Salocin

Modern times and culture wars

When I was little, my parents used to take me skiing in the south of France. We lived in London, so we'd drive to Dover, get on a boat, cross the channel at a snail's pace, then do the 9-hour drive down through Europe to the Alps. The motorways were not continuous all the way down, the way they are today, so we'd have to drive down A and B roads, through towns and villages. It was quicker, for example, to go through the centre Lyon than it was to go around it, because Lyon's perimeter motorway was incomplete, and subject to huge delays.

As a consequence of this, we'd stop in different towns and villages every time we went down there or came back. Over 11 years, we got to know the countryside intimately, the familiar landmarks letting us know how close we were to our destination. While some trips were truly awful because of traffic or weather, many were enjoyable in and of themselves, and I suppose we obtained a knowledge of the countries and communities on the way, although we weren't aware of the value of that at the time.

Now, I can sit in the Eurostar buffet car, eating a mushy microwave-heated ham and cheese thing that goes by the name of sandwich but doesn't deserve it, and outside the window, the French countryside flies by at over 200 miles per hour. Effectively, I am in a sealed cocoon, a powered bullet, speeding from one capital to another. I see farmhouses, roads, villages and towns fly by with barely enough time to figure out how big they are and what period they're from before they're out of sight. My level of interaction with these communities has dropped to zero as a consequence of being able to bypass them completely.

Of course such technology is fantastic. It's extremely convenient to be able to go from Brussels to London in under 150 minutes, but every so often, I wonder at what cost this new efficiency has come. The benefits are quantifiable in terms of money or time: I save a certain number of hours by travelling in this way, and that has value to me. The cost is different though. It's not only that I personally no longer have much interaction with the waypoints and pitstops between Brussels and London, it's also that, were I not to have done this trip the hard way in the past, I would have no appreciation of the actual distance covered, nor would I have much understanding at all of what it's like to stop over for lunch in one of these communities, and how the people there differ from my cityfolk. Furthermore, as a society, the segregation of urban dwellers from those who live in the country becomes more pronounced. What sort of animals do they perceive as inhabiting the train that passes at 200 miles per hour on the rails that barely touch the outskits of their community? It's easy to imagine how, with different problems to face in their daily lives, they could grow contemptuous of these people who live in such comfort and ignorance of what, to them, is 'real life'.

We've come to a point where time is more valuable than ever, and anything that can provide time economies is seized immediately. I see no relaxation of this trend. We worship speed - the demise of Concord dominated the press in a way near-genocide in Somalia has failed to. Both airplane-manufacturing giants have projects for sub-orbital and supersonic passenger aircraft. Teleconferencing technology continues to advance, reducing daily the need to travel at all. In our relentless pursuit of efficiency, we specialise and narrow the focus of our lives to the point where our depth of understanding of those things that matter to us is without parallel, but our breadth of knowledge has suffered terribly. Few people these days read classics, prefering Harry Potter to any writing that might not be a "page turner", as quickly finished as a 7-hour transatlantic plane journey; the only knowledge anyone has of an artist such as Nicolas Poussin is the reference made to him in Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code". The most well-advertised piece of "art" in the UK in the past 10 years was a pickled cow in a vat of formaeldahyde. Very few people can tell the difference between Beethoven and Mozart, or Schubert and Brahms, but everyone can sing Britney. If it's piped to us through a clearchannel-controlled radio station, or advertised on telly, or if it embodies quick thrills, then it has popularity, without which is gains no respect. If it requires application, thought or effort, then it is the domain of the few, and they are labelled intellectual snobs.

It's always been this way, except that the minority who seek to immerse themselves in culture and philosophy is far smaller today than it was before. What's more, those that have no interest in these things belittle them today, and regard anyone who might look at the latest pop sensation and wonder what on earth is happening to the world as a backward idiot with stuck up tastes, who is unable to adapt to "modern culture". I agree with the "modern" bit, it's the definition of "culture" I'm challenging here. I lump much of today's music, art, movies and so on into a category you might call "commercial entertainment". While we can debate the definition of "culture" endlessly, I have trouble believing that the songs of today will be regarded as an achievement by anyone in 100 years, and if they epitomise the culture of the moment, that's not something to be proud of. Such things certainly have value, but they have been allowed to replace the kind of artistic achievement that inspires and overwhelms, when they really satisfy a different need - they are distractions, they aspire to popularity, not greatness, and many of their authors confuse the two.

I'm as much of a fan of rock/pop as most people, Barenaked Ladies, Ben Folds Five, The Beautiful South, to use the "B" category of my current playlist as an example, but it's not a question of whether or not people listen to pop or rock or metal or rap, it's about whether they've let these replace something else, that modern music imperfectly replicates. If you've never listened to classical music, for example, then if you stretch your boundaries in only one way this month, try listening to Pachebel's Canon, and see if you like it. If you've never really liked art, then try going to the National Gallery, pick an artist, and find out when he lived, what he painted, why it's considered great. Next time you travel somewhere, pick something to see that's on the way, and stop over for a couple of hours to find out what your ancestors built, for example, you could do worse than visit the second world war cemeteries in Normandy, both the American and the German one - they are both incredible achievements in the noble depiction of the loss and sorrow of war.