Forty Years of 'Civilisation' | Hacker News Reader

Forty Years of 'Civilisation'

online.wsj.com

25 pointsasciilifeform25 comments

If you think Michael Jackson was a musical master, you've come to the wrong shop.

Oh, blow me. Michael Jackson was an incredible musician. Have you actually listened to any of his music?

Four decades ago, Time magazine declared "Civilisation" to be TV's "most distinguished (not to mention only new) cultural series" of the year. Those words have a hollow ring today. For years PBS has been trimming back its high-culture programming, partly because it doesn't do well in the ratings and partly, I suspect, because such lofty fare has lost favor with the intellectual elite.

I bet that, decades ago, the quality of AM radio programming declined as it struggled for attention among people (especially younger ones) turning to TV. It shouldn't be surprising that today, TV programming is racing to the bottom.

> Oh, blow me. Michael Jackson was an incredible musician.

Before you get your due remember all of Michael Jackson's best selling hits were produced by Quincy Jones who is very much a fan of those musical masters that came before. And, one of the great musicians of our time. Much of what was the early Michael Jackson sound was Quincy's creation.

1) I'm not saying those other people aren't masters as well. Clearly they are. I listen to all of them, frequently.

2) When I say "Michael Jackson", I am referring to the entire 'product' known as Michael Jackson. If I said "Apple has some good laptops" you don't say "Actually it was Jonathan Ives that designed them."

Most of MJ's famous hits were primarily written by the person himself, though. Produced by Quincy Jones, yes. Not written. Those two terms have come to be commonly conflated recently.

Do you really think that Michael Jackson will have the permanence of Shakespeare or Jefferson? Young people mostly don't care about [him] or for his music, and he is unlikely to make the history books.

I agree with the spirit of your comment though, in believing that the linked article was elitist beyond reason. Anyone who would describe western society as contemptible because the "intellectuals" don't watch PBS needs to pick up a book (just like the "intellectuals" have done). The information density is way too low for someone with real stuff to do, which is why television is relegated to relaxation time, where bandwidth is a non-issue.

[Edited]

Do you really think that Michael Jackson will have the permanence of Shakespeare or Jefferson? Young people mostly don't care about or for his music

I have no real comment on MJ as a musician, but I just wanted to point out that young people don't care about or for Shakespeare either, and haven't for a long time. They overwhelmingly tend to feel that it is something forced upon them that has little relevance to their lives. Obviously there are exceptions, but they aren't exactly the common case.

It's true that many young people don't care much about Shakespeare, but some people come around to reading him later in life, voluntarily. For my part, I haven't read much Shakespeare as an adult, but I have a poster about him and his language framed and mounted on the wall behind me... I mean, I now read a lot of stuff that I should (for want of a better word) have been reading in high school and college (and Shakespeare is part of that canon) and don't read much stuff I read when I was in high school. (It's true about the poster, though.)

Jackson's style of music isn't really my cup of tea, but maybe the former young people of the future will come around to him too, much as I came around to listening to the Beatles.

This is not a problem for Shakespeare's legacy, since high literature is not meant for only one particular demographic group. Pop music on the other hand is targeted primarily to young people of a particular time and place, which makes it transitory and eventually forgotten.

If not Michael Jackson, do you think any 20th century musician will have historical permanence?

He probably comes after the Beatles and Elvis, but after that, it gets harder to come up with musical performers who made a bigger global impact.

Let's see: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, john Coltrane... to name just a few that will be talked about and listened to 100 years from now....

..Oh, blow me. Michael Jackson was an incredible musician... Perhaps this is the appropriate point to encourage folks to learn a bit more about art. Because the more you know and understand, the more you can appreciate.

or not ;)

Don't take the votes too seriously on HN anymore, they aren't really worth anything now.

A small detail Teachout doesn't mention is that "Civilisation" was funded by the British taxpayer, meaning it was a product of the socialism WSJ readers despise so much.

So? "WSJ readers" might say that they'd prefer "Civilisation" (or space exploration, universities, development of the Internet, etc.) be supported on a voluntary basis rather than by forced participation. That hardly precludes them from enjoying the result.

May a grocery-store-meat-consumer, who is aware of the cruel treatment of livestock, not be opposed to the methods by which his sustenance originated? Would you criticize him (as a hypocrite?) for advocating change so that in the future, hopefully, good things will have more ethical origins rather than having "the ends justify the means"?

Would you prefer to have the means justify the ends? If you say, "Hey capitalism is great." but it results in the destruction of our civilization, then is that okay?

I just came up with that. Usually people say, "The ends justify the means." But I've never known of someone to take it the other way. Thinking about it that way though, it seems that is precisely what we do with Capitalism. We know that greed is bad and leads to bad things, but we justify those ends because the alternative means, that is, a bit of loss of individualism and sacrifice of public property is, by capitalists, considered a severe punishment to the self.

So we say things like, "Bankers destroying the economy is okay, because we were more free until it happened." We say, "Environmental destruction is okay, because only a socialist world could prevent it." We say, "Big SUVs and houses and consumerism are good, because the government shouldn't interfere in people's personal decisions."

But the end product of all that is a less habitable planet and less happy place for future generations -- and not only future generations, but these generations in the future.

While I disagree with you about capitalism, I think this concept of "the means justify the ends" is a very interesting one. It seems to be providing a name for a problem that befalls people on both sides of the political spectrum - following an ideology to its logical conclusion, regardless of its actual effects on the world.

Another small detail is that much of the art of the Renaissance was paid for by murderous thugs.

Sauce for the goose and all that.

book is called The Great War for Civilisation after the inscription on the back of my father's World War I medal.

After WWI the British and French created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and the Middle East.

I've spent my entire professional career watching the people within those borders burn.

For me it's all about linking history with the present.

-- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4393358.stm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_for_Civilisation:...

http://www.archive.org/details/RobertFiskWarGeopoliticsAndHi...

Author insinuates that all civilization comes from Western Europe. Worse, he suggests that, somehow, the fact that the classic masters more or less invented the arts of painting, writing, performance, architecture, etc. as we know them today indicates that they lived in a more "civilized" period.

The fact of the matter is that, for most people living at that time, life was nasty, brutish, and short (to borrow Hobbes' phrase). Wars were regularly fought as a means of political gain, sanitation was unknown, religious tolerance was sporadic at best, etc., etc.

Yes, the end product has been the greatest global civilization that the world has ever known, but that wasn't how things started out.

Actually neither mass culture nor "high" (literary/artistic) culture is really defining Western civilization, their equivalents were/are shared by anything that could remotely be called a civilization. The defining characteristics of Western civ are individual liberty, capitalism (economic liberty), and especially science. Science itself could be called intellectual liberty, intellectualism bound not by class or bureaucracy, but controlled only by the reality it seeks to understand.

Shows like "Civilisation" are based on a notion of high culture - to uphold some things above others; the rationale for something being "high" tends to be flimsy. It's a cultural meme - not necessarily bad or good, but highly opinionated and in a way that embeds itself deep into our psyche. Recognition of this kind of notion was the entire point of pg's "What You Can't Say."

Ironically, this specific notion of high culture has become the epitome of "What You Can't Say."

The history of Western art, literature, and science in the post-ancient world possesses more than enough justification for anyone to call it "high" culture.

If you can't make value judgments about Mozart, Michelangelo, or Shakespeare, that's simply a tragedy.

I strongly recommend Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life."

To take a direct shot at relativism: I think it's quite possible to justify the West over the last 500 years as the most productive era for art and science in all of human history up until now.

Dear Editors,

Why was this renamed?

Where is the definition of Western culture? Also, civilization?

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