by Frank and Christa Thornsbury
All culture everywhere expresses thought; that is, all culture everywhere expresses a vision of what makes life worth living. Culture is always an attempt at making collective aesthetic and moral judgments.
For instance, Homer’s Iliad expresses the ancient Greek sense of the good life by illustrating the virtues of courage and of the love of family and country. Shakespeare’s histories provide dramatic images of English heritage and identity that have captivated the English imagination for hundreds of years. And, for the most part, art—both high and low—has been as provincial as these examples, meaning that the best of human culture has come from a place. It has come from somewhere and has expressed the definition of the good life according to that somewhere.
Indeed, the subtle cultivation of a sense of belonging is always at work in our interactions with culture, and entertainment culture is no different. It offers us visions of what makes life worth living. And we may hope that these visions come from real people—or from artists genuinely answering inescapable questions. But artists’ imaginations are not the only source of the culture that fills our screens.
Genre v. Taste
In reality, as goes the market, so goes the culture. We often think that the consumer controls entertainment culture’s vision of the good life, since the consumer dictates the market with his money. In fact, consumers have no real stake in the production of entertainment culture because patterns of entertainment consumption often come down to genre rather than taste.
People cultivate taste by contemplating specific artistic traditions and universal values such as beauty, or at least they are guided by a coherent worldview. Genre, on the other hand, is a chain of multiple links that connect together our disparate consumer preferences. For younger people, this phenomenon often culminates in a genre-based archetype such as hipster, gamer, active mom, or “prep.” For the more mature, it results in the ever-increasing sub-genres of the middle class and the expectations and aesthetics that accompany those sub-genres.
From what shoes we wear to what movies we see, the chain of preferences is vast but also personal, dictating our sense of identity, our genre. What do shoes and movies and hairstyles and even food preferences have in common? Often nothing, other than the fact that magazine editors, advertisement agencies, and Instagram curators have correlated them in order to market a product or in order to create an aesthetic backdrop upon which advertisements can be framed. When we consume entertainment culture, we likely have the aesthetics of these genres in mind, rather than a cultivated sense of what is good and excellent according to our worldviews.
If taste truly dictated the market, we could assume that democracy has prevailed and that the people have gotten their culture. But because genre is the predominant animating force behind entertainment production and consumption, the consumer prefers what he or she has been massaged into preferring. At the end of the process, the consumer hasn’t dictated the vision of the good life, nor has he gotten another person’s perspective—person to person, artist to art lover. The result is a view from nowhere.
We needn’t proscribe entertainment completely from our lives, but we certainly shouldn’t go into the cinema or log on to the Internet looking for patterns of life to imitate. Yet, this is what we do and what we are encouraged to do by both the form and the content of entertainment culture.
Roger Scruton, in his Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, argues that good art invites us to see another person’s view of the universe and to think about it, while entertainment invites us only to experience the emotion of the action portrayed. He mentions that this is especially true of movies. I’ll say that this is also true of the culture we find on the Internet. Here, the form—the quick shots and first-person camera angles of television and movies, the “immersive-ness” of video games, the diminished attention spans on the Internet—facilitates the turning off of our brains and the initiation of the process whereby we merely feel our way into taking on the content of nowhere and making it our vision of the good life.
This is not a conspiracy; it is a business model. And who can fault marketers for doing their jobs? The root issue is not market capitalism or its functions or even its abuses; the root issue is the fact that in most cases we conceive of ourselves and the culture to which we belong according to our consumer preferences. We purchase our vision of the good life rather than discovering it in a place as humans have done for thousands of years.
Entertainment from Somewhere
We must establish ourselves as citizens of somewhere before we take on a view from nowhere.[1] The problem with entertainment culture is that it is inherently placeless, or, if it does reflect a place, it does not reflect our place. Thus, the first step in resisting the genres of entertainment culture and in developing actual taste is establishing a rooted sense of identity, which begets worldview, which begets taste.
For Christians, our self-definition is found first and foremost in the gospel, in God’s revelation to us, and in His communion of saints. We also gain a sense of place through God’s common grace conveyed in the family, the community (town, state, and country), and broader traditions such as the Western tradition. From all of these, we obtain a whole universe of values and understandings of how to live well and how to understand the origin, purpose, and application of principles such as order, proportion, balance, and beauty. In other words, from all of these we obtain the tools that we need in order to judge culture well—to have taste. One of the greatest gifts that our most local places can give us, as we seek to redeem our free time and to develop taste, is good culture, namely in the form of folk culture.
Folk culture is an important alternative to the rootless, placeless entertainment culture. It is of a place—usually regional, though sometimes national. It is deeply connected to a specific local culture and heritage. Thus, it is also of a people, directly related to community identity. It is made up of skills, ideas, and values that have been handed down from generation to generation. It is made by human beings for human beings for the sake of building honest solidarity. It offers truth, beauty, and goodness that shape our imaginations and preferences.
We the authors can speak to this personally. We are from Appalachia (Eastern Kentucky and Southwestern Virginia, respectively). We are exceedingly thankful for the unique Appalachian identity that we have, with its own heritage, own music, own folktales, and own craftsmanship. Every fall, we go home for two important celebrations of Appalachian identity. One is the Apple Festival in Paintsville, Kentucky, which features local music, local artisans and craftsmanship, and, of course, lots of apples and apple-related treats.
Another is Old-fashioned Day that Central Free Will Baptist Church in Norton, Virginia, holds each year. The day features cake walks, mountain food (soup beans and cornbread and mixed pickles and fried potatoes), opportunities for children to make biscuits from scratch, and quilting. The highlight of the day, though, is a traditional apple-butter stir-off; the apple butter is cooked in copper kettles with silver dollars in the bottom over an open fire, and each person takes turns in stirring the butter. Both the Apple Festival and Old-Fashioned day offer their attendees a sense of heritage and a sense of home.
We were further reminded of the beauty of folk art at one of our wedding showers this past spring. Of all the gifts we received, some of the most meaningful were the ones that my (Christa’s) aunts and mother gave us. My aunts had kept the last quilt that my father’s mother had sewn to give to her first grandchild who married. My mother had some of the last of her mother’s completed quilt tops sewn into a quilt as well. These were beautiful, colorful, skillfully wrought examples of folk art that carried with them heritage, family, and love.
Of course, we consume more than just folk culture from Appalachia, and we see ourselves as more than just Appalachians. But folk culture roots us and shows us the truth and beauty found in the traditional, in the local, in the home-grown. It humanizes. It gives us a sense of belonging or of understanding what it is to belong when we explore the folk forms of other cultures.
The Bible doesn’t call people to transcend their local and national traditions but rather to redeem and transform them. Such is the vision of Isaiah the prophet and John the revelator, as the nations, with their local identities intact, fill the new earth. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, our most local tradition is our clause to maintain in the grander contract of culture. Thus we must guard folk art and resist the ever-homogenizing effect of entertainment culture that produces a market-driven, bland culture for everywhere, which ends up being a culture from nowhere.
About the authors: Frank Thornsbury is the English program coordinator at Welch College in Gallatin, TN. He and regular forum contributor Christa Thornsbury were married in June of this year. They live in Gallatin, TN, where they attend Immanuel Church.
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[1]This term is original to the Appalachian poet Jim Wayne Miller and first appeared in his commencement address to graduates of Berea College in 1981.
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