Chapter One
The Middle Mind
Having adapted Beethoven's Sixth Symphony for Fantasia, Walt Disney commented: "Gee! This'll make Beethoven."
-- Marshall McLuhan
1.
I've suspected for some time that there's something missing in the way we usually construct the Culture Wars. Bennett, Cheney, D'Souza, Kimball, etc., on one side. Fish, Graff, Bérubé, Mapplethorpe, etc., on the other. I've been as involved and absorbed in this faux drama as anyone, but at the same time, dimly, I have wondered: Do these characters really stand for things people care about? I mean, in places other than the Chronicle for Higher Education and the National Review?
And then at last it occurred to me that this titanic agon was just a diversion from the real action. There is another cultural politics in our midst, perhaps even more organic than the academic left or ideological right. It is moving, making its way, accumulating its forces, winning while putative conservatives and tenured radicals beat the bloody hell out of each other to no end at all. This third force I call our Middle Mind. It is a vast mind, my friends, and I fear it is already something towering and permanent on our national horizon.
The Middle Mind attempts to find a middle way between the ideological hacks of the right and of the theorized left. Unlike Middlebrow, the Middle Mind does not locate itself between high and low culture. Rather, it asserts its right to speak for high culture indifferent to both the traditionalist right and the academic left.
The Middle Mind is pragmatic, plainspoken, populist, contemptuous of the right's narrowness, and incredulous before the left's convolutions. It is adventuresome, eclectic, spiritual, and in general agreement with liberal political assumptions about race, gender, and class. The Middle Mind really rather liked Bill Clinton, thoroughly supported his policies, but wished that the children didn't have to know so much about his personal life. The Middle Mind is liberal. It wants to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and has bought an SUV with the intent of visiting it. It even understands in some indistinct way that that very SUV spells the Arctic's doom. Most important, the Middle Mind imagines that it honors the highest culture and that it lives through the arts. It supports the local public broadcasting station, supports the symphony, attends summer Shakespeare festivals, and writes letters to state representatives encouraging support for the state arts council. The Middle Mind's take on culture is well intended, but it is also deeply deluded.
One way or the other, what I'm here to tell you is that the Middle Mind is winning. That is, it has the most plausible claim to being the true representative of the public's opinion. Now, you might say, given the mostly liberal markers I have described above, that worse things could happen. That's true enough. We could be returned to William Bennett's puritanical world of culture as quasi-religious credo. Our "legacy," indistinguishable from our manacles. But however liberal its methods, the Middle Mind is still a form of management, and its final purpose, even if it's not a purpose it's aware of, is to assure that the imagination is not abroad, not out and about, and certainly not doing its own powerful thing.
I'd like to review a few recent exfoliations of the Middle Mind that have drifted by me. It's not always easy to know when one is in the presence of the Middle Mind. It generally flies below critique's radar, because it has the advantage of not being associated with a particular political camp. It feels "natural," which is how we can be pretty sure it's winning. It has its effect and passes notice. A neat trick in Kulturkampf.
The Middle Mind is very well connected. It doesn't need bags of money from conservative foundations and think tanks to create its presence. The Middle Mind is present effortlessly. It comes to us with the convincing and implicit claim, "You've been curious about this, you've been waiting for it, and wondering about it, and here it is." The Middle Mind is frequently on public TV (Charlie Rose), in city weeklies, and in book review sections of slick magazines (Spin and GQ). It is everywhere on National Public Radio, even shows like Whad'Ya Know? but our collective nose is rubbed in it on Terry Gross's Fresh Air. Fresh Air is not merely a promotional vehicle for the Middle Mind, it is itself a prime example of the Middle Mind in all its charm and banality.
Let's think about Terry Gross and Fresh Air with particular regard for her cultural programming. (I will have nothing to say here about her efforts in public affairs.) Here is an interview program that claims quite earnestly to be for intelligence, for the fresh and new, for something other than regular stale network culture, for the arts and for artists. But anyone who listens much to the show knows (I certainly hope that I'm not the only one who has noticed) that: a) Terry Gross has no capacity for even the grossest distinctions between artists and utter poseurs. (Many of the "writers" she has interviewed recently have been writers for TV series and movies. People who can with a straight face say, "Seinfeld is a great show because of the brilliant scriptwriting" love Fresh Air. Now, Seinfeld may be a cut above the average sitcom, but it's a sitcom!) b) The show is a pornographic farce.
Let me develop this last idea about the pornographic. Terry Gross's interest in books and writers is too often morbid, perverse, and voyeuristic. Two quick examples: in 2001 she interviewed Alan Ball, the writer of the HBO series Six Feet Under...
The foregoing is excerpted from The Middle Mind by Curtis White. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022