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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 July 2000 Issue No. 490 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 July 2000 Issue No. 490
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Focus International Economy Opinion Interview Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain Talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
For many nations, the current state of affairs is primarily one of rethinking. First there was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, then the globalisation and anti-globalisation movements that followed. It is no wonder that a number of governments are reorienting themselves and reviewing their hitherto unquestioned policies.
Britain's was one such government. For some time now there has been a process of what might be loosely termed self-criticism or evaluation. An initial restlessness with what-is has given way to various attempts to establish what-should-be. This is reflected in both a number of newly instated regulations and what amounts to a press campaign commenting on them, preempting them or simply calling for change.
A series of five articles running in The Independent under the title "Dumb Britania" dealt with education and the arts. John Sutherland, who opened the series, thinks education is "an alien compound that has colonised a small part of our master dialect and has driven out the useful item in our own national lexicon in the process." The term, he pointed out, is pejorative and carries strong negative connotations.
The apparent cultural problem is so acute that a conference, "Culture wars: dumbing down, wising up" was organised in which a number of speakers expressed concern about there being "a drive towards popularisation which, rather than making the best available to all, panders to our assumed liability to appreciate really good things."
Some take Pop Culture to be a form of easy social cohesion, one that is nonetheles devoid of "the costly rites of passage that bring moral and emotional knowledge," one that demotes aesthetic objectives and elevates the art of advertising in its stead, one that substitutes escapist fantasies for the imagination and replaces feelings with kitsch, one that has -- and I cannot disagree with this one -- destroyed the old forms of music and dancing and relied instead on repetitive noise.
The "dumbing-down debate," John Sutherland explains, is increasingly polarised, with two extreme arguments presiding. On the one hand there are those who seem genuinely fearful of ordinary people, and on the other hand there is the effort to increase relevance and accessibility to make culture "for the people... If you criticise this gesture of egalitarianism you are seen as being anti-people. Nowadays," one of the contributers to The Independent series wrote, "anyone who utters this phrase is considered anti-democratic."
The section on art had a somewhat intriguing title: "How low can we go." Britons, it is pointed out, used to aspire to enjoying high art, however difficult. So "were we fooling ourselves, or have audiences got lazy?" The writers bring education into the equation, wondering whether the educational system has stifled creative learning. The role of the one-eyed hypnotiser, television, is discussed too, and the writers take the time to review the kind of high-browish programmes shown on BBC and ITV. But at the same time they focus on the fact that T.V. cartoons might be "dumbing down our children."
"Look what they've done to our songs... was Pop Music always this trite, or have we just lost our innocence?" one writer asks in an article entitled "The Day music died." Yet other writers, with an equal degree of force, have claimed that "we're not as dumb as they like to think we are. The high arts are more popular than ever. So are we really dumbing down or are we being persuaded to do so?"
"In most cases, what is happening is not so much dumbing down as broadening out. But there is one area where the drive towards the lowest common denominator should genuinely be worrying, and that is journalism... the convergence of the tabloid and broadsheet newspapers on the middle ground of celebrity soap opera is a real threat, not to our cultural life," the editor contends, "but to our democratic citizenship."
