released 9/20/2024

Today’s Friday Feature presents two archived interviews from Volume 42 (2000) of the Journal. Michael Kammen, author of American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change in the 20th Century, discusses the difference between popular and mass culture. He establishes their differences in scale (both quantitatively and qualitatively), skill, and participation levels. Kammen gives examples of the bonding function of popular culture at the community level. Then, Philip Fisher, author of Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction, defines culture as passing down tradition from one generation to the next. He then analyzes Ralph Waldo Emerson who, unlike many thinkers, thought new culture would inevitably erase the older form of culture. (He used the metaphor of a bigger circle drawn around a smaller circle: new culture dissolves old culture.) Fisher projects the consequences of this kind of thinking: painting, for example, will be abolished with the advent of film. In conclusion, Fisher examines the effects of this nineteeth-century American thinking on our modern society.

26 minutes

PREVIEW

The player for the full version of this Feature is only available to current members. If you have an active membership, log in here. If you’d like to become a member — with access to all our audio programs — sign up here.

Related reading and listening

  • Sports in America —
    FROM VOL. 21
    Robert Higgs looks at the history of sports in American experience and at how organized religion has interacted with that history. (12 minutes)
  • A fearful darkness in mind, heart, and spirit — Roberta Bayer draws on the work of George Parkin Grant (1918–1988) to argue that our “culture of death” must be countered with an understanding of reality based in love, redemptive suffering, and a recognition of limitations to individual control. (33 minutes)
  • Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
  • Christopher Dawson: Chronicler of Christendom’s Rise and Fall — Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)
  • Questioning “conservatives” — John Lukacs asserts that believers in unending technological ‘progress’ can’t really be conservatives.
  • “How deep the problems go” —
    FROM VOL. 103
    Eric Miller discusses the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s intense commitment to understand the logic of American cultural confusion. (20 minutes)
  • Nihilism in popular culture —
    FROM VOL. 44
    Thomas Hibbs, author of Shows about Nothing, discusses the nihilism that runs through films and television shows in recent American popular culture. (9 minutes)
  • On moral authority and medicine — Continuing our time travel back to 1992, we hear two more interviews from the pilot tape for the Mars Hill Tapes, with sociologist James Davison Hunter and bioethicist Nigel Cameron. (28 minutes)
  • Don’t feel bad — James Twitchell discusses a few of the themes in his book about the confusing state of the evolution of shame and shamelessness. (20 minutes)
  • Shedding epistemic modesty — Peter Harrison on the rise of confidence in scientific progress
  • The disabling consequences of winsomeness — Stanley Hauerwas on how many modern Christians offered atheists less and less in which to disbelieve.
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 101 — FEATURED GUESTS: James Davison Hunter, Paul Spears, Steven Loomis, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Long, and William T. Cavanaugh
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 91 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Hugh Brogan, Daniel Ritchie, Daniel Walker Howe, George McKenna, and Patrick Deneen
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 89 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jerome Wakefield, Christopher Lane, Dan Blazer, Fred Turner, Barrett Fisher, and Thomas Hibbs
  • The Necessity of Tradition — “If a society wishes to find a way of ensuring that newly emergent and valuable techniques are passed on and preserved, its members must feel themselves under an ethical obligation to leave the best possible world not only for their children, but also for their grandchildren.”
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 67 — FEATURED GUESTS: Eric O. Jacobsen, Allan C. Carlson, Terence L. Nichols, R. R. Reno, David Bentley Hart, J. A. C. Redford, and Scott Cairns
  • Life after culture — The modern elevation of individual autonomy leads to postmodern suspicion of all authority, and eventually to postculturalism. Insights from Christopher Clausen and Philip Rieff.
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 40 — FEATURED GUESTS: Joseph Epstein, John Gray, Kenneth R. Craycraft, Jr., William T. Pizzi, Pamela Walker Laird, Albert Borgmann, Neal Stephenson, and Alan Jacobs
  • Manners and the Civil Society — Three essayists reflect on the relationship between manners and morals, and address the way in which the survival of a democratic society depends upon its citizens’ respect for one another. (90 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
Tags: