In music, counterpoint is the composer intentionally inter-weaving different melodies into the same piece. In society, it's the culture doing much the same but unintentionally. In music the result is usually harmony; in society it's often cacophony. The audience, even the orchestra, have to wonder how this happened.
Three melody lines in today's America help drive home the point:
* Greed -- in the Judaic-Christian ethos it had long been deemed a sin. The work of the devil. In modern Western culture, it has gradually become a virtue. Take one 16th C part Protestant each-man-a-priest...add one part 18th C Adam Smith profit-seeking-fuels-the-economy...result is modern day Capitalism. Vast personal and national wealth has resulted in the Western democracies where Gordon Gekko neatly summed it up in the 1987 movie WALL STREET: "Greed my friends is good...!"
* Idealism -- a very different melody line has experienced a very different historical fate. From the days of ancient Greece where gods, goddesses and their statuary glorified the ideals of beauty and virtue... through the high Renaissance when European art rediscovered this ancient ethos...up through the formulated idealism of the Victorian and post-Victorian America expressed in MGM, Norman Rockwell and Hallmark iconography, Americans have often enjoyed preaching and pursuing the ideal in life. However, in today's harsher tell-it-like-it-is culture, such idealism seems discordant to the ear. Especially the young less sentimental ear which has learned to mistrust any promises or heroes that seem too good to be true.
A sharply different summary comes from the Deep Throat character in the 1976 ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN: "Follow the money...!"
* Conservatism -- once a powerful political philosophy based on the reality of human nature, it has morphed into whatever excuse can be found to protect a personal philosophy: "I've got mine; if you don't, don't count on anyone or anything to give it to you...!"
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Newsman Walter Cronkite used to say it best at the end of each broadcast: "And that's the way it is....!"
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Walter would still be saying it.
ReplyDelete