Cardinal Pell, Michael Jensen, a frock contest, and how rock and roll has failed to change the world ...

(Above: what 'popular culture' war?)

The problem, of course, is the rich. The rich are ruining the planet. They are ruining western civilisation. They are diluting our precious bodily fluids. They are polluting the world.

They are creating a central weakness, which will see al-Qa'ida triumphant by the end of the year, and everyone in Australia celebrating Eid-ul-Fitr and Eid-ul Adha instead of Xmas.

We owe this insight to the week-old thoughts of Cardinal George Pell, channeling Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his Sunday Terror column September 11:

More fundamentally, honour, loyalty and integrity are downgraded or rejected. "Me" takes precedence over "we" and pleasure over tomorrow's sustainability. According to Sacks, the most important enemy is not radical Islam but "unsustainable self-indulgence".

Naturally rich people - who have by definition been most successful at mastering the art of unsustainable self-indulgence - are the core group of society-destroying conspirators who place "me" above "we".

Next time you meet a rich person, abuse them for the scoundrels they are. Perhaps a stoning, or at least an hour-long droning sermon about the way they're ruining themselves, society and the planet. Before it's too late:

Our enemies recognize this central weakness. Therefore the challenge for the Western world is to renew the moral disciplines of freedom.

Can it be done?

On the other hand, it could be all righteous, mealy-mouthed twaddle from a church which isn't short of wealth, nor short of priests willing to indulge in the sins of the flesh with passing altar boys.

It's hard to pin down the actual worth of the Catholic church - though one brave soul at Google Answers gave it a go here - but truth to tell, the pond's eyes glaze over at all the listings of the billions here, the squillions there, and the millions extorted from hapless victims convinced that the only certain path to paradise involves a weekly envelope full of cash.

By golly, if the cops in Kings Cross (yes, we once saw a brown paper bag change hands) or the Mafia worked that kind of shakedown routine, there'd be a lot of indignation. You have to admire Scientology for working out the central principle behind any kind of cult. Show me the money, and all will be well ...

In the Google accounting, fancy footwork allows Vatican City to be valued at a lira, meaning either (a) we have a lira waiting, ready to complete the transaction or (b) the pond's residence can now be considered, for the purposes of rates and taxes, to be about zillionth of a lira. Marrickville Council, you useless mob of reprobates, please take note ...

In any case, what exactly are the moral disciplines of freedom? And why is one of the Vatican's chief climate science deniers in the antipodes rabbiting on about tomorrow's sustainability?

The pond's conclusion? If you see some rich ponce, some fancy git dressed to the gills in a bright red or purple dress, blame it all on him. Anyone who can afford that kind of lavish frock is surely responsible for the decline and fall of western civilisation. And a bonus reason?

The family is disintegrating, and some actively encourage this.

Yep, that'd be right. Build a church where the priests and the nuns are denied a family life of the conventional kind - hitched to Christ instead - and blather on about insidious forces, as if somehow cross-dressing isn't some kind of commentary on family, communities, standards in public life, ethical codes, morality and institutions (oh okay, we're only making a satirical point, we love cross-dressing, we really do, who doesn't love a mannish woman, and a womanish man in the great continuum of gender?)

Okay, cross dressers, here's your frock of the week:

Wow. Lady Di, take your place at the back of the queue. Come on locals, we can't take that lying down:

Not bad, but I'm sensing we need a big smackdown, say a' judges versus meddlesome priests' routine at a Sydney red mass:

Out of the way Mr. Claus. Now there's a handy display of fripperies and self-indulgent self-importance.

Some Sunday we're going to have a "frock off" contest, and may the best frock win, and the losers can contemplate their sins and consider how they too can get frocked in style ... (we're advised it helps if you have a lazy 30k to dress in the best frock fashions).

Moving right along, where would we be without thinking about the Calvinists on a Sunday?

And so it's off to the Sydney Anglicans, who have no time for frocks or fashion as an art form, and right away we discover that Michael Jensen is tortured by the dangerous notion of elitism.

It's well known that elitists are responsible for all the ills that ail the world, especially as rich people and high up frock wearers tend by their very nature to be elitist (well would you buy furniture art if you could buy a Rembrandt?)

By golly, if you look at the Patron List of the SSO, more than a few are well heeled.

As Jensen notes, this sort of rich elitist carry on can be a bit of a worry:

The instinct of true Christianity is thoroughly egalitarian, in recognition of the significance of every human individual and the universal appeal of the gospel. Elitism is abhorrent to true Christianity and especially to missionary Christianity. As Davison Hunter says, 'elitism for believers is despicable and utterly anathema to the gospel they cherish'.

Heaven forbid that churches, of all places, become the sites of exclusion and condescension.

Yes indeed. Please, only frocks from Tarjay for the missionary Christian.

But wait, there's an even bigger fly in the ointment:

The dilemma that arises from this observation is this: the evangelical movement, which has aspirations to changing the world and not just winning souls, is addicted to a populism which is at odds with what we know about 'the dynamics of world-changing’. The world is not changed by popular culture. The world (as Davison Hunter shows) is changed by the making of what we might call ‘high’ culture. This is not elitism: it is simply true. A work of superior aesthetic quality by its nature has a superior power to impact the world in which it is encountered.

Oh dear, the old Leavis-ite high and low culture argument rears its ugly head again.

Well if nothing else, Jensen proves his point about the Calvinists not having the first clue about either aesthetics or culture.

Let's start with the catch-call Jensenist notion The world is not changed by popular culture.

Personally the pond is relieved that at long last the peculiar, perverse notion that rock 'n roll/television/the movies/pop music/jazz/graphic novels/Carl Barks' comic books/computer games/the internet ... insert preferred hatred of the month here .... corrupted the world in the twenties/thirties/forties/fifties/sixties ... insert preferred decade or century here ... and so reduced civilisation to mere tatters, such that there is no decent art or culture left in the world ... has now, at long last, been laid to rest.

Bugger off, popular culture, stop wasting our time and our precious teen spirit.

Thanks to Jensen, we learn that popular culture has zilch impact, changes nothing, does diddly squat, has the impact of a foam stick. Next time a conservative starts ranting about the decline and fall of Roman being caused by (a) pop music (b) lashings of wine, or (c) popular gladiatorial contests, quote Jensen at him.

What a blessed relief to know that the Rolling Stones, the Beatles etc etc had no impact at all on our moral fibre (or even the fibre in our breakfast cereals), and as for the notion that Motown and Duke Ellington and similar brought black culture to new levels in the United State, surely this preposterous argument must stand revealed as cant and fraud.

Or perhaps sssh - whisper it quietly - perhaps the Duke showed that you could have your Cotton Club and you could have Johnny Hodges working on that Shakespeherian rag Such Sweet Thunder. And even chew gum ...

Perhaps it's possible to produce works of superior aesthetic power that had a popular impact?

But hang on, according to Jensen, if such works are popular, apparently they can no longer be high or elite, and that means trouble at mill.

The trouble is, too, that this tendency to populism means that evangelical Christianity often imbibes the worst features of popular culture - its shallowness, its brittleness and its attention deficit disorder, for example.

Yes, yes, I've always thought of popular culture as shallow and brittle.

Why the cinema has been called an art, but we all know that (a) it's way too popular and (b) the pictures flicker, making our heads hurt and (c) common brittle sordid people munch on popcorn, thereby ruining the 7.1 Dolby soundtrack (why did they ever bother, surely mono was good enough for the plebs in the stalls) and (d) eek, thanks to dvds they lurk in the lounge room waiting to explode and (e) thanks to the intertubes you might have an avi file at this very moment on your actual computer, waiting to corrupt you with its shallow brittleness.

Like you know Citizen Kane or something just as evil giving newspaper barons like Chairman Rupert a hard time ...

Davison Hunter is not calling on Christians to produce more operas so that we can extend our influence in the upper echelons of power in society.

Which is just as well, when you come to think of it, because after all we know that some of the best practitioners of opera tended to be atheist.

While Wagner bunged on a conversion for his wife, Nietzsche knew him to be a cynical atheist at heart, and Verdi was very little of a believer, while Mozart joined the Freemasons, refused a priest on his death bed, and was buried in a lime pit for his troubles.

It turns out there's any number in high culture who might get into trouble with the Calvinists, not limited to but including Paganini, Schubert, Robert Schumann, Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, Bizet, Brahams, Debussy ...

You could whip up a good first eleven out of that mob, and you could probably get Beethoven into the team without too much hard work, as the Catholic Encyclopaedia sniffily explains here:

In Beethoven, instrumental music, the vehicle of subjectivism par excellence, finds its culmination after a gradual development extending over almost three centuries. In his hands it become the most powerful voice of the prevailing Zeitgeist. Living in an age and atmosphere of religious liberalism, when Hegelian pantheism pervaded the literature of the day, especially Goethe's fiction and poetry, he could not escape their befogging influence.

Sniff. Hegelian pantheism! Ah yes, the befogging influence that produced the Ode to Joy.

Never mind, back to Jensen:

Rather, he wants Christians to remember that they are not actually called to change the world, but to be faithful witnesses in the world. The absence of Christians from these cultural forms is a failure of the call faithfully to witness to Christ in all the world. As he says: ‘The failure to encourage excellence in vocation in our time has fostered a culture of mediocrity in so many areas of vocation’ (p. 95).

Actually there's a fair argument that simple minded faith is its own worst enemy, and if you want good poetry, it might be better if you end up a tortured celibate homosexual, like Gerard Manley Hopkins. Or perhaps living a life of debauchery in the style of Henry Miller might help the creative juices flow.

Or perhaps you might take pop music seriously and aim for excellence in that or any other art form you fancy. Rather than treat it as a vehicle for simple-minded theology of the Hillsong kind, which isn't pop so much as Jesus plastic in a way even Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons would have trouble recycling ...

Oh okay, that's as simple-minded and as simplistic as anything Jensen has to say. But perhaps that's because anyone who believes art can't be popular - or things that are popular can't be art - really has got the wrong end of the foam stick, and possibly has no interest in cultural activities, whether "high" or "low" ...

This comes to the crunch point (yes popular culture allows for cliches in dire emergencies) when you consider that Shakespeare was a very successful playwright in his day, and was later dismissed and damned by many critics for his willingness to please the pit with puns and jokes and broad flourishes. If he were around today, most likely he'd have made the trip across the Atlantic, like Chaplin, to work in Hollywood ...

It's the reason Leavis foundered in the modern age, though it's fun to see Leavis-ite sentiments echoing through the Calvinist corridors, as they once did through film criticism. Take it away F.R.-friendly film theorist:

The wholesale rejection of popular culture. Leavis held, quite correctly, that popular culture was thoroughly contaminated by capitalism, its productions primarily concerned with making money, and then more money. However, film criticism and theory have been firmly rooted in classical Hollywood, which today one can perceive as a period of extraordinary richness but which to Leavis was a total blank. He was able to appreciate the popular culture of the past, in periods when major artists worked in complete harmony with their public (the Elizabethan drama centered on Shakespeare, the Victorian novel on Dickens) but was quite unable to see that the pre-1960s Hollywood cinema represented, however compromised, a communal art, comparable in many ways to Renaissance Italy, the Elizabethan drama, the Vienna of Mozart and Haydn. It was a period in which artists worked together, influencing each other, borrowing from each other, evolving a whole rich complex of conventions and genres, with no sense whatever of alienation from the general public: the kind of art (the richest kind) that today barely exists. Vestiges of it can perhaps be found in rock music, compromised by its relatively limited range of expression and human emotion, the restriction of its pleasures to the "youth" audience, and its tendency to expendability. (more here).

Today that kind of art barely exists? Excuse me, high minded sniff coming on ...

This too of course is nonsense, suffused with yearning for previous ages where art was both good and popular, now lost in a haze of limitations (nee basic emotional prejudices).

As George Orwell noted in his response to T. S. Eliot's Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, way back in 1948, the 'golden age' routine is an old saw, repeated by each generation:

"We can assert with some confidence," he (Eliot) says, "that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidence of this decline is visible in every department of human activity."

This seems true when one thinks of Hollywood films or the atomic bomb, but less true if one thinks of the clothes and architecture of 1898, or what life was like at that date for an unemployed laborer in the East End of London. (more reviews here).

Actually it's even less true if you think of the Hollywood films that were then made in the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties or nineties. If we were left only with the films of Hitchcock from the forties and thirties, what a dud deal it would be ...

Truly the whole notion of 'high' and 'low' is from a distant age, much like the notion of 'progress' in the arts ...

If you can explain how there's progress from Beethoven, as opposed to difference and diversity and new areas of musical expression being explored, then you're probably incapable of enjoying his works for what they have to offer within and of themselves ...

The good news for Jensen? Well he shouldn't torture himself about art. It's possible to enjoy 'high' and 'low' (and chew gum) as the mood and the moment requires ...

Watching Fred Astaire dance is in no way a sin or a crime, nor a defect in popular culture, and quite possibly being moved to dance is more useful than being moved to join the military and kill people.

But then singing and dancing and painting and carving graven images and clapping hands in time and savouring the art of wine making and contemplating icons and fucking and other fun things have always been a problem for the Calvinists ...

If only some of these Xian fuddy duddies could get down and enjoy art and culture in all its lip-smacking joyous diversity, and pluck the rich fruits from whatever branch they find, whether high or low ...

Right now artists are beavering away in their garrets. Some will provide insights, some will go on the dole, some will be popular, some will be so niche only their family will care, but if they score their fifteen minutes of fame and popularity, credit where credit is due, and if they only get discovered fifty years after they've shuffled off the mortal coil, that's the way it sometimes goes ... (oh we loves ya now biggie Van G).

And now a reading, and note the way that Macduff answers the porter's feed line with a feed line of his own that's worthy of the best 'low' twentieth century vaudeville routines:

Macduff: Was it so late, friend, ere you went to bed,
That you do lie so late?
Porter: 'Faith sir, we were carousing till the
second cock: and drink, sir, is a great
provoker of three things.
Macduff: What three things does drink especially provoke?
Porter: Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and
urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes;
it provokes the desire, but it takes
away the performance: therefore, much drink
may be said to be an equivocator with lechery:
it makes him, and it mars him; it sets
him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him,
and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and
not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him
in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.
Macduff: I believe drink gave thee the lie last night.
Porter: That it did, sir, i' the very throat on
me: but I requited him for his lie; and, I
think, being too strong for him, though he took
up my legs sometime, yet I made a shift to cast
him.

By golly, the Marx brothers or Mo McCackie would steal that routine in an instant, and likely as not score a laugh with it, and as with frocks as a form of art, nothing wrong with that ...

(Below: and now for some low Sunday humour).