#103: The Road to The Kitsch Society

March 17, 2012

Johnson ushered in what he called “The Great Society.” It didn’t really come up to its billing and it has declined into what I would call “The Kitsch Society.”

What is “kitsch”? We don’t hear the word very often any more, but it was in common use just a few decades ago. It designated what was taken to be a low, vulgar, cheap, sentimental imitation of “real” art. In those days, kitsch was applied to the kinds of mass produced “cute” figurines collected by elderly women; today, it might be applied to glow-in-the-dark portraits of Elvis available for sale at stands by the sides of country roads.

Perhaps the fundamental difference between “real” art and kitsch is that the real stuff is driven by some set of criteria, standards, or principles that are generally understood and accepted, both by the artist and the purchaser, while kitsch is driven only by market forces. All in all, kitsch art is “real” art divested of creativity, skill, talent, and principle, leaving only a facsimile which appeals to emotions quite different than the ones evoked by the “real” thing.

I think the notion of kitsch is more useful now than it has ever been, simply because our Western societies are culturally driven by mass consumption. As the amount of discretionary money has increased nearer and nearer the cultural bottom, so have the dominant tastes that find expression in the mass media.

In the 30s and 40s, music was melodic and sentimental. In the 50s, as more money became available to younger people, we saw the introduction of rock and roll. In the 60s, sex, drugs, and more rock and roll. We are now at a time when “music” consists of screaming obscenities while simulating copulation to a background of deafening noise. Surely I am not the only one who sees the pandering absurdity that lies in speaking of “rap artists.” The culture goes where the easy money is. The easy money is always with the least educated, the poorest, the neediest, and the most frustrated.

But my theme in this post is not how degraded pop so-called “culture” has become. It is true that calling what is “pop” a “culture” is as fatuous as calling every herd of gibbering pre-humans squatting around a fetid camp a “civilization.” In the PC world, of course, everyone is “equal,” but in the real world, for good or for ill, they are not. The problem with PC arises when the unequal outnumber the equal – at that point, Political Correctness becomes more than a sanctimonious self-indulgence, it becomes a sad necessity.

My theme in this post is that the cultural regression towards the mean (as in “mean streets”) is unsurprisingly not limited to the world of art. It is far more significant that this regression permeates every aspect of our society.

One very conspicuous instance of the vulgarization of our social lives into behavioral kitsch is the shift from the old virtues of compassion and respect to the new virtue of sentimental appreciation. While compassion and respect were reserved for deserving recipients, sentimental appreciation is due to everyone, regardless of their behavior. We see this reflected in the sentimentalization of our language. Apparently, the world no longer contains any “mothers” or “fathers,” they were, apparently, replaced during some starless night by a whole new cadre of “mums” and “dads.” This is as true for bad mothers and fathers as it is for good ones. Nancy Grace recently made a point of referring to Casey Anthony, a woman charged with killing her infant daughter, as the “tot mom.” The crazed woman who produced eight children was known as the “octomom.” So, these days, even a possible child murderess is a “mom.” A self-aggrandizing mental case who tries to make an industry out of procreation is still a “mom.” Men, on the other hand, who don’t pay child support payments are known as “deadbeat dads.”

But what is more frightening, I think, is that morality itself has been replaced by sentimental response. What was once moral judgment has now become kitsch affect. People are no longer taught to ask what is right and what is wrong, but rather “how they feel about an act.” This might be called the “Oprahfication” of North American moral life. Our current state is not only a consequence of market forces serving a more moneyed underclass, it is a change that has also been hastened through the collaboration of popular scribblers of the academic and non-academic stripes. These have been the purveyors of the doctrine of “moral relativism.” There is enough truth in moral relativism and enough self-interest within the various underclasses to adopt this doctrine in the most self-serving ways. For, while it might well be true that no moral code has a metaphysical imprimatur, it is also true that in general some moral code is better than none, and, more important, that some moral codes have proved better for their societies than others. And while some of the marketers of moral relativism may be utterly well motivated, the fact of the matter is that the eager consumer masses hear only one message, and that is that “right is whatever *feels* right in the moment.”

What, you might ask, does it matter?

Well, I could be wrong, but it seems to me that this process is a progress towards an a-cultural society, a society not without norms, but a society with fleeting, transient, manipulated norms that reflect the wants of primitive, uneducated masses. Such masses remain docile only as long as they are fed; once the trough is empty, they take to streets to rampage and burn. They become French and Greek Socialists, whose idea of voting is burning a tire in the street. No one wants that to happen here.