My colleagues and I in Tisch College’s small but mighty Civic Science program recently read and discussed these three works together:

• Arendt, Hannah. “Man’s Conquest of Space.” The American Scholar (1963): 527-540.
• Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press.
• Polanyi, Michael. 1962. “The Republic of Science.” Minerva 1 (1): 54-73.

Polanyi is interested in how scientists coordinate. A “multitude of scientists, each of whom is competent to assess only a tiny fragment of current scientific work,” must collectively decide what to study next, which methods to use, what findings to publish and cite, and what the results mean. You become a scientist by joining a “network of mutual appreciation extending far beyond [your] own horizon.” This network is governed by the community of science through such means as blind peer-review and citation. These tools play the same role as prices in a market: they communicate information about what is valued without resort to a central authority, which would lack sufficient knowledge and would be untrustworthy.

Science is “an association of independent initiatives, combined towards an indeterminate achievement. It is disciplined and motivated by serving a traditional authority, but this authority is dynamic: its continued existence depends on its constant self-renewal through the originality of its followers.” Science is not exactly goal-directed, because no one knows what it will discover. But it is value-driven, because the “explorers strive toward a hidden reality, for the sake of intellectual satisfaction.”

Polanyi developed the idea of “spontaneous order,” which Hayek used to advocate for minimally regulated markets. But Polanyi distinguished himself from classical liberalism. “It appears, at first sight, that I have assimilated the pursuit of science to the market. But the emphasis should be in the opposite direction. The self-coordination of independent scientists embodies principle which is reduced to the mechanism of the market when applied to the production and distribution of material goods.” In other words, science is better than a market because the motives of all the independent but coordinated decision makers are superior to those of buyers and sellers.

Polanyi paints a comfortable picture of constant progress–the steady accumulation of knowledge. In contrast, Kuhn focuses on scientific “revolutions.” He observes that all the scientists working at a given time tend to share one overall “paradigm,” composed not only of foundational beliefs but also of methods and instruments. These paradigms “shift” occasionally when the current one ceases to explain the data. Kuhn introduces a modest kind of relativism by suggesting that scientists at any given time see the world through, or with, a paradigm that will later become obsolete. Yet nature or reality plays a substantial role in changing our paradigms. It is because the earth really moves around the sun that the Ptolemaic system falls to the Copernican system once scientists have obtained enough data to shake the former view.

Both of these theories are progressive and take an essentially benign view of science. They seek to explain the apparent fact that science is successful. Arendt’s stance is very different. She notes that “physicists split the atom without any hesitations the very moment they knew how to do it, although they realized full well the enormous destructive potentialities of their operation.” This is an example of the fundamental amorality of science. “The scientist qua scientist does not even care about the survival of the human race on earth or, for that matter, about the survival of the planet itself.”

Not only does science yield catastrophic practical results–including the possible extinction of the human race–but it also alienates us from nature and ourselves. As scientists discover aspects of reality that are deeply counter-intuitive (for instance, invisible living organisms in our noses; distant ancestors that were apes and even bacteria; light as both wave and a particle), knowledge becomes unmoored from experience. Science culminates with the figure of “the astronaut, shot into outer space and imprisoned in his instrument-ridden capsule where each actual physical encounter with his surroundings would spell immediate death.”

For Arendt, the problem is built into the logic of science and the mentality and motivation of scientists. (It is not nature’s fault that we study it as we do.) Polanyi admires scientists’ motives and defends their refusal to look at ultimate consequences. Results should be “emergent” rather than planned. The contrast between these two authors raises interesting questions about the motivations and underlying commitments of actual scientists.

But the governance of science is a different issue from the mentality of scientists. I think Polanyi errs in assuming a well-functioning system. What about bias, status hierarchies within labs, replication crises, selling out to industry? Kuhn might offer some insights about why revolutions are sometimes necessary. Meanwhile, Arendt misses the problem of collective action. An individual physicist could opt not to study atoms ca. 1935 because that research might lead to atom bombs. But this physicist would reasonably believe that other scientists–possibly Nazi scientists–would go ahead with the research anyway. To stop scientific investigation of a particular topic is a problem of governance.

Polanyi is too cheerful about the actual governance of what he calls the “republic of science,” but Arendt (despite being a great republican political theorist) strangely neglects it. I suspect this is because she views republics as autonomous political entities that have plenipotentiary power within their geographical borders. She would subsume scientists to their respective republican states. She misses the possibility that science is a republic of its own, overlapping political borders. But then the question is how that republic should be governed.

See also: science, UFOs, and the diminishment of humankind; The truth in Hayek; adding democracy to Robert Merton’s CUDOS norms for science; vaccination, masking, political polarization, and the authority of science; mixed thoughts about the status of science.

Some people (I have no idea how many) presume that cultures belong authentically and originally to specific groups of human beings, and when we see aspects of a culture diffuse from their source, that is usually a sign of appropriation (wrongly taking someone else’s property) or else imperialism (imposing one’s culture on others).

These are real phenomena that deserve critical analysis–and sometimes recompense or other kinds of solutions. But they are by no means the only conditions under which ideas (concepts, values, aesthetic principles, styles, stories, technical solutions, artifacts, etc.) diffuse. People also:

• Peacefully propagate their ideas to others
• Advertise and sell their ideas
• Exchange ideas voluntarily
• Voluntarily exchange goods that also have cultural significance and influence
• Borrow ideas respectfully
• Borrow ideas competitively
• Subversively borrow ideas from more powerful groups
• Accidentally misunderstand others’ ideas, thereby creating new ones
• Collaborate voluntarily to create new ideas
• Discover forgotten ideas from their own past that resemble ideas that are popular elsewhere
• Create new cultures or nations (ethnogenesis), which usually involves (selective) memory plus imagination and creativity
• Choose to accentuate their own roots in specific places and times instead of other roots, thus adjusting their sense of who they are
• Literally intermarry
• Combine ideas from diverse sources

Sometimes, these processes are good, sometimes they are bad, but they are not automatically one or the other. And they are not exceptional. Once you recognize them, you see them happening all the time, all the way back through history. And that undermines the premise that specific ideas authentically belong to specific groups in the first place.

See also: what is cultural appropriation?; when is cultural appropriation good or bad?; the Oberlin cultural appropriation controversy, revisited; the ethical meanings of indigeneity; diversity, humility, curiosity.

In our Introduction to Civic Studies course, we have been discussing how to analyze institutions–“analyze” in its root sense of dividing things into smaller components. Our major theorist is for these sessions is Elinor Ostrom, and we are learning from her how to think about the specific types of goods, actors, incentives, rules, and other aspects in play in each situation.

Our goal is not (merely) academic. I believe that institutional analysis helps people to support good institutions, to change or even subvert imperfect or bad ones, and to design alternatives.

Some of our students push back against this fine-grained analysis, because they want to interpret all the specific components of particular institutions in much larger contexts. For example, the police or the schools may manifest white supremacy, and that is the issue.

Meanwhile, they are working on a published case, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” In class, I suggested that Martin Luther King, Jr. and his colleagues were good at both interpreting specific circumstances in holistic terms and analyzing the details.

Starting the day after Rosa Parks’ arrest, King described the segregated bus system of Montgomery as part of at least three very large and deep histories: the global history of European colonialism and slavery, the struggle to create an American democracy, and a providential story of sin and redemption. These are debatable interpretations, but he offered all three explicitly.

Yet he also said, “But we are here in a specific sense, because of the bus situation in Montgomery. We are here because we are determined to get the situation corrected.” He and his colleagues realized that the privately owned and segregated buses depended on fares, and that by properly organizing an alternative system for getting Black workers to their workplaces, they could defeat this company. Their strategy required both analyzing the existing institutions of Montgomery to reveal a vulnerability, and also very cleverly designing a new institution, the boycott, that transported 17,500 people to work for many months.

I think each of us must decide which of these approaches to social problems we will develop and employ more. This is a personal and even existential choice, and I wouldn’t offer an answer for anyone else. But I do believe that our skills of holistic social critique have probably improved, thanks to the flourishing of several important schools of critique–of which Critical Race Theory is just the most controversial example at the moment. At the same time, I think our skills of institutional analysis have tended to weaken, mainly because too few Americans get hands-on experience leading associations.

Therefore, I would advocate for everyone to at least experience detailed institutional analysis so that we know how it works and form our own views of it. And I would argue that it’s better to put holistic interpretation aside while analyzing institutions, or else the crucial details will be lost. For instance, if you read everything as “neoliberalism,” you will not be attentive to the significant differences among firms, markets, and goods–differences that might create openings for action.

See also Complexities of Civic Life; civic education and the science of association;  a template for analyzing an institution; the legacy of Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School.

In Fox News’ September survey, 78% of Democrats and 31% of Republicans say that both vaccines and masks are effective against COVID-19, and another 10-11% of each say that only masks work. That is a 47-point gap. Democrats are also about 50 percentage points more likely than Republicans to support mask mandates. Masking indoors seems to be normative as well as mandated in places like Cambridge, MA, where I live. On the other hand, not wearing a mask is normative in many parts of the USA. Masks are extraordinarily visible and they have accrued symbolic meanings.

This pattern is not inevitable. When we visited Amsterdam in late August, we hardly saw anyone else in a mask–not even in the crowded interior of the Rijksmuseum. The vaccination rate is similar in the Netherlands and Massachusetts–probably three points lower in the Netherlands. The Dutch generally fall to the left of Americans on the political spectrum. Yet they do not happen to see masks as good behavior.

Should the scientific evidence tell us what to do? Here are two examples of relevant studies (out of many):

Evidence for vaccination: Pollack et al 2020 is an example of a randomized controlled experimental test of an mRNA vaccination (the one produced by Pfizer) against COVID-19. Individuals were randomly assigned to receive the vaccine or a placebo. The vaccine was “95% effective in preventing Covid-19 (95% credible interval, 90.3 to 97.6). Similar vaccine efficacy (generally 90 to 100%) was observed across subgroups defined by age, sex, race, ethnicity, baseline body-mass index, and the presence of coexisting conditions.” (These results were obtained before the Delta variant, but studies after the rise of Delta continue to find high impact.)

Evidence for masking: Abaluck et al 2021 is the most ambitious and best-publicized study of masking against COVID-19. The researchers randomly divided 600 Bangladeshi villages into three groups. In 200 villages, they gave out free surgical masks and advocated their use. In another 200, they did the same with cloth masks. The third group was the control, with no intervention. Mask-wearing was about three times more common in the treatment villages than in the control villages, and COVID-19 prevalence was 9 percent lower in the villages with the surgical mask intervention.

Several caveats are necessary, however. Despite the intervention, the majority of people did not wear masks in the treatment villages, but 13% did in the control villages. The effects were not statistically significant for people under age 50. The physical and social context is different in rural Bangladesh than in, say, Boston. Finally, because villages, not people, were randomized, the authors must make some statistical assumptions that could be challenged. Note that the 9% estimate could be too low rather than too high; but there are several layers of uncertainty.

According to this particular pair of studies, the effect of vaccination is a bit more than 10 times larger than the effect of masking. We should think differently about evidence–and about other people’s attitude toward evidence–when results are this different. I am suggesting that a change of state occurs somewhere between 9% and 95%: a cloudy belief turns solid.

We should be very surprised if additional research casts doubt on the core finding that COVID-19 vaccination works. The methodology was simple and compelling, the outcomes were huge, and there is every reason to believe that a vaccine has consistent effects despite variations in context.

In contrast, we need additional research on masking, and subsequent studies are unlikely to yield a result of 9% again. With socially-embedded, behavioral interventions that have small effect sizes, the outcomes will vary from study to study. Future research may well yield null results as well as bigger effects.

If you began as skeptical of COVID-19, of vaccination, or of the new mRNA vaccines, then the vaccination experiments should change your mind. Critical debate is always welcome, but I don’t think you can responsibly criticize the vaccines–or any policy designed to promote vaccination–without seriously considering these studies. In essence, we know that the vaccines work, and if there is a debate, it should be about follow-up issues, like boosters, or about explicitly normative questions, such as how to distribute scarce vaccine doses internationally or whether to mandate as opposed to recommend vaccination.

If you began as skeptical of masks, then the Bangladesh study should cause you to revise your views in a somewhat more positive direction, especially since the preponderance of other evidence also supports masking. (See, e.g., Tirupathi et al 2020.)

However, if you began by assuming that masks are highly effective, then perhaps you should revise your estimate downward. Although you may not have quantified your prior estimate of the effectiveness of masks, you may have been assuming that they cut the spread of COVID-19 by 50%, or at least 20%. Nine percent may be lower than you were assuming.

I wear a mask. I think the evidence points in favor of them. Also, I think that legitimate institutions, such as my city and my employer, have a right to make decisions about such matters, and unless I have major grounds for conscientious objection, I should do what they say. We live together in communities. Finally, I note that experts widely recommend mask-wearing, and they may add a kind of practical wisdom or experience-based judgment that has value above and beyond the results of specific studies.

At the same time, you could predict my view of masks pretty well from my party identification and my place of residence. That fact gives me the following concerns:

• Partisan heuristics may be causing US liberals to over-estimate the value of masks, thus possibly encouraging us to take other risks (such as close indoor contact) that we should avoid.
• US liberals may be overlooking equally or more important policies and social norms because masks have become symbolic of good behavior. For instance, why aren’t we all regularly taking COVID-19 tests at home? Partly because of an unconscionable state failure to provide these tests (for which the Biden Administration now shares responsibility), and partly because testing has not become a mark of personal responsibility–while masking has.
• We may be marking the boundaries of appropriate debate wrong. Scientific institutions are often too powerful and should never be allowed to shut down dissent. On the other hand, responsible participants in public debate should not ignore truly compelling evidence. Criticizing vaccines is probably bad for the public debate (even though criticism is–and must remain–legal). But criticizing masks probably enriches the public debate, since masking involves tradeoffs and uncertainties and we should be constantly updating our opinions.

An additional problem: vaccinating and wearing a mask have benefits for others, not only (or mainly) for oneself. Therefore, they could generate a tragedy of the commons, in which individuals fail to do what would be best for all.

One way to overcome that problem is to establish a powerful social norm in favor of the desired behavior. Sometimes, marginalizing criticism is a way to reinforce a norm. For instance, almost everyone now decries littering, there is no pro-litter movement, and there is not all that much litter. On the other hand, criticism is the lifeblood of democracy. Marginalizing controversial views threatens to free and open debate.

In my opinion, the evidence for vaccines is so strong that vaccination should be a social norm as well as a legal requirement for many people. The main question is what works to get to the outcome of near-universal vaccination. If marginalizing vaccine skeptics is effective, let’s do it. (But if it backfires, let’s not.) On the other hand, we should encourage debates about masking even if that makes it harder to get everyone to mask up, because debate is valuable.

See also marginalizing odious views: a strategy; marginalizing views in a time of polarization; why protect civil liberties in a pandemic?; mixed thoughts about the status of science; Despite Similar Levels of Vaccine Hesitancy, White People More Likely to Be Vaccinated Than Black People

A note on Constitution Day: I haven’t often focused on the key verbs in the phrase, “We the People … do ordain and establish this Constitution.”

The authors held a precarious role. They took it upon themselves to write a legally authoritative document that included its own process of ratification. Their logic was circular. They adopted the first-person plural voice of the nation, but it was by no means clear that the people would agree with them–not even the propertied white men who would have an official voice in ratification. The Framers could have said that they were “requesting” or “proposing,” but they chose to ordain, and also to establish. This was a performative utterance if there ever was one.

The Northwest Ordinance (1787) had begun, “Be it ordained by the United States in Congress assembled. …” “Be it ordained” is an expression of explicit authority, like a court’s “so ordered, adjudged and decreed.” In the case of the Northwest Ordinance, the basis was a majority vote of the Congress. “We the people … ordain this Constitution” was more metaphysically complex, since “the people” could not speak until the Constitution that was attributed to them had actually come into force.

Already in 1325, according to Robert of Gloucester, “The king.. let ordeiny..& let rere up chirchen” (he ordained and let churches be reared up.) As in this example, “ordain” can mean “to decide the order or course of; to arrange, plan” (OED), although that use is now obsolete. Much more common is the sense of “to confer holy orders on,” which is not what the Framers meant.

To “establish” can mean “to fix, settle, institute or ordain permanently, by enactment or agreement” (OED). Chaucer used it in that sense ca. 1386, in the Parson’s Tale: “The peynes that been establissed and ordeyned for synne.” Note how he uses the Preamble’s two key verbs in one phrase, albeit in the opposite order from the Preamble.

Was it redundant to say both ordain and establish, or were their meanings subtly different? Legal language often incorporates pleonasm, as in “null and void,” “terms and conditions,” and “each and every.” These are examples of a whole category called legal doublets.

The Virginia Constitution of 1776 (written by elected “delegates and representatives of the good people of Virginia”) included the phrase “do ordain and declare.” Robert Ferguson (1987) thinks that the Constitution’s framers had this text in mind as a draft and self-consciously improved it for the Preamble, although I must admit I like the way the Virginians presented their work as the product of “having maturely considered … the deplorable conditions” of their state.

Source: Robert A. Ferguson, We Do Ordain and Establish: The Constitution as Literary Text, 29 WM. & MARY L. REV. 3 (1987) See also: why social scientists should pay attention to metaphysics; liberals, conservatives, and love of the Constitution; constitutional piety; etc.

If Congress passes a reasonably ambitious spending package, I hope that some of the money can serve as at least a down-payment on the idea proposed last year by the mayors of Pittsburgh; Youngstown, Ohio; Dayton, Ohio; Columbus, Ohio; Cincinnati; Huntington, W.Va.; Morgantown, W.Va.; and Louisville. They call it a “Marshall Plan for Appalachia” and they cite Re-Imagine Appalachia‘s “New Deal” proposal for the region. They rightly recommend investing in the whole region, but they write as mayors, and I’d advocate for focusing substantial investments in the cities.

For more than a century, Appalachian resources, especially coal, were extracted to fuel US industrial growth. The social and environmental damage was grave, and now the region will bear a disproportionate price for de-carbonization. Already, about 15.2% of all residents of Appalachia live below the official poverty line. That’s not far from the 13.4% rate for the country as a whole, but poverty is concentrated in some Appalachian counties. McCreary County, KY has a poverty rate of 41% and a median household income below $20,000. Its last coal mine closed in 1994.

Appalachian residents live shorter lives than other Americans, and the gap is growing. According to Singh et al., “Cardiovascular diseases (especially heart disease), unintentional injuries (which include drug overdoses), and cancer accounted for 57.8 percent of the life-expectancy gap.”

Direct federal investments are appropriate and could help. However, the relationship between Appalachian residents and the federal government is bad, for deep and complex reasons. Trump won Leslie County, KY with 89% of the vote. (The county’s median household income is $18,546 and it ranks 3,120th out of 3,142 in life expectancy at birth.) I mention partisanship not to make a judgment about how people should vote, but for a pragmatic reason. I think it would be difficult to spend money effectively under conditions of deep distrust.

Appalachia is already more dependent on federal programs than any other region, but that has not made most voters favor those programs or their source. One resident, a Republican who previously voted for Democrats, told The New York Times’ Eduardo Porter: “People in Harlan County have been on the front lines of the war on poverty for 50-plus years and can see its actual effects. It is degrading.” Whether this person is right about welfare programs (as they are designed today) is immaterial; the point is that voters and local elected officials will not be primed to cooperate to make federal funding work. (Harlan gave 85% of the vote to Trump in 2020–having favored Democratic presidential candidates until and including 2000. Harlan ranks third from the bottom in the USA in life expectancy and has a median household income of $18,665.)

This is where the cities come in. Rural Appalachia is closely linked to nearby cities. In addition to Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Pittsburgh, Louisville, Youngstown, and the West Virginia cities (whose mayors all signed the op-ed), one could add Allentown, Binghamton, Charlotte, Chattanooga, Lexington, Nashville, and Scranton, among others. People, goods and culture flow back and forth between these cities and rural areas.

And almost all of these cities have Democratic mayors. Again, I mention partisanship not as a value-judgment but for practical reasons. Municipal leaders who believe in government may work better with federal officials and may use federal funds better, particularly when that is what their voters demand. At the same time, thriving cities in or near Appalachia can create markets and other opportunities for rural residents.

Insofar as we can spend funds to boost rural Appalachia, I am all for it. Infrastructure spending may go over better there than welfare, for understandable reasons. But I am especially optimistic about the impact of federal funds for transportation, renewables, health, and education in the cities within or near the 420 counties of Appalachia.

See also A Civic Green New Deal; a Green recovery; who wants less government?; Building Civic Capacity in an Era of Democratic Crisis by Hollie Russon-Gilman and K. Sabeel Rahman

Today, my late father’s books are on their way to the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo. Most of that library’s collection was lost on August 25-26, 1992 when the Army of the Republika Srpska shelled the building. Several generous friends have helped my family and me to cover the shipping costs.

The books fill more than 1,000 60-pound boxes, for about 30 tons of weight (27 metric tons). We did our best to measure the linear feet this spring and estimated there are 25,000 volumes. Although I watched dad pick out books over many years, it is still kind of amazing that he purchased each one individually, thinking about its price, whether he already owned a copy, and what he thought of it. He bought the majority in Britain, so most are making their second transatlantic voyage.

The coverage is basically Western European cultural and intellectual history from 1500 to 1900, with some offshoots. Dad didn’t read all his books, but he only purchased what he could read, which means that the languages are Latin, French, Italian, and English, with just a few exceptions.

We didn’t send all his books to Bosnia. Since 2014, several hundred volumes have been on loan to Montpelier, James Madison’s house. They match editions that we know Madison owned. (His library was sold to meet the debts of his stepson.) I also kept about 2,000 volumes, books printed between 1500 and 1820 that I didn’t think would survive the travel well. They now line the walls of my office at Tufts–rising eleven feet on three sides, which is hard to capture in a photo.

We intend these books as a gift to the people of Sarajevo and Bosnia and as a commitment to the humane values that made the library a target for destruction in 1992.

(This is actually a post for Labor Day, although the connection to labor and working-class culture may not be immediately obvious.)

People sometimes say: “This artifact or text is worth your effort and attention. It is less accessible than some other works; it may take more effort to understand and appreciate. But it will make you a better person, or help you improve the world, or give you insight.”

This type of claim requires a justification because it is a proposal for how other people should allocate their time and effort. The justification can be an explicit argument that the work in question is valuable. Or it can be an interpretation, explanation, or reaction to the work that helps people to understand it. Understanding enables appreciation. Like any justification, it can fail because it was not a worthy claim in the first place, or because the reasons were weak, or because they fell on infertile soil.

To say that a given work deserves unusual effort puts that item in a special category. Even if you make such a claim in an informal and unpretentious way, you are suggesting a value-judgment and implying a rough ranking from better to worse.

We could have a culture in which many people frequently exchanged such claims, coming from diverse perspectives and advocating a wide range of cultural products. People would then allocate some of their time and effort to relatively challenging works because they had been persuaded that these items have special value. “High culture” would be the list of all the works that significant numbers of people appreciated in these ways.

And we do have that kind of culture. People exchange claims about value. Subcultures can be found that love almost any challenging form of culture you can think of. However, the dialogue about which works are especially worthy is constantly challenged–or even threatened–by several factors:

• The massive supply of culture that is profitable because it is addictive and easy to enjoy. (Believe me, I am addicted as anyone is.)
• A certain reluctance to accept that some works can be more worthy than others. This attitude has shaken the confidence of people, such as humanities professors, who might otherwise be more active proponents of challenging culture.
• The kind of defense of high culture that assumes it must be a traditional Eurocentric canon and that students should recognize a list of canonical authors without actually struggling with their works. In my own area of specialization, K-12 civic education, state standards often present long lists of names. Students are supposed to identify the word “locke” with a long-dead man who happened to believe in individual rights, as if that were a worthy learning objective. The backlash is inevitable.
• The dominant role that colleges and universities play in generating and consuming culture. Higher education has limitations: it serves mostly young adults, it has been assigned an economic function, and it is run by people (like me) who chose an academic path instead of another worthy vocation. Meanwhile, unions and other working-class organizations, religious denominations, small publishing houses and magazines, and other independent sources seem relatively weak.

In “Culture as Counterculture” (New Criterion, Sept. 2021), Adam Kirsch explains how we got to where we are.  I would start a bit earlier than he does and would propose a future phase, but steps 3 to 7 in the following summary match his account:

1. In aristocratic cultures, popularity indicates a lack of quality. Aristocrats gladly prefer to own unpopular things.
2. In democratic cultures, popular tastes gain influence and even authority.
3. As European cultures begin to democratize in the 1800s, people like Matthew Arnold, John Stewart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others–I would add the Uruguayan essayist Jose Enrique Rodo or the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore–argue that all citizens should have access to “the best which has been thought and said in the world” (Arnold). They hope that a classically educated public will govern better.
4. In the 1900s, industries and governments become increasingly effective at distributing mass-produced cultural products whose markets dwarf those for traditional high culture. Leftist critics like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Dwight Macdonald argue that mass audiences are being exploited and denied access to better works, which people would prefer if they had real access to them.
5. In the mid-1990s, many students are still required to study canonical works in schools, under the influence of Arnold and other Victorians. A common motif in youth-oriented pop culture becomes the rejection of that canon. “My heart’s beating rhythm / And my soul keeps singing the blues / Roll over Beethoven / Tell Tchaikovsky the news.”
6. In the wake of that revolt, some highly sophisticated critics argue in favor of pop culture and against status hierarchies. Kirsch’s example is Susan Sontag ‘s 1966 essay collection.
7. Mass-produced, for-profit popular culture keeps expanding while the market for traditional high culture continues to shrink. Sontag decides that pop culture is mainly individualistic and consumerist; she should have resisted it, but the battle is now lost. Genres like classical music are now countercultural niches, not even worth making fun of.

Today’s surviving proponents of high culture seem somewhat diverse philosophically. They include intellectual successors of Macdonald and Sontag, who still want students to read Kafka or the Bhagavad Gita to counteract consumerist capitalism, plus conservatives who want them to read Locke and Jefferson–or at least to know those names–in order to preserve traditional values. Their choice of texts overlaps more than you might think, but the whole group is small and ineffectual, vastly outnumbered by people who don’t see much value to the humanities in any form.

Or perhaps there are still several “high culture countercultures.” Perry Link writes, “Should we compare poetry across civilizations? If we do, classical Chinese poetry wins easily. The contest is almost unfair …” Some of my fellow Americans read classical Chinese verse in the original calligraphy. Likewise, the best poetry being written in English today may take the form of rap lyrics, and some people have highly discriminating, deeply informed knowledge of rap. One could add students of the Talmud or Islamic jurisprudence, jazz aficionados, serious fans of midcentury modernism, and more.

Still, even if we combined all the diverse countercultures devoted to demanding forms of excellence, they would be badly outnumbered.

I believe we can move from step 7 to another phase, when claims of excellence are more influential again. To get there, we will need “business models” (defined broadly) for creating, sharing, and evaluating excellent and demanding forms of culture outside the monopoly of the university. Federal subsidies could help, but I would not put all my eggs in a governmental basket. The goal is not just to make fine culture available–there is already more online than you could see or hear in a lifetime–but to help it to compete for attention in marketplaces like Spotify or Amazon.

Meanwhile, there is cultural work to do. We need more–and more diverse–people to make confident, compelling arguments that specific works will reward the hard work needed to understand them. Some artifacts and texts are better than others: that is the claim. A good life incorporates some of the best works. They do not all come from any particular genre, cultural context, or tradition. One of life’s great joys is finding new forms of excellence where you didn’t expect them. Yet we are surrounded by insidiously addictive but highly profitable mediocrity, and it is up to us to do better.

See also: separating populism from anti-intellectualism; the library of Albert Shanker; “a different Shakespeare from the one I love”; the state of the classics in 2050; and the future of classics.