Our website: www.justandsinner.org Patreon: / justandsinner This video is a discussion of high culture as distinguished from low culture, including folk culture and high culture.
You should definitely do more videos about culture. I love your insight! I don’t think that high culture is necessarily something that is valued by the upper classes. For example, I have had conversations with people who have far more wealth and formal education than I do, but when I talked about high culture or used certain vocabulary words, they had no idea what I was talking about. Education is useless if someone doesn’t actually value what they are being taught. I also think it’s ironic that most of high culture was produced by writers and artists who didn’t have a great amount of wealth or formal education as children, such as Shakespeare and Dickens. It was only later that they were propped up by the upper classes.
I made people angry one time because I said something against pop culture regarding books. I said that poorly written books will only give a person poor perspectives on the human condition, God, and so forth; that bad books only produce bad thoughts; and that when those books have a popular agenda, then those thoughts can go from bad to corrupt. Many people are very sensitive to what they consume, and they will typically adopt whatever it is into how they view the world. It's like when I was younger (14-16), I started watching many cyncial atheists and ranters on TH-cam, and so I quickly became a clone of them. So, what happens when your country's media is submerged in things like selfishness, promiscuity, and cheap entertainment? Well, all we have to do is look around.
Your father had appreciation for classical music liked the family to get to know the great composers in music history. And it is very likely that your father. had a love of literature and in time you would chose your favourite genre especially classical literature.
When the impulse to high culture used folk culture to express timeless metaphysical truths to everyday people, these great composers were born. So, high culture transfused its blood into folk culture. Not the other way around. Most composers were Rosicrucians, or metaphysical initiates, by the way.
@@rlbonner123456Thank you for this information. You have encoraged me to delve deeper next time, I listen to classical music, seek which composers are Rosicrucians and metaphysical initiates.
I really appreciate your willingness to talk about these topics: culture, beauty, etiquette. Young men need Godly men to provide a holistic education so that we can properly navigate the world, and so that we are not captured by the teachings of those who are not Christians.
Eloquently put, but it all boils down to the same thing as so many conservative messages: that which is old and traditional is inherently good and wholesome owing to its history, and that which is new is inherently bad and dangerous because it doesn't have those deep roots. But showing such a dichotomy is very difficult to do. In this video you say that the new pop cultural works lack the power to push back against bad ideas because pop culture changes so frequently, but that does not follow. High culture and folk culture would also lack that power if the bad ideas are baked into those cultural works as well, and acting as though high culture and folk culture cannot have bad ideas within them is begging the question.
Great video. One difficulty I’ve noticed is the complete replacement of folk culture with pop culture in America. I feel as though it may actually be easier to recover aspects of high culture in our society that we’ve lost than that of folk culture.
I believe that folk culture exists in the underground cultures, like for example there are still hobos who ride trains and I used to do this 12 years ago. It was absolutely amazing to go from one side of the country to the other and actually find people you met across the country just walking around. There is no electronic connection, nothing to "keep in touch" yet I always found them, and you would meet people who knew another person you met somewhere over there. But those underground cultures make there way up and then become "pop culture" and usually die there to be reborn again from below. It's quite pagan I would say.
The TH-cam app seemingly just glitched on me…I clicked on a video about genocidal space lizards in the game Stellaris, and this is what came up. Don’t get me wrong, I do love Dr. Cooper’s content, but this video (as far as I can tell) has nothing to do with genocidal space lizards (unless that is a term of art denoting Neo-Marxists).
As usual, spot on. I em really a huge fan of your program also because you touch not only on theology but also in these other topics. Especially when you connect them to God and theology. Great work!
Dr. Cooper, I have to say it's really cool to see how broadly you are able explain theological, cultural, and philosophical issues while at the same time coming across as a very regular and relatable person. It says a lot about you, especially the way you answer your critics. And when your wife appears, your relationship comes across as very real and down to earth. And it seems to me that your aporoach to your church/academic/publishing work has a very punk rock ethic to it. That is to say that without having some massive team, you've taken upon yourself to make your ecclesiastical tradition accesssibke to others. Anyway, I just wanted to mention how inspiring what you do and how you do it is. I say this as Catholic. So I don't agree with every last thing you say, but I still really enjoy hearing your take on many issues, many of which I do agree with!
This was really helpful on helping me understand why I found the richness and beauty when I walked into a storefront Pentecostal Church in San Francisco. It had the same authentic experience of the Russian vespers service I had just left... both richly different than a modern produced American Evangelical pop service
It can also be very rewarding to enjoy, or learn to enjoy, cultural output which presupposes some form of knowledge. For a long time Bach's music was inaccessible to me and raucous even, until I began to understand polyphony - now it seems nonpareil. Chaucer became more beautiful to me, not when, but because, I began understanding Middle English more. I think it is liberating to discover beauty across time, but such liberation requires the effort of curiosity, which seems, in my opinion at least, to find its reward in making beauty more beautiful.
Very much appreciate the video and your other videos on thinkers who have shaped the modern world. Being in the liberal academy, it nice to hear the take of other orthodox Christian thinkers. I actually discuss the distinctions between high/folk culture and pop culture in my American Government course drawing on observations from Alexis de Tocqueville, particularly what happens to a democratic society when traditional forms of religious belief and practice fade. Tocqueville predicts that you will get something like the end of high culture and a ubiquitous pop culture. Because high/folk culture emerge out of a shared understanding of an objective moral order and thus they tell a shared story that provides folks living in a society with rooted identities and well-defined roles and responsibilities. You know, the kind that help young men make the transition to responsible adulthood and help young women understand life's essential purpose is not built around career, but family, creating discord between biological realities and societal expectations regarding their priorities. I would take issue with one point and I would love to hear your thoughts on it. When I define the "telos" of pop culture I don't think its ultimately about entertainment, rather I teach that its about "consumption". Yes, it may entertain, but only towards the end of consumption. This is why pop culture doesn't offer a shared story provides a rooted identity or reinforces an objective moral order. Rather it undermines both, so that your identity is built around the products that are marketed to you. .
High culture is initially made by inspired people. Around and through high culture, happiness, trust and cooperation flourish. But this then tends to create a wish to associate with this for the status it can give to do so. After a while this becomes the decadence of the people who enjoy the high culture, and then a reactionary movement will start, which removes the status aspect, whereupon a new high culture can arise again, and start the cycle over.
Dr Cooper, I would love to hear more about culture from you. Going to university, the Western canon of literature was deemed as the "cultural imperialism of dead white men". Reading lists priced diversity over any aesthetic or historical consideration. Going through your "MoTMW" playlist has opened my eyes to the origins of this pyromaniac impulse, but I would love to see you explicitly connect it to the current exclusion of the classics in many higher education institutions.
How do you account for the shifting definitions of high culture in the west? Historical high culture is now accessible to working class people through the internet and libraries. It used to be that only the wealthy had access. We also have access to works of art and literature from the east and africa and we can bring that into the tapestry of what was once purely influenced by european high culture.
I think the more interesting change is that cultural products that were not considered "high" (probably more like middlebrow if one dare apply this category to earlier periods) at their time became high, e.g. Shakespeare or Dickens. Opera is also a good example. It started with the intention to revive antique tragedy but it never really worked like that but became a spectacle around virtuoso singers with a generation or two. Of course, it still retained some of the serious classical sujets and it was for centuries fairly exclusive and expensive but a lot was also quite ephemeral. I am very much in favor with Dr Cooper's defense of high culture and I abhor both the current relativism and "reverse snobbery" that seems worse in the Anglosphere than in continental Europe. But I fear there needs to be a bit more work done for the theoretical defense. It's also a bit sad that one has to defend these art works at all, one would hope that to present and introduce them would be enough for many people to fall in love with them.
What do you make of works of high culture that were popular for a long time, but then suddenly disappear from the canon at one point or another? I'm thinking of something like Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered which inspired countless paintings and operas across Europe for centuries and then, at some point around the beginning 20th century, seems to have almost completely fallen off the map. Statius's Thebaid may be another example of this.
At the moment, early 2023, many works of classical music may be viewed on TH-cam. Track down the orchestras which exclude advertising from their productions. I don’t mind advertising at the beginning and end of a piece, but not in the middle! If you like a piece, buy the DVD from an online seller. I can only afford secondhand, but I also buy boxes of 10 spare cases to replace anything too grubby, and this produces good results. So yes a lot of classical music is free or cheap, and now is the time to take advantage.
I can relate to this . Even in Indian culture, there are elements of high culture that last forever and are transcendental in nature like the epics and the works built rooted on the themes of the epics . However, I would say in India, there are folk culture that over time becomes high culture as more and more discourse is generated on it over hundreds of years.
You touched on this some, but part of the issue here is that the institutions that at one pointed supported the continuation of high culture are now actively involved in tearing it down. I particularly noticed this at my undergraduate institution that was a bit more liberal, where if we _are_ going to engage in something like a Shakespeare it is primarily to criticize it through a modern lens and otherwise we are going to promote pop culture or more of a Marxist (in the technical not the modern popular sense) works that are actively seeking to undermine the core tenets of what we have received. In graduate school I went to a right wing (I hesitate to even say conservative) institution and did a degree in philosophy, but even there I think you can see in the analytic/continental split of European philosophy and the present focus on the analytic that what is happening is an attempt to separate and deconstruct a received tradition in favor of something considered more 'purely' logical in a way that detaches us in a harmful way from the philosophy that built what we would consider high culture. It's frustrating because we see the same things at work in our churches, not only in who or what they do or do not read but also in how liturgy plays itself out, and it is harder as a pastor to connect people to the richness of the tradition of Christian thought when almost nothing they consume is anything other than pop culture.
Fantastic topic for a video. It's remarkable, and humbling, the access we have to the vast wealth of human knowledge from all around the world. One area where pop-culture almost ruined my enjoyment was with reading. I was always reading growing up. Mostly contemporary fantasy/science-fiction but also Tolkien and Bradbury and a few other classic authors. Around 20 years old though it changed. I felt the contemporary market (this was 2005ish) was scared people were no longer buying books (the panic of the book industry dying) and so they started mass producing copycat books like there was no tomorrow. Every book that became a bestseller had countless books copying its exact formula. While that has probably always been the case it just felt like this time period (and since) was worse. Thankfully I have since regained my reading enjoyment thanks to reading more of the classics of literature and less on anything contemporary. One area where pop-culture has reignited my enjoyment was with chess. Chess has been booming these last few years. There was the Netflix show, the pandemic, the cheating scandal and a lot of content producers putting out quality videos to help learn the game. This was a game where I learned at 13 but could only ever play the same 2 other people who knew at my school (rural). The likelihood of ever meeting a Grand Master chess player was not possible, but now they're making TH-cam videos and live streaming the game. Interacting with their chat and answering questions. Chess has always been viewed as something of a game for intellectuals/higher class but it's more accessible than ever and that's due to pop-culture. Sorry for the thesis in your comments. It's an interesting topic.
I'm not particularly religious (a secular Jew to be precise) and am staunchly leftist, but I love and admire high culture as a rule. Anyone can come to embrace it, especially now with the availability of information to gain cultural capital. I grew up extremely poor in Appalachia, but my mother was the one who made sure I learned about Western high culture through radio, television, and trips to a library one county over so I could gain that knowledge.
Is it possible to have products of high culture that are not necessarily Christian, or that are even anti-Christian in some ways? If truth and beauty are objective, should not all high culture eventually point to the beauty and goodness of God Almighty? Just wondering about classical music that sounds really great, but once you include operas with very negative lyrics about Christianity, will it still remain high culture?
15Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16For all that is in the world-the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life-is not from the Father but from the world.…
High Culture is found in the literature of Nation? High culture is Spiritual Culture. The things of the man which leads to Divine Communion. Pythagoras was poor in terms of money, but he is high culture.
This critique is fairly similar to the criticisms of pop culture by Adorno and Brecht. I feel like this is a point of convergence between 20th century academic marxists and folks like you even if you’re much less cynical about high culture.
I think it is best to think of high culture like a production line, you have raw ore that is refined into ingots then smelted etc and then high culture is the majestic cathedral that is the finished product. Folk culture is like raw ore and pop culture is the furnace, then critics pound the smelted ore and I think you get the point.
@@christopherk222 not sure what is funny about that comment. That's basically how to Scriptures characterize culture, 1 Cor 4. Even the term "culture" and to cultivate, the farming parables and the metallurgy parables all through out Scripture. Proverbs 25:4-5 - Take away the dross from the silver, and the smith has material for a vessel; take away the wicked from the presence of the king and his throne will be established in righteousness.
A delicate topic. I consider Bach to be the greatest composer who ever lived. Bob Dylan on the other hand is a voice of protest in the Sixties revolution.
High culture is the active weaving of metaphysical principles and understandings into everyday beliefs, worldly products, and daily actions. Western culture was built on weaving Platonic Idealism into our everyday worldview, resulting in the civilization we have known. Even Christianity is the result of this weaving, but for the mass of people. So, everything that brings one's mind, heart, and behaviors directly back to that esoteric framework of first principles is high culture. Whether we realize it or not. If you understand this, then the old elite education made sense. Every world civilization had this feature. And all societies begin to die when everyday life dislodges itself from, and actively rebels against, its founding metaphysical principles. It's what folks call a legtimation crisis. It's where the West is right now. Smh.
That rebellion is the result of pop culture. Its glitz kills folk culture for the young. Everywhere in the world now. And its ephemeral nature disconnects it from the timelessness of high culture. And it hollows out people's insides. The impulse to profit always leads to pop culture. Look at the rise and fall of all civilizations.
Very interesting how the Indo Aryans (modern day Pakistani) invaded the Dravidians (modern day Indians), very much like the Mongols overcame the Chinese. Mughal culture is the most longstanding culture from India which gave birth to beautiful art, architecture and ideals.
Man, I’m sorry, but you are going to find a way around what prevents you from joining the Roman church if ever you spend time with deeply beautiful and deeply Christian Catholic communities (like monasteries or elsewhere). What we Protestants do when we “study” the reality of goodness, truth, or beauty as life-changing and godly looks to someone who has indeed spent time in such communities and understood them like we’re talking heads with nothing actually invested. Or like LARPers. You can’t put-on virtue as an affectation or hope to start some kind of community apart from ancient ones. You have to walk with people connected to that culture by generations. We Americans simply cannot “choose” a culture and remake it. This is impossible. If that’s your goal you are utterly wasting your time.
You should definitely do more videos about culture. I love your insight! I don’t think that high culture is necessarily something that is valued by the upper classes. For example, I have had conversations with people who have far more wealth and formal education than I do, but when I talked about high culture or used certain vocabulary words, they had no idea what I was talking about. Education is useless if someone doesn’t actually value what they are being taught. I also think it’s ironic that most of high culture was produced by writers and artists who didn’t have a great amount of wealth or formal education as children, such as Shakespeare and Dickens. It was only later that they were propped up by the upper classes.
Yes, this is very true. Very often, it is among the middle classes that much of the culture actually arises.
I made people angry one time because I said something against pop culture regarding books. I said that poorly written books will only give a person poor perspectives on the human condition, God, and so forth; that bad books only produce bad thoughts; and that when those books have a popular agenda, then those thoughts can go from bad to corrupt.
Many people are very sensitive to what they consume, and they will typically adopt whatever it is into how they view the world. It's like when I was younger (14-16), I started watching many cyncial atheists and ranters on TH-cam, and so I quickly became a clone of them. So, what happens when your country's media is submerged in things like selfishness, promiscuity, and cheap entertainment? Well, all we have to do is look around.
My late father grew up very poor, but loved reading and loved opera. All the classical music was available on records, which he played for us.
Great comment, I see parallels in my family
Your father had appreciation for classical music liked the family to get to know the great composers in music history. And it is very likely that your father. had a love of literature and in time you would chose your favourite genre especially classical literature.
Folk culture eventually bleeds into high culture. We can see that in great deal of composers from the romantic period.
When the impulse to high culture used folk culture to express timeless metaphysical truths to everyday people, these great composers were born. So, high culture transfused its blood into folk culture. Not the other way around. Most composers were Rosicrucians, or metaphysical initiates, by the way.
@@rlbonner123456Thank you for this information. You have encoraged me to delve deeper next time, I listen to classical music, seek which composers are Rosicrucians and metaphysical initiates.
Thanks so much for this necessary message, your channel always rocks with truth, and a distinct style :)
I really appreciate your willingness to talk about these topics: culture, beauty, etiquette. Young men need Godly men to provide a holistic education so that we can properly navigate the world, and so that we are not captured by the teachings of those who are not Christians.
Or not
Freidrich would most disagree. Islam is the master/masculine religion.
Eloquently put, but it all boils down to the same thing as so many conservative messages: that which is old and traditional is inherently good and wholesome owing to its history, and that which is new is inherently bad and dangerous because it doesn't have those deep roots.
But showing such a dichotomy is very difficult to do. In this video you say that the new pop cultural works lack the power to push back against bad ideas because pop culture changes so frequently, but that does not follow. High culture and folk culture would also lack that power if the bad ideas are baked into those cultural works as well, and acting as though high culture and folk culture cannot have bad ideas within them is begging the question.
Great video. One difficulty I’ve noticed is the complete replacement of folk culture with pop culture in America. I feel as though it may actually be easier to recover aspects of high culture in our society that we’ve lost than that of folk culture.
I believe that folk culture exists in the underground cultures, like for example there are still hobos who ride trains and I used to do this 12 years ago. It was absolutely amazing to go from one side of the country to the other and actually find people you met across the country just walking around. There is no electronic connection, nothing to "keep in touch" yet I always found them, and you would meet people who knew another person you met somewhere over there. But those underground cultures make there way up and then become "pop culture" and usually die there to be reborn again from below. It's quite pagan I would say.
The TH-cam app seemingly just glitched on me…I clicked on a video about genocidal space lizards in the game Stellaris, and this is what came up. Don’t get me wrong, I do love Dr. Cooper’s content, but this video (as far as I can tell) has nothing to do with genocidal space lizards (unless that is a term of art denoting Neo-Marxists).
As usual, spot on. I em really a huge fan of your program also because you touch not only on theology but also in these other topics. Especially when you connect them to God and theology. Great work!
Dr. Cooper, I have to say it's really cool to see how broadly you are able explain theological, cultural, and philosophical issues while at the same time coming across as a very regular and relatable person. It says a lot about you, especially the way you answer your critics. And when your wife appears, your relationship comes across as very real and down to earth. And it seems to me that your aporoach to your church/academic/publishing work has a very punk rock ethic to it. That is to say that without having some massive team, you've taken upon yourself to make your ecclesiastical tradition accesssibke to others.
Anyway, I just wanted to mention how inspiring what you do and how you do it is. I say this as Catholic. So I don't agree with every last thing you say, but I still really enjoy hearing your take on many issues, many of which I do agree with!
Thanks! Yes, it is indeed the punk rock DIY orientation that has pushed me toward many of the things that I do.
This was really helpful on helping me understand why I found the richness and beauty when I walked into a storefront Pentecostal Church in San Francisco. It had the same authentic experience of the Russian vespers service I had just left... both richly different than a modern produced American Evangelical pop service
It can also be very rewarding to enjoy, or learn to enjoy, cultural output which presupposes some form of knowledge. For a long time Bach's music was inaccessible to me and raucous even, until I began to understand polyphony - now it seems nonpareil. Chaucer became more beautiful to me, not when, but because, I began understanding Middle English more. I think it is liberating to discover beauty across time, but such liberation requires the effort of curiosity, which seems, in my opinion at least, to find its reward in making beauty more beautiful.
Yes Dr. Cooper, whenever it is possible, please do a video on Mathew Arnold, and. recommend his book culture and anarchy,thank you.
Very much appreciate the video and your other videos on thinkers who have shaped the modern world. Being in the liberal academy, it nice to hear the take of other orthodox Christian thinkers. I actually discuss the distinctions between high/folk culture and pop culture in my American Government course drawing on observations from Alexis de Tocqueville, particularly what happens to a democratic society when traditional forms of religious belief and practice fade. Tocqueville predicts that you will get something like the end of high culture and a ubiquitous pop culture. Because high/folk culture emerge out of a shared understanding of an objective moral order and thus they tell a shared story that provides folks living in a society with rooted identities and well-defined roles and responsibilities. You know, the kind that help young men make the transition to responsible adulthood and help young women understand life's essential purpose is not built around career, but family, creating discord between biological realities and societal expectations regarding their priorities.
I would take issue with one point and I would love to hear your thoughts on it. When I define the "telos" of pop culture I don't think its ultimately about entertainment, rather I teach that its about "consumption". Yes, it may entertain, but only towards the end of consumption. This is why pop culture doesn't offer a shared story provides a rooted identity or reinforces an objective moral order. Rather it undermines both, so that your identity is built around the products that are marketed to you.
.
"Suburu, Made with Love!" - I used to repeat this all the time, I thought it was so silly.
High culture is initially made by inspired people. Around and through high culture, happiness, trust and cooperation flourish. But this then tends to create a wish to associate with this for the status it can give to do so. After a while this becomes the decadence of the people who enjoy the high culture, and then a reactionary movement will start, which removes the status aspect, whereupon a new high culture can arise again, and start the cycle over.
So how do we decide what in our current culture can we judge as high culture?
Dr Cooper, I would love to hear more about culture from you. Going to university, the Western canon of literature was deemed as the "cultural imperialism of dead white men". Reading lists priced diversity over any aesthetic or historical consideration. Going through your "MoTMW" playlist has opened my eyes to the origins of this pyromaniac impulse, but I would love to see you explicitly connect it to the current exclusion of the classics in many higher education institutions.
How do you account for the shifting definitions of high culture in the west? Historical high culture is now accessible to working class people through the internet and libraries. It used to be that only the wealthy had access. We also have access to works of art and literature from the east and africa and we can bring that into the tapestry of what was once purely influenced by european high culture.
I address the accessibility of "high culture" to the masses at the end. It's a great thing!
I think the more interesting change is that cultural products that were not considered "high" (probably more like middlebrow if one dare apply this category to earlier periods) at their time became high, e.g. Shakespeare or Dickens.
Opera is also a good example. It started with the intention to revive antique tragedy but it never really worked like that but became a spectacle around virtuoso singers with a generation or two. Of course, it still retained some of the serious classical sujets and it was for centuries fairly exclusive and expensive but a lot was also quite ephemeral.
I am very much in favor with Dr Cooper's defense of high culture and I abhor both the current relativism and "reverse snobbery" that seems worse in the Anglosphere than in continental Europe. But I fear there needs to be a bit more work done for the theoretical defense. It's also a bit sad that one has to defend these art works at all, one would hope that to present and introduce them would be enough for many people to fall in love with them.
What do you make of works of high culture that were popular for a long time, but then suddenly disappear from the canon at one point or another? I'm thinking of something like Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered which inspired countless paintings and operas across Europe for centuries and then, at some point around the beginning 20th century, seems to have almost completely fallen off the map. Statius's Thebaid may be another example of this.
At the moment, early 2023, many works of classical music may be viewed on TH-cam. Track down the orchestras which exclude advertising from their productions. I don’t mind advertising at the beginning and end of a piece, but not in the middle!
If you like a piece, buy the DVD from an online seller. I can only afford secondhand, but I also buy boxes of 10 spare cases to replace anything too grubby, and this produces good results.
So yes a lot of classical music is free or cheap, and now is the time to take advantage.
Speaking to your experience, would the punk movement be part of folk culture, a form of pop culture?
It isn't really either. Perhaps "counter culture" would be a separate category.
@@DrJordanBCooper would love to hear you talk about counter culture. Don’t know if you can in a comment or if a video would do it’s justice
✅ More !
I can relate to this . Even in Indian culture, there are elements of high culture that last forever and are transcendental in nature like the epics and the works built rooted on the themes of the epics . However, I would say in India, there are folk culture that over time becomes high culture as more and more discourse is generated on it over hundreds of years.
You touched on this some, but part of the issue here is that the institutions that at one pointed supported the continuation of high culture are now actively involved in tearing it down. I particularly noticed this at my undergraduate institution that was a bit more liberal, where if we _are_ going to engage in something like a Shakespeare it is primarily to criticize it through a modern lens and otherwise we are going to promote pop culture or more of a Marxist (in the technical not the modern popular sense) works that are actively seeking to undermine the core tenets of what we have received.
In graduate school I went to a right wing (I hesitate to even say conservative) institution and did a degree in philosophy, but even there I think you can see in the analytic/continental split of European philosophy and the present focus on the analytic that what is happening is an attempt to separate and deconstruct a received tradition in favor of something considered more 'purely' logical in a way that detaches us in a harmful way from the philosophy that built what we would consider high culture.
It's frustrating because we see the same things at work in our churches, not only in who or what they do or do not read but also in how liturgy plays itself out, and it is harder as a pastor to connect people to the richness of the tradition of Christian thought when almost nothing they consume is anything other than pop culture.
Hei, Can you talk about Friedrich Froebel?
Heavy metal seems to be lasting across time. I was a teenager listening to music made decades before i was born. Metal and classical.
6:20 That is millennial media in a nut shell. Especially in cartoons and I hate that mindset.
Fantastic topic for a video. It's remarkable, and humbling, the access we have to the vast wealth of human knowledge from all around the world.
One area where pop-culture almost ruined my enjoyment was with reading. I was always reading growing up. Mostly contemporary fantasy/science-fiction but also Tolkien and Bradbury and a few other classic authors. Around 20 years old though it changed. I felt the contemporary market (this was 2005ish) was scared people were no longer buying books (the panic of the book industry dying) and so they started mass producing copycat books like there was no tomorrow. Every book that became a bestseller had countless books copying its exact formula. While that has probably always been the case it just felt like this time period (and since) was worse. Thankfully I have since regained my reading enjoyment thanks to reading more of the classics of literature and less on anything contemporary.
One area where pop-culture has reignited my enjoyment was with chess. Chess has been booming these last few years. There was the Netflix show, the pandemic, the cheating scandal and a lot of content producers putting out quality videos to help learn the game. This was a game where I learned at 13 but could only ever play the same 2 other people who knew at my school (rural). The likelihood of ever meeting a Grand Master chess player was not possible, but now they're making TH-cam videos and live streaming the game. Interacting with their chat and answering questions. Chess has always been viewed as something of a game for intellectuals/higher class but it's more accessible than ever and that's due to pop-culture.
Sorry for the thesis in your comments. It's an interesting topic.
I'm not particularly religious (a secular Jew to be precise) and am staunchly leftist, but I love and admire high culture as a rule. Anyone can come to embrace it, especially now with the availability of information to gain cultural capital. I grew up extremely poor in Appalachia, but my mother was the one who made sure I learned about Western high culture through radio, television, and trips to a library one county over so I could gain that knowledge.
Is it possible to have products of high culture that are not necessarily Christian, or that are even anti-Christian in some ways? If truth and beauty are objective, should not all high culture eventually point to the beauty and goodness of God Almighty?
Just wondering about classical music that sounds really great, but once you include operas with very negative lyrics about Christianity, will it still remain high culture?
15Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16For all that is in the world-the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life-is not from the Father but from the world.…
High Culture is found in the literature of Nation? High culture is Spiritual Culture. The things of the man which leads to Divine Communion. Pythagoras was poor in terms of money, but he is high culture.
This critique is fairly similar to the criticisms of pop culture by Adorno and Brecht. I feel like this is a point of convergence between 20th century academic marxists and folks like you even if you’re much less cynical about high culture.
Adorno is largely correct about the culture industry, imo.
Doesn't "high culture" flow from (pre-1900) the literate / educated / aristocracy ??
I think it is best to think of high culture like a production line, you have raw ore that is refined into ingots then smelted etc and then high culture is the majestic cathedral that is the finished product. Folk culture is like raw ore and pop culture is the furnace, then critics pound the smelted ore and I think you get the point.
@@echeneis2256 🤣 May be ! 🤣
@@christopherk222 not sure what is funny about that comment. That's basically how to Scriptures characterize culture, 1 Cor 4. Even the term "culture" and to cultivate, the farming parables and the metallurgy parables all through out Scripture.
Proverbs 25:4-5 - Take away the dross from the silver, and the smith has material for a vessel; take away the wicked from the presence of the king and his throne will be established in righteousness.
@@christopherk222 just as those fancy nobles and aristocrats depend on the "folk" labor haha.
@@echeneis2256 . . .and that's relevant because ??
A delicate topic. I consider Bach to be the greatest composer who ever lived. Bob Dylan on the other hand is a voice of protest in the Sixties revolution.
It's basically just a fact. No one rivals Bach.
maybe that's not a good question... but wasn't the folk culture of today the pop culture of yesterday?
it's the other way around. Think of the pagan myth of Persephone and Demeter. It's kind of a chicken and egg scenario.
I think their is a"quasi-canon" of great films. (Not recently, unfortunately!)
There is, and I think that Canon will become clearer as time moves forward. The Criterion Collection does a good job at identifying many of them.
@@DrJordanBCooper ✅ Agreed !
High culture is the active weaving of metaphysical principles and understandings into everyday beliefs, worldly products, and daily actions. Western culture was built on weaving Platonic Idealism into our everyday worldview, resulting in the civilization we have known. Even Christianity is the result of this weaving, but for the mass of people. So, everything that brings one's mind, heart, and behaviors directly back to that esoteric framework of first principles is high culture. Whether we realize it or not. If you understand this, then the old elite education made sense. Every world civilization had this feature. And all societies begin to die when everyday life dislodges itself from, and actively rebels against, its founding metaphysical principles. It's what folks call a legtimation crisis. It's where the West is right now. Smh.
That rebellion is the result of pop culture. Its glitz kills folk culture for the young. Everywhere in the world now. And its ephemeral nature disconnects it from the timelessness of high culture. And it hollows out people's insides. The impulse to profit always leads to pop culture. Look at the rise and fall of all civilizations.
High culture keeps me high.
So, where do hipsters fit within this spectrum???
Hipsters are part of a different, newer spectrum. You probably haven't fallen on it yet 😎
@@ottovonbaden6353 Considering the fact that the Dr. has already abandoned the high culture of the hipster, I think I will do well to pass.
Very interesting how the Indo Aryans (modern day Pakistani) invaded the Dravidians (modern day Indians), very much like the Mongols overcame the Chinese. Mughal culture is the most longstanding culture from India which gave birth to beautiful art, architecture and ideals.
Sir, you have offended me. How DARE you disparage Dick Van Dyke!
No offense meant to Mr. Van Dyke.
Great literature is The Bible!!! 😉 KJV is Jacobean is it high culture? 😂
The message would be pop culture.
Man, I’m sorry, but you are going to find a way around what prevents you from joining the Roman church if ever you spend time with deeply beautiful and deeply Christian Catholic communities (like monasteries or elsewhere). What we Protestants do when we “study” the reality of goodness, truth, or beauty as life-changing and godly looks to someone who has indeed spent time in such communities and understood them like we’re talking heads with nothing actually invested. Or like LARPers. You can’t put-on virtue as an affectation or hope to start some kind of community apart from ancient ones. You have to walk with people connected to that culture by generations. We Americans simply cannot “choose” a culture and remake it. This is impossible. If that’s your goal you are utterly wasting your time.
Woah don't be antisemetic Jordan