The Pop Culture Wars
By Carson Holloway
If we take seriously what is said by Plato and Aristotle, then we must also pay attention to what is being said by the likes of Taylor Swift and Kanye West.
A few weeks ago, rapper Kanye West made headlines by crashing Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards ceremony. Swift had won the prize for best female video, but West, believing that Beyoncé should have won, took the stage and interrupted Swift to make his opinion known. Confronted with a torrent of uniformly condemnatory public commentary, West soon apologized. In all of the discussion his actions provoked, however, little thought was given to the significance of the connection between West’s self-absorbed music and his boorish behavior.
There was a time in America, not too long ago, when this question might have been raised. Over a period of some decades America’s cultural politics involved a debate between the left and the right over whether some popular music tended to weaken society by eroding standards of personal conduct. This controversy extends at least as far back as the rise of jazz, but it gained intensity with the rise and progress of forms of rock—and, later on, rap—that seemed to celebrate liberation from self-control, especially in relation to sex, drugs, and even violence. Some conservatives have held that such music poses a serious threat to society. Such music, they contended, glorifies and thereby encourages self-indulgent and violent behavior. Yet a free society requires citizens with a capacity for self-control. In the absence of the voluntary public order such citizens support, the alternatives are either disorder or government-coerced order. Thus the worst popular music educates the young not for free and responsible citizenship but for anarchy or despotism—or, more likely, anarchy followed by despotism. In contrast, liberals have seen the great threat to freedom not in such music but in the conservative critics’ reaction to it. Pop music, they suggested, is in fact merely harmless fun. There is, after all, no scientific proof that such music produces violent or otherwise antisocial behavior. Those who think otherwise threaten freedom by their illiberal and un-American interest in regulating other people’s private pleasures.
This argument was alive and well as recently as ten years ago, when troubled artists like Marilyn Manson and Eminem rose to prominence producing troubling music that expressed and celebrated their extreme loves and hatreds. The dispute over the moral and cultural consequences of pop music, however, was soon crowded out of the public discourse by matters of national security. The terrorist attacks of 9-11, and the subsequent American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, turned the minds of Americans away from the culture wars for a time. And, when the culture wars resumed later in the decade, they took the form of the struggle over same-sex marriage. The musical front in the culture wars, it seems, has been abandoned by both sides.
An argument, however, can be forgotten without deserving to be forgotten. In fact, the debate between left and right over the morality of popular music touches upon issues of the deepest significance and gives expression to concerns that were explored with the utmost seriousness at the very beginnings of the tradition of western political philosophy. When conservatives and liberals argued over whether pop music could transform the character of individuals—and hence, eventually, of whole generations and of society itself—they were not, as contemporary social scientists often contended, pursuing a diversionary debate about merely “symbolic” issues. They were rather disputing a question that thinkers like Plato and Aristotle had treated as inseparable from their inquiry into the best political order. To be sure, the contemporary debate was often characterized more by passion than insight. This, however, is not a reason to dismiss its central concerns as fundamentally irrational, but instead to turn for instruction to the classical political philosophers.
What, then, is the classical teaching on the moral and political significance of music? And what light does that teaching shed on the recurring (although presently suspended) American argument over popular music?
Surprisingly, to us, the ancients not only thought music worthy of serious attention, they in fact considered it an issue of supreme political importance. Plato’s Socrates, for example, suggests, in theRepublic’s discussion of the political institutions of the best city, that among these the rearing in music is “most sovereign.” He later adds that the guardians of the best regime “must beware of change to a strange form of music ... For never are the ways of music changed without the greatest political laws being moved.” Even more surprisingly, Plato and Aristotle hold the primary preoccupation of the contemporary debate to be of mere secondary importance. For they insist that the political importance of music arises not only from the message of the lyrics of a song but also from the emotional and moral power of the music itself. Hence the ancients’ constant emphasis on “rhythm,” “harmony,” and “tune.”
Plato and Aristotle attribute this great political importance to musical rhythm and harmony because of their power to contribute to the fulfillment of the primary aim of political life. This aim, as Aristotle states it, is to “produce a certain character in the citizens, namely, to make them virtuous, and capable of performing noble actions.” Yet, he continues, music obviously “contributes something to virtue” because “it is evident through many things” that “we become of a certain quality in our characters on account of it.”
Music, the ancients contend, is an “imitative” art. That is, it depicts the various passions and states of character of which human beings are capable. Again, Aristotle: “in rhythms and tunes there are likenesses particularly close to the genuine natures of anger and gentleness, and further of courage and moderation and all of the things opposite to these and of the other things pertaining to character.” Such images do not merely present themselves to the soul but in fact impress themselves upon it. In the case of the extremely impressionable souls of the young, moreover, the mark left by such images is apt to be lasting. Indeed, the ancients attribute this character-forming power to artistic images generally. Hence Socrates’ concern in the Republic that the young, by “grazing” on “licentious, illiberal, and graceless” works of art, will create some great evil in their souls, and his hope that, in contrast, they will, if surrounded by graceful images, be led to “likeness and friendship as well as accord.” Of all such images, however, music is by far the most powerful. Rhythm and harmony, Socrates contends, “most of all insinuate themselves into the inmost part of the soul and most vigorously lay hold of it in bringing grace with them; and they make a man most graceful if he is correctly reared, if not, the opposite.”
The ancients appear particularly interested in using music to foster a kind of moderation. Music’s ability to engage the passions, it seems, includes a capacity to calm them. Thus Aristotle’s concern to exclude from education those forms of music that are “frenzied and passionate” and instead to emphasize music capable of putting us “in a middling and settled state.” The calm disposition of the passions fostered by the proper rearing in music prepares one for the activities of virtue because, as Aristotle points out in the Nicomachean Ethics, one’s capacity for moral reasoning and choice is disrupted by excessive passion. Aristotle argues that living virtuously requires prudence, the twofold ability to discern the first principles of action, the moral virtues, and to discover by calculation how, in particular circumstances, these virtues can be realized by particular actions.
With regard to the former capacity, Aristotle notes that the Greek term for moderation literally signifies “preserving prudence.” This is so, he argues, because moderation in fact preserves our understanding of what is good, since pleasure and pain, which accompany the passions, tend to pervert or destroy our beliefs concerning moral virtue. Aristotle also indicates that the latter capacity is likewise impeded by passion. In the Ethics he contends that there are those who see the goodness of the virtues but who nonetheless fail to live them in their particular circumstances because when under the influence of passion they, in a sense, forget their principles, like men who are asleep, mad, or drunk. It is in this light that we can understand Aristotle’s comment, in the Politics, that the proper rearing in music makes one capable not only of judging noble tunes, but even of judging the noble things themselves.
Looking even higher, the ancients go so far as to suggest that the proper rearing in music can prepare the soul for philosophy. How can music accomplish this? Plato and Aristotle both suggest that excessive passion is an impediment to philosophic activity no less than to moral activity. Hence their moderation-inducing music paves the way for philosophy by quieting the desires that distract the soul from the search for truth Moreover, and more positively, music can foster in the soul an attraction to the truth that philosophy seeks. The graceful music of the best city presents the young soul with a kind of intelligible and beautiful order, and, by its grace and the natural pleasure that accompanies it, such music fosters a lasting taste for such beautiful order. Yet this ultimately is the object of philosophic longing, according to the Republic: the philosopher, Socrates says, keeps company with the divine and orderly, the beautiful order of the cosmos.
What, the modern reader might wonder, does all this have to do with politics? The ancient account offers two answers. To begin with, Plato and Aristotle contend that the kind of character fostered by the proper rearing in music tends to support a decent and free public order. The Republic’s music education is said to produce gentlemen, men who are attracted to virtue and repelled by vice. Thus a city with good music education will not have to bother with a multitude of laws regulating conflicts among the citizens. Absent the moderate and gentlemanly disposition fostered by the right music, however, the preservation of peace is very difficult. One of the themes of both Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics is the close connection between immoderation and injustice: the man with excessive passions eventually must turn to unjust means to satisfy them. Thus the character formed by the lack of passion-taming music, or, worse, by a rearing in passion-inflaming music, leads necessarily to widespread injustice, thence to conflict among the citizens, and thence to the multiplication of laws in a futile attempt to solve these problems.
Furthermore, the concern with musical character formation is political to the ancients because to them the political is above all not so much that which conduces to public order (as important as that is) as that which conduces to human excellence, both moral and intellectual, and hence to human happiness. This is an important point, because it reminds us that the music education they offer moderates the passions not by artificially constraining them but instead by eliciting other longings, for moral nobility and philosophic insight. Such longings are, for the ancients, not only natural but at the core of human nature. Intellect, with its capacity to contemplate and to act in the light of the true and the noble, is our “true self,” says Aristotle. But this true self can only come into its own with the assistance of music. Thus for the ancients music, no less than politics itself, is essential to our becoming fully human, and fully humanly happy.
Critics of popular music have pointed to its often violent, misogynistic, or sexually explicit lyrics in explaining why we should worry about what plays on our iPods. Defenders of pop music have countered this charge by pointing out that many listeners pay little or no attention to the lyrics, and when they do, they don’t take them seriously. As I argued in the first installment of this article, however, it is time this limited debate reckons with the voices of Plato and Aristotle, who claimed that people generally and the young especially are influenced most powerfully not by the words of a song but by the music itself—the rhythm, harmony and tune. For these ancients, the music itself, not the lyric, causes the stirrings of passion in the soul that show themselves in the movements of the body. Such experiences, repeated often during one’s formative years, leave a lasting mark. And the immoderation such music fosters, Plato and Aristotle remind us, can be harmful, whether or not the words of the songs are objectionable.
Both sides of today’s debate might be inclined to dismiss such concerns as silly. The intemperance of some pop music, they say, is enjoyed only in the mind of the listener and is not translated into action. Music, they point out, cannot force the will to certain actions. How often, after all, does a person run out and commit a crime after listening to a song? But this is no more than setting up and knocking down a straw man. The contention made by Aristotle and Plato is not that music can, in so simple a fashion, cause people to act a certain way. Rather, they contend that music moves the passions, and that this power, exerted repeatedly over time on people who are immature and impressionable, can produce a certain disposition under which it will be either easier or more difficult for reason to see, and for the will to choose, what is right.
Even if such music causes nothing more than a passionate reverie in the mind of the listener, the classical teaching still urges us to avoid it. This point is brought to light by the ancients’ general emphasis on human flourishing above and beyond mere social order, and more specifically by their account of the highest happiness, which results from the activity of the human mind in leisure. As Aristotle teaches, leisure is the purpose of life. For most of us work is merely the means to the goods we enjoy in the time we can be free from work. Leisure is, in contrast, the time when we are free to enjoy the things that we choose for their own sake. In sum, leisure is what most people cherish most and is where they expect to find their happiness.
For Plato and Aristotle, however, the crucial question is whether the things we enjoy in our leisure are truly worthy of us as rational beings and whether they are conducive to the happiness proper to such beings. So we must ask whether the excessive passion of some pop music, and its consequent hostility to reason, may incapacitate the young for the kind of leisure that is at once more reasoned and truly fulfilling.
We may be tempted to think that this critique places these classical voices in the same camp as today’s critics of popular music. However, the classical account provides the basis for a much more penetrating criticism of this music than its opponents today have advanced. This must give us pause, for it suggests that the basis of the classical teaching’s criticism of obscene pop differs from that of these contemporary critics. And that in turn suggests that Plato and Aristotle would find fault with pop’s critics as well as with its defenders.
For the ancients, then, conservatives are correct to take music so seriously, but they do not take it seriously enough. Put another way, in their attempt to take music seriously, the conservative critics of pop music do not aim high enough. They oppose music that fosters vice, but that limited aim does not do justice to the full flourishing of human nature or to the key role that the right kind of musical culture can play in fostering that flourishing. By failing to aim higher, modern conservatives ignore, and therefore do nothing to correct, the very social conditions that foster soul- and culture-deforming popular music. To understand this failing more fully, we need to develop the likely Platonic and Aristotelian diagnosis of modern popular music, modern culture and politics, and their effects on the human soul.
From the standpoint of the ancients, life under contemporary, secular liberalism—with its emphasis on material prosperity, its privatization of morality and hence its indifference to the highest human possibilities—must prove, in the end, to be less than fully satisfying. They argued that such a society addresses itself only to the brute in man, and thus the soul soon begins to hunger for nourishment that it cannot provide. Confronted with the prospect of life in such a society, the young react as the young Glaucon reacts, in Book II of the Republic, to what he calls the “city of sows,” a city dedicated exclusively to the needs of the body. There must be more to life than this, they think. But since they have no accurate sense of what that “more” is, they turn to the most obvious thing: overindulgence of the pleasures of the body. Bored with liberal modernity’s sober and cautious pursuit of pleasure, they turn instead to the careless and even reckless enjoyment of excessive pleasure, as well as to the music that celebrates such a life. Hence the essential correctness of Allan Bloom’s assertion, in his The Closing of the American Mind, that a certain kind of rock—at least the most daring rock of his time—is primarily about infantile sex pursued to extremes.
This is not, however, the last stage of the youthful soul’s, or of pop music’s, progress under conditions of contemporary secular, liberal culture. Sexual overindulgence proves in the end no more responsive to our most human desires than the timid bourgeois pleasure-seeking from which the soul recoiled in the first place. Once again the young seek for more, but once again, in the absence of the musical education of the ancients, they have no idea where to look. They have exhausted the body as a source of fulfillment, but they know nothing of reason. Thus they turn from bodily appetite to the far more interesting and dangerous regions of what the Republic calls the spirited part of the soul, the seat of anger and self-assertion. The satisfactions of spiritedness, at least in their coarser forms, are easily accessible. They require no refining education of the soul through orderly and graceful music. Certain spirited pleasures can be added to the indulgence of the body, and this solution appears, at least initially, responsive to the longing of the soul for more than the dominant culture has to offer. After all, that sexual excess alone is not fully satisfying need not mean that it is to be dispensed with, only supplemented.
Hence the emergence of a new, more disturbing popular music, one that adds violence to sex and is dually obscene for its celebration of both unrestrained physical gratification and the joys of uncontrolled spirited self-assertion. Indeed, the apparent summit of the new rock and rap’s perverse genius is not merely to add spiritedness to sex but actually to combine the two: intercourse itself is presented not only as a source of physical pleasure but also as an occasion for self-assertion, as a handy means of gratifying the body with the aid of another while simultaneously asserting one’s self by degrading that other.
On this classical diagnosis our sexually and violently obscene popular music appears as an increasingly unwholesome but nonetheless understandable reaction on the part of the young to the moral and spiritual poverty of liberal modernity. According to this account, though, pop music’s critics, while correctly perceiving that something of the utmost political importance is taking place in the realm of popular music, have incorrectly understood how to respond. Their critique of pop music takes the form of a call to decency and law-abidingness, rather than to virtue or excellence of character and mind. Such a strategy will be limited in its effectiveness because it does nothing to reform the cultural and moral emptiness that provoked the emergence of vicious popular music in the first place.
In contrast, the ancients would prescribe a serious attempt, including the educational use of the right kind of music, to encourage our pursuit of the highest goods attainable by man, reason’s enjoyment of moral nobility and theoretical truth. This, of course, is a daunting prospect in light of the discipline it imposes on the desires, which are powerful and inclined to resist such a project. We look with sympathy on the modern temptation—which influences liberals and conservatives alike—to dispense with the pursuit of excellence and instead to erect society on a basis apparently more reliable because more agreeable to desire: the promotion only of peace and prosperity, the conditions of comfortable self-preservation.
Yet, the classical argument indicates that such a society cannot in the long run reliably attain even the humble goal it sets for itself: instead it eventually gives rise to irrational and unruly passions that deform the soul and threaten the society itself. Thus it seems necessary to strive for the highest things identified by the ancients, from which striving a decent public order may emerge as a byproduct. To borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, civilization can only be preserved by people who care about things higher than civilization. The ancients teach us that music is essential to fostering our love of those things, and hence to the preservation of civilization.
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Carson Holloway is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is the author of All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politicsand, most recently, of The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity (Baylor University Press).
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