Why High Culture Matters

You should definitely do more videos about culture. I love your insight! I don’t think that high culture is necessarily something that is valued by the upper classes. For example, I have had conversations with people who have far more wealth and formal education than I do, but when I talked about high culture or used certain vocabulary words, they had no idea what I was talking about. Education is useless if someone doesn’t actually value what they are being taught. I also think it’s ironic that most of high culture was produced by writers and artists who didn’t have a great amount of wealth or formal education as children, such as Shakespeare and Dickens. It was only later that they were propped up by the upper classes.

I made people angry one time because I said something against pop culture regarding books. I said that poorly written books will only give a person poor perspectives on the human condition, God, and so forth; that bad books only produce bad thoughts; and that when those books have a popular agenda, then those thoughts can go from bad to corrupt. Many people are very sensitive to what they consume, and they will typically adopt whatever it is into how they view the world. It's like when I was younger (14-16), I started watching many cyncial atheists and ranters on YouTube, and so I quickly became a clone of them. So, what happens when your country's media is submerged in things like selfishness, promiscuity, and cheap entertainment? Well, all we have to do is look around.

My late father grew up very poor, but loved reading and loved opera. All the classical music was available on records, which he played for us.

Folk culture eventually bleeds into high culture. We can see that in great deal of composers from the romantic period.

Thanks so much for this necessary message, your channel always rocks with truth, and a distinct style :)

I really appreciate your willingness to talk about these topics: culture, beauty, etiquette. Young men need Godly men to provide a holistic education so that we can properly navigate the world, and so that we are not captured by the teachings of those who are not Christians.

Eloquently put, but it all boils down to the same thing as so many conservative messages: that which is old and traditional is inherently good and wholesome owing to its history, and that which is new is inherently bad and dangerous because it doesn't have those deep roots. But showing such a dichotomy is very difficult to do. In this video you say that the new pop cultural works lack the power to push back against bad ideas because pop culture changes so frequently, but that does not follow. High culture and folk culture would also lack that power if the bad ideas are baked into those cultural works as well, and acting as though high culture and folk culture cannot have bad ideas within them is begging the question.

The YouTube app seemingly just glitched on me…I clicked on a video about genocidal space lizards in the game Stellaris, and this is what came up. Don’t get me wrong, I do love Dr. Cooper’s content, but this video (as far as I can tell) has nothing to do with genocidal space lizards (unless that is a term of art denoting Neo-Marxists).

Great video. One difficulty I’ve noticed is the complete replacement of folk culture with pop culture in America. I feel as though it may actually be easier to recover aspects of high culture in our society that we’ve lost than that of folk culture.

As usual, spot on. I em really a huge fan of your program also because you touch not only on theology but also in these other topics. Especially when you connect them to God and theology. Great work!

Dr. Cooper, I have to say it's really cool to see how broadly you are able explain theological, cultural, and philosophical issues while at the same time coming across as a very regular and relatable person. It says a lot about you, especially the way you answer your critics. And when your wife appears, your relationship comes across as very real and down to earth. And it seems to me that your aporoach to your church/academic/publishing work has a very punk rock ethic to it. That is to say that without having some massive team, you've taken upon yourself to make your ecclesiastical tradition accesssibke to others. Anyway, I just wanted to mention how inspiring what you do and how you do it is. I say this as Catholic. So I don't agree with every last thing you say, but I still really enjoy hearing your take on many issues, many of which I do agree with!

High culture is initially made by inspired people. Around and through high culture, happiness, trust and cooperation flourish. But this then tends to create a wish to associate with this for the status it can give to do so. After a while this becomes the decadence of the people who enjoy the high culture, and then a reactionary movement will start, which removes the status aspect, whereupon a new high culture can arise again, and start the cycle over.

It can also be very rewarding to enjoy, or learn to enjoy, cultural output which presupposes some form of knowledge. For a long time Bach's music was inaccessible to me and raucous even, until I began to understand polyphony - now it seems nonpareil. Chaucer became more beautiful to me, not when, but because, I began understanding Middle English more. I think it is liberating to discover beauty across time, but such liberation requires the effort of curiosity, which seems, in my opinion at least, to find its reward in making beauty more beautiful.

This was really helpful on helping me understand why I found the richness and beauty when I walked into a storefront Pentecostal Church in San Francisco. It had the same authentic experience of the Russian vespers service I had just left... both richly different than a modern produced American Evangelical pop service

Very much appreciate the video and your other videos on thinkers who have shaped the modern world. Being in the liberal academy, it nice to hear the take of other orthodox Christian thinkers. I actually discuss the distinctions between high/folk culture and pop culture in my American Government course drawing on observations from Alexis de Tocqueville, particularly what happens to a democratic society when traditional forms of religious belief and practice fade. Tocqueville predicts that you will get something like the end of high culture and a ubiquitous pop culture. Because high/folk culture emerge out of a shared understanding of an objective moral order and thus they tell a shared story that provides folks living in a society with rooted identities and well-defined roles and responsibilities. You know, the kind that help young men make the transition to responsible adulthood and help young women understand life's essential purpose is not built around career, but family, creating discord between biological realities and societal expectations regarding their priorities. I would take issue with one point and I would love to hear your thoughts on it. When I define the "telos" of pop culture I don't think its ultimately about entertainment, rather I teach that its about "consumption". Yes, it may entertain, but only towards the end of consumption. This is why pop culture doesn't offer a shared story provides a rooted identity or reinforces an objective moral order. Rather it undermines both, so that your identity is built around the products that are marketed to you. .

Dr Cooper, I would love to hear more about culture from you. Going to university, the Western canon of literature was deemed as the "cultural imperialism of dead white men". Reading lists priced diversity over any aesthetic or historical consideration. Going through your "MoTMW" playlist has opened my eyes to the origins of this pyromaniac impulse, but I would love to see you explicitly connect it to the current exclusion of the classics in many higher education institutions.

So how do we decide what in our current culture can we judge as high culture?

Yes Dr. Cooper, whenever it is possible, please do a video on Mathew Arnold, and. recommend his book culture and anarchy,thank you.

How do you account for the shifting definitions of high culture in the west? Historical high culture is now accessible to working class people through the internet and libraries. It used to be that only the wealthy had access. We also have access to works of art and literature from the east and africa and we can bring that into the tapestry of what was once purely influenced by european high culture.

What do you make of works of high culture that were popular for a long time, but then suddenly disappear from the canon at one point or another? I'm thinking of something like Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered which inspired countless paintings and operas across Europe for centuries and then, at some point around the beginning 20th century, seems to have almost completely fallen off the map. Statius's Thebaid may be another example of this.