Requiem for the 20th Century

Last Sunday I attended a performance by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. The two selections were both elegies. The first, by Richard Strauss, was written in 1945 as the Nazi Reich was collapsing and his beloved concert halls were all being destroyed by Allied bombs. The most devastating to him was the Munich Court Theater, which he called, “the greatest catastrophe of my life.” His composition began under the title Sorrow for Munich, but soon changed into something else, a work for string orchestra that was aptly named Metamorphosen. He was eighty-years old at the time and wrote of the burning of the theater, “there is no possible consolation, and at my age no hope.” At the opposite end of the spectrum was the second piece in the program, the comet flame at the end of Mozart’s life, his Requiem Mass, left incomplete at the time of his own untimely death at the age of thirty-four. Though he had only finished five of the movements, they are stunning, some of the most inventive and evocative choral music I’ve ever heard. The rest of the piece was fleshed out at the insistence of his widow, Constanze, by one of his students, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, in order to collect the commission from Count Franz von Walsegg.

It turns out, however, that Walsegg had a habit of anonymously commissioning works by composers and then passing them off as his own. Constanze Mozart wisely held a recital of the work before tuning it over and thus forestalling any controversy over authorship. While there has been debate through the centuries about the merits of Süssmayr’s additions and wholly composed sections, it is not an inconsiderable attempt at mimicking Mozart’s style and no less an expert than Beethoven said of it, “If Mozart did not write this music, then the man who wrote it was a Mozart.” That’s good enough for me. The act of attempted plagiarism by Walsegg is not unique in history, unfortunately, but it put me in a reflective frame of mind as I considered the utterly derivative and artistically devoid product that passes for music today. In looking over the concert hall it also occurred to me how few young people were in attendance, and that had me wondering what would become of concert music in this century. At the same time, however, I also realized that the lack of support for classical music that is already beginning is just a part of a bigger picture in that intellectual thinking, philosophical argument, and high-minded artistic sensibilities in our culture seem to have fallen off a precipice. And it’s doubtful, at least to my mind, they will ever return.

Part of this personal lament has emerged from a variety of readings I have come across recently. One is a 1997 piece from Harper’s Magazine by Mark Edmundson, professor of English at the University of Virginia, called “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students.” In this personal essay Edmundson attempts to explain why the students in his classes are unable to comprehend the material they were assigned and therefore had nothing to say about it. He chides the consumer culture that kids have grown up in, without blaming the kids themselves, and places the blame squarely on the colleges and universities for buckling under pressure from students and parents to get easy grades. The problem, however, begins long before students enter college. Walk into any high school English class and you will see ill-prepared teachers--some of whom could be the very students Edmundson saw floundering in his classes--doing nothing to teach critical thinking or analysis of literature, for the simple reason that they don’t possess that ability themselves. The protective cocoon kids grow up in, which includes everything from participation trophies to public school mandates that teachers not damage children’s fragile self-esteem, has created a generation of young people who can’t bear to be told they’re wrong. So universities, ever vigilant to keep their lecture halls full, have eliminated challenging courses and give out easy grades in response. At least Edmundson’s essay has a glimmer of hope, from a distance of seventeen years in the past. Not so with a newer essay.

Former professor of English at Northwestern University, Joseph Epstein, throws in the towel in his essay “Who Killed the Liberal Arts? And Why We Should Care.” from the Weekly Standard in 2012. Epstein does a better job than Edmundson of defining just what the liberal arts are, and their importance in a free society. His essay, however, is more of a personal take on a book review of Andrew Delbanco’s College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. He takes a more analytical approach in looking at the devaluation of a liberal arts degree in the workplace as well as the ability of science and technology departments to maintain higher standards because of the greater competition for available spots and more guarantee of prospects coming out of college--something Edmundson mentions as well. But where Edmundson looks at the situation from his spot at the front of the room, Epstein juxtaposes what is going on now with what happened when he was a student in a lengthy, but interesting, digression. What his college experience gave him was “the confidence that I could read serious books, and with it the assurance that I needed to return to them, in some cases over and over, to claim anything like a genuine understanding of them.” Students today, however, have little time for doing anything but the minimum to get by. They certainly never cultivate anything like the intellectual excitement that Epstein felt during his undergraduate years. The implication for the future is that the elimination of that kind of education in the vast majority of colleges and universities is the reason for much of our society’s ignorance and corruption, a trend with seemingly no way of reversing itself.

This sense of despair was made all the worse for me because of other readings I have been doing. The first came about from seeing Leon Wieseltier on television promoting a book of articles from The New Republic called Insurrections of the Mind. That book is astounding. The minds that wrote for the publication over the last century were brilliant as well as prescient. Herbert Croly’s 1920 article "The Eclipse of Progressivism" could have been written today in its delineation of a mono-political culture that colludes with big business at the cost of the populace they are ultimately dependent upon. This book, in turn, led me to the introduction of a book by Lionel Trilling that was written by Wieseltier, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent. His concise and insightful summation of Trilling’s importance and beliefs were eye opening, and Trilling’s work led me to his own introduction of a book on Matthew Arnold. The result of all of these revelations for me was the ability to really understand the intellectual depth of thinking in the country during the last century. And the juxtaposition of that kind of thinking with the almost non-existent mode of argument in today’s society is chilling.

Where are the new intellectuals going to come from if schools are not going to teach? As a country we have already reached the point at which today’s teachers and professors are the lackluster product of a broken education system themselves, one that seems incapable of instilling any kind of passion for genius or excitement about learning to students. Kids--as well as adults--immersed as they are in a meaningless virtual world of their own creation, have no conception of genius, the virtue of intelligence, or the moral responsibility to others to be able to think for themselves and participate in meaningful societal discourse. Instead we have incredibly imbecilic people like George W. Bush, the moron-in-chief, running the country into the ground because of his inability to think and, even worse, his toadies spending the next six years blaming the current president for the Republican debacle that was the Bush years. Fortunately, we still have a few intellectuals left but, like the gray haired and bald heads in the audience at the symphony, they are not going to be around for long and are already being replaced by people who have no business, much less brains, passing themselves off as having anything like a critical mind. If only there were someone like Mozart to write a requiem for the death of intelligence in our country. But, alas, there’s no one left with the intelligence to do so.