By Chet Richards March 9, 2014 For many years I had a much older friend. My friend was highly intelligent and musically cultured, but he had an odd quirk: He listened to Arnold Schoenbergs atonal, and highly dissonant, music for pleasure. My friend maintained that this music was the epitome of beauty and that the philistine world would eventually see that beauty as he saw it. Classical harmoneous music was hopelessly obsolete and banal. Then, one day, my friend was exposed to Vaughan Williams The Lark Ascending. Tears in his eyes he admitted that he had never imagined something could be so transcendently exquisite. With this, his mind newly opened, he began a deep reevaluation of why the great musical classics were indeed classics. I was not greatly surprised at his emotional epiphany. After all, like myself, my friend was a product of U.C. Berkeley. There, my professor in the music history class was openly scornful of twentieth-century attempts to maintain the traditions of tonal music. Music had to break free of such straitjacket restrictions. The music composition majors did not agree. In order to survive in the music department, the students were constrained to write only atonal music the more dissonant the better. The students hated this injunction and went on strike. This strike preceded the famous Free Speech Movement but it had its impact on that later student unrest. The music faculty caved and reluctantly allowed tonal music to be a students thesis. Inspired by the rebellion of the music students the art students similarly went on strike -- successfully. They had been forbidden to paint representational pictures. Students who wanted to do that should take up architecture, not fine art. Change of scene: Recently the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. had an amazing exhibit of the works of Albrecht Durer, the Renaissance master. The walls were jam packed with masterpiece after masterpiece. After two floors of these treasures one was ushered out into a room of modern masterpieces. I put quotes around the description of these works of Picasso and Braque because of the visible reaction of people as they transitioned from the Durer exhibit into this new room. I stood and watched the migrating people for awhile. For almost all, their reaction was the same as mine had been: repulsion at the ugliness and a desire to leave the area as quickly as possible. What is going on? Why the visceral reaction of sophisticated people to the contrast between Durer and the modernists? Why such totalitarian behavior on the part of a world class liberal arts faculty? The answer lies in the fact that the intellectual world of our era has been seduced by a fashion that had taken hold early in the twentieth century. What is this oddly seductive idea? It is the notion that human beings are born as blank slates.That is, humans have no preprogrammed behavioral and emotional inclinations. If humans are indeed born blank then they can be programmed in any way that society deems appropriate. This idea fit perfectly with a certain brand of radical politics. If people start out as blank slates, then a utopian socialist society of true equality and happiness can be created by leaders of great wisdom. There is a busybody arrogance in this kind of thinking (guess who the proposed leaders will be). Does this sound Marxist? Well, it is. Am I being judgmental, am I being sarcastic? You bet I am! Is this idea obsolete? It should be, but, within the walls of Academia and the trenches of Progressive Politics, the idea still rings with powerful echoes. [Excerpt] Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/03/dissonance_harmony_and_american_culture.html According to the Op-Ed by Chet Richards, explains to us why Progressives trying to change our way of thinking and our lives is doomed to fail. The utopian idea that Progressives can change the ideology and psyche of a nation will not work.
