The great violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman posted a 1964 video on social media this week in which he is seen at age 18 playing a violin concerto. It’s a striking clip not only for Perlman’s mastery of instrument and nuance but also because he was not playing for aficionados but for a mass audience on prime-time TV. He was on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Fox News columnist David Marcus noted on X, “This is what the average American watched on the country’s top variety show in 1964,” and added elegiacally, “Decline was a choice.”
Even if one could imagine such a performance in prime time today, it would presumptively be on a glitzy talent show and presented as a spectacle to amaze, like a circus act, rather than because the audience would be expected to engage with it as the composer hoped.
Increasingly, high culture, art, music, and literature have been implicitly or explicitly deprecated as luxuries or as damnable because they are said to be steeped in class and white supremacy. Arts, humanities, and the study of elevated literature or history in higher education have been relegated or else corrupted and turned into vehicles for morally and intellectually bankrupt sub-Marxist theories. It has been possible for some years to take a degree in English literature at the nation’s most prestigious colleges without reading or considering even a single line of Shakespeare.
Even national leaders tend to treat the arts and their study as less important than science, technology, engineering, and math. It has become the norm for presidents to launch STEM initiatives or give major talks on their importance. In 2016, President Barack Obama told the nation, “Leadership tomorrow depends on how we educate our students today — especially in science, engineering, technology, and math.”
It is not that this is wrong, exactly; we need highly educated graduates in the hard sciences. But the emphasis, repeated over decades, has contributed to the reductive idea that education should be thought of primarily as a means of achieving success against, or dominance over, other nations rather than as being to produce educated men and women suitable to a great culture and society.
Higher education has come to be measured, especially by the parents paying for it, on its ability to lead to a good salary. They can’t be blamed. The price of college tuition has risen twice as fast as consumer price inflation since 1980.
But it does prompt thoughts of financial inputs and returns rather than of supposedly hifalutin, but actually more important, stuff such as whether the result is a more fully formed, coherently educated, and civilized graduate.
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The picture, however, is not all gloom. There may be a glimmer on the horizon prompting reasonable hope that man’s natural desire for spiritual and aesthetic fulfillment has begun to prompt a reaction, a rebellion against coarsening and dumbing down, a reaching out for higher things.
Young people have started posting video online of themselves discussing great literature. To see it is encouraging. Anyone of a certain age can affirm that our culture has been coarsening for decades. But are we near the bottom of a wave? Is a reawakening at hand? Some people think so. If so, it cannot come a moment too soon.
