Terry Teachout, fresh from a marathon of mad indexical labor, found world enough and time last night to post a wonderful riff on the disappearance of a common American culture:

...the middlebrow culture on which I was raised was a common culture, based on the existence of widely shared values, and it is now splintered beyond hope of repair. Under the middlebrow regime, ordinary Americans were exposed to a wide range of cultural options from which they could pick and choose at will. They still do so, but without the preliminary exposure to the unfamiliar that once made their choices potentially more adventurous. The rise of digital information technology, with its unique capacity for niche marketing, has replaced such demographically broad-based instruments of middlebrow self-education as The Ed Sullivan Show with a new regime of seemingly infinite cultural choice. Instead of three TV networks, we have a hundred channels, each "narrowcasting" to a separate sliver of the viewing public, just as todayís corporations market new products not to the American people as a whole but to carefully balanced combinations of "lifestyle clusters" whose members are known to prefer gourmet coffee to Coca-Cola, or BMWs to Dodge pickups.

The information age offers something for anybody: Survivor for simpletons, The Sopranos for sophisticates. The problem is that it offers nothing for everybody. By maximizing and facilitating cultural choice, information-age capitalism fused with identity politics to bring about the disintegration of the common middlebrow culture of my youth. Letís return for a moment to those unlettered folks who donít know who painted the "Mona Lisa." I assume, since youíre reading this, that youíre distressed by this unmistakable symptom of the widespread cultural illiteracy with which what Winston Churchill liked to call "the English-speaking peoples" are currently afflicted. But it so happens that a great many American intellectuals, most of them academics, would respond to your distress with a question: so what? To them, the very idea of "high art" is anathema, a murderous act of cultural imperialism. They donít think Leonardo da Vinci should be "privileged" (to use one of their favorite pieces of jargon) over the local neighborhood graffiti artist. And as preposterous as this notion may seem to you, it is all but taken for granted among a frighteningly large swath of the postmodern American intelligentsia.

Which brings us right back to the problem of cultural illiteracy. How can we do anything about it if we canít even agree on the fact that it is a problemóor about what basic cultural facts ordinary people should be expected to know? The answer is simple: we canít.

Two recent events resonate.

The first is the decision of an Indiana high school to cancel its production of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird because it contains the "n-word." Never mind that Lee's work addresses the problem of racial injustice. According to the local NAACP expert on such matters, Lee's inclusion of the word in her story of a southern girl who comes of age during the 1930s sends a negative message about black people and also encourages racism: To stage the play "would be giving another reason to say, 'OK, if they use it in the play, we can say it outside the play.' And that's not right," she said. "Don't we have some positive things going on with black people that we can highlight now? Find those plays and use them." The school bought her argument, saying that cancelling the play is "being sensitive to issues still bubbling below the surface." In this instance, cultural illiteracy paves the way for more cultural illiteracy. In focussing on Lee's use of a word, rather than on how Lee's use of the word enables her to paint a realistic portrait of the southern culture she criticizes, the Indianapolis NAACP and the school that follows its directives are using identity politics to promote ignorance. The lesson they teach is that cheap simulations of sensitivity are superior to genuine expressions of it, that censorship is preferable to knowledge, that context and tradition do not matter, that history and memory exist to be strategically shaped and selectively suppressed according to the needs of the moment, and, lastly, that kids are really, really stupid.

The second event is the decision of a Tennessee court to allow administrators at Vanderbilt University to sandblast the word "confederate" off a campus dormitory known as "Confederate Memorial Hall." In 1935, the United Daughters of the Confederacy donated $50,000 to help build a residence hall for female students of confederate descent. Accordingly, the building's name reflected its financing, as campus buildings typically do. But three years ago, the Vanderbilt student government passed a resolution saying it wanted to change the name of the building, and since then there has been a campus-wide movement afoot to get the word "confederate" off the building in order to make the campus more "diverse." That goal has now been achieved, and Vanderbilt now has the legal right to efface its past in the name of promoting racial sensitivity on campus: "The name 'Confederate' on its building, with the stigma of the institution of slavery, is in contradiction of its policy of diversity and makes it extremely difficult to recruit minority faculty members and minority students,'' ruled Irvin Kilcrease. Kilcrease found that Vanderbilt has fulfilled its contractual obligations to the UDC, and so was not obligated to preserve the building's original name. Thus has history ceded to the politically correct prerogatives of the present; thus will collective memory--the basis for a common culture--be erased. As one reader wrote to me, "Southerners like me are truly glad our ancestors lost the War of 1861, but
we are truly sick of seeing history being PC'D." Worth noting: no one at Vanderbilt seems to be arguing that the building itself should be razed--despite the fact that by Vanderbilt's own argument the building was financed by putatively racist dollars and was designed for putatively racist ends. As with the cancellation of the high school play, certain words trump context, and the display of "sensitivity" becomes synonymous with a tradition-destroying, illiteracy-inducing censorship.

I wrote quite a bit last fall about the UDC's lawsuit against Vanderbilt. You can read more here, here, and here.

UPDATE: There's more at The Goat and SCSU Scholars.

UPDATE UPDATE: John Rosenberg has even more. He writes, "I find it both odd and typical (which is itself odd) that a university can claim to enhance ìdiversityî by erasing evidence of one part of that universityís and communityís past that some elements now find objectionable." Rosenberg's post is in part a response to Stephen Bainbridge's response to mine.