There is No Such Thing as a Neutral Culture - Dan Snyder
In decades past, the children of the fifties would reminisce upon their adolescent lives, indulging in nostalgic dreams of their cultural cradle in movies and television shows like “American Graffiti” or “Happy Days”. You hear this sort of thing in grocery stores as the music of two decades ago is played to the adults of today shopping to feed the children of this decade. We are unwittingly conditioned by the culture of our times, which tends to raise us accidentally, which leads us to think of it, by feelings of nostalgia, as harmlessly. Classical education should be highly critical of popular culture. This is contrary to the thought “what was good for me will be good for my kids,” when we have not examined what we mean by “good.”
We are, in fact, cripples, living under the baneful influences of misunderstood trends. Thinking of one example out of many illustrates this point; we are aesthetically brought into subjection by giantism in our public expressions of music. The impulse to amplify everything by means of technology means that the dynamics of music in public can only go in one direction, that being a crescendo intended to drown out any nuance, any possibility to humanly reply or in some cases even participation. Historically, the reformation was a time when the tendency to sit or stand in the church and listen to what was professionally poured forth upon you was reversed, and hymnody, the participation of the laity and common chanting of the psalms replaced an aesthetic of authoritative display. Today, that authoritative sort of thing happens when highly amplified music dwarfs the human voice, making the act of public music a striving tower of technological babel, proclaiming power that transcends flesh and bone and challenges the heavenly thunders themselves. This tendency toward giantish artistic expression resembles Super Bowl half time shows. We see it as even high school sporting events must be prefaced with gigantic reflections on the power of magnified percussion and braying postures.
Here we must understand that the technological culture of power is definitely not neutral. It uses human emotion as a raw material in making the popular aesthetic an ever-inflating balloon, where really all that is growing is an increasing emptiness surrounded by an ever-thinner material stretched to the limits. The result of this experience when the amplifiers are unplugged is deflation. An overstimulated and stupefied population who can only be roused by the next blast on the horn of Nebuchadnezzar.
In classical education, we do not assume that cultural forces can be neutral or empty of content. Music is one force that is a key factor in the formation of human consciousness, and expressive of the life that we would like to pass on to our students. We should exercise care, understanding that man exists in imagine Dei, or in other words, with recognition that the culture of man is divine, or diabolic.
