THE CULTURAL CANON
THE SWAMP OF ARTISTIC OPPRESSION
Two weeks ago I wrote this:
“What artists are able to see, because of becoming and then being outsiders, is a clearer picture of who they are and what they have come from. In the midst of this ongoing struggle to free themselves and to find a voice they discover many social and personal mysteries, and it is these mysteries which are worrisome to the status quo, to the static view the community wishes to maintain.
‘In my next essay I’ll discuss how the above leads to the formation of a Cultural Canon, something invisible to most of us but very real and very oppressive.”
Well, I got pleasantly distracted by one of my readers, the painter Helen Garrett. She wrote a moving response to my essay which I felt needed a rapid response in last week’s essay. So here I am, fulfilling my promise, but first I want to quote George Orwell, who wrote the following in 1941.
“Totalitarianism has abolished freedom of thought to an extend unheard of in any previous age. And it is important to realise that its control of thought is not only negative, but positive. It not only forbids you to express – even to think – certain thoughts but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct. As far as possible it seeks to isolate you from the outside world, it sets you up in an artificial universe in which you have no standards of comparison.”
This present oppression is now a product of the neoliberal Establishment’s construction which manufactures a popular culture laden with the value system they wish us to accept. It takes many forms, including political propaganda through Public Relations and advertising, and in softer cultural forms as novels, films and TV soaps.
The beliefs that form their Cultural Canon are a set of rules, norms and ideas acceptable to representatives of the Establishment (film, TV and radio producers; gallery, arts centres and museum curators; newspaper and especially children’s schoolbook editors, and so on. Although mostly unknown to many of us, this system represents the interests of the ruling powers. It helps them to control we, the 90% in the least expensive way by instilling a belief system and sets of values that do a good job convincing us that the current political/economic relations are the natural order of things.
The formation of the Cultural Canon is not the consequence of an organised plot by a handful of people on behalf of their bosses. It is more complex and subtle than that. Modes of thinking and attitudes develop out of class assumptions:[i] the experiences of growing up in wealth or poverty, freedom or repression, of being loved and cared for or ignored.
The political views that ripen out of small groups of people wishing to protect their power construct a tendency, from generation to generation, to hire their own (from the ‘right’ background, family and schools with the right coloured skin, the right or at least not the wrong religions and of course the right accents) for key positions in the media, culture and government hierarchies. Although those children fill only 8% of school going children’s places (those in private schools) they occupy over 80% of media, political and entertainments seats of power.
Since the rise of the ultra-rich and the new establishment of entrepreneurs, political families (the Bush and Clintons in the US), media moguls and their offspring (as the Murdochs in Britain, Australia and the US) we have seen the rise of new dynasties, some small and modest and others more grand and powerful.
These privileged individuals are not only disconnected from most people’s experiences but live within the rarefied air of a glass tower. To them, every window is a mirror reflecting only themselves and their own needs. This is why the culture they produce, while cleverly seductive, is irrelevant to the psychic needs of rest of us, and banal because they can never allow it to address the harsh realities they impose.
They will only allow creative work to enter the Cultural Canon which plants within us the belief system that helps them convince us that it is acceptable for them to extract maximum profits from our labour while paying minimum wages and allowing us as little democratic decision-making powers over our jobs, education or any other social forms of participation. They also try to convince us that because of the (false) need for austerity, it is justifiable to invest as little as possible in physical infrastructure and social care.
The entire edifice of their Cultural Canon is constructed to mask an Establishment whose prime concern is creating wealth and security for themselves while not giving a damn about the lives of the value-makers – the workers, us.
In embracing their Cultural Canon, we fall under their control, supporting them and their system and therefore their exploitation of our labour and the earth’s riches to serve them.
We believe in their illusions because we are surrounded by their popular culture that smothers most of our own thoughts.[ii] Popular culture is one of the most powerful expressions of the Cultural Canon. It is contrived to seduce us as it entertains us with its superficial charms and easy answers into accepting the Canon’s values. It diverts us, making certain we do not look elsewhere for guidance.
The only way to escape this is to question, read, discuss, argue and rediscover your own values and morality.
i Studies have revealed that increased wealth causes people to believe in their ‘superior’ traits, and to scorn the needs of others. This attitude blends well with the Ayn-Rand/Neoliberal idea that "greed is good."
ii The troubled middle class find it easy to blame the poor for being poor, including the newly impoverished. They should consider the cost of the entire safety net is only one-sixth of the $2.2 trillion in tax benefits received by the rich. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said, "It's really American to avoid paying taxes, legally...It's a game we play."
Dear readers, open a discussion, ask questions, contribute ideas…