By Sheldon

Recently I finally got around to reading Thomas Cahill’s delightful book How the Irish Saved Civilization, which, I should point out, does not actually address that compelling title until well past the halfway point in the book. But no matter, because prior to that point he takes the opportunity to acquaint the reader with Celtic culture, the fascinating fusion with Christianity, and traces the decline and fall of Rome, aka, The End of Civilization.

Cahill trots out all the usual suspects; moral decline, loss of territory, running with scissors, etc. as per Gibbon and others. Incidentally, for some very thought-provoking insights into the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, I highly recommend Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity.

But Cahill plays on a theme I have seen before, which is the “decline of culture”–whatever that means–but he does so in a fairly meaningful way. He makes reference to one Ausoneus, a Roman poet who was considered pretty hot stuff; not only did he have the admiration of the Very Serious People of his day, he managed to parlay that influence into a nice government post until things went wrong as they often do.

Compared to Roman poets and authors who preceded him; Virgil, Cicero, and so forth, Ausoneus was actually pretty lame. In fact, it’s hard to find much poetry of his that doesn’t flagrantly crib of one of his more talented predecessors. In other words, his reputation as a poet was founded on his ability to imitate, not on his skill at creating anything new.

Fast-forward now to the present day and age, and yet another book by Jeremy Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, written around 2007. Siegel is a wise, witty, and pungent observer of technology and its effects on culture, and his book is filled with some very trenchant comments about what the promises of the Internet, fulfilled and otherwise. He notes that a great deal of what passes for creativity on the Internet is in fact just copied-and-pasted. Photos augmented with wisecracks or jokes, videos that are just “mashups” of existing material, and many, many other instances of imitation masquerading as creativity. He multiplies these examples from art to journalism. Siegel also calls out the entertainment industry for special scorn; he points out that American Idol features contestants singing tried-and-true “classic” songs as part of their extended auditions, but no original works appear (I can’t confirm this, never having watched it). He also remarked on how an increasing fraction of feature films are sequels based on existing stories, with fewer major movies based on original work. A look at the local movie marquee seems to confirm this.

Siegel’s suggests that the Internet is not the creative boon that was promised us and, as he himself points out, those who made such promises seemed unaware that not everyone has something interesting to say, or the skill to articulate it if they do. It is true, in spite of Siegel’s critique, that some fiendishly clever stuff is being done on the Net, but I think his original points retains some validity. There is a lot of dull stuff that gets passed around and, worse, a lot of bullshit. It could be an example of Gresham’s Law, which is that good money drives out bad. High-quality, insightful, truly talented work gets swamped and eventually buried under a wash of meh.

It may just take time. In an archaeology class taken long ago the professor remarked on the effect of new technologies on material culture: when the new technology appears, artistic quality takes a nosedive, temporarily. Over time, however, the truly talented learn how to use the new technology to push beyond what they could do in the past.

This, of course, assumes that it is a technological problem and not a cultural problem.