Letter #139: The Everlasting Bell Curve Meme

It's the Circle of Life

Spensoir,

A wonderful essay. And a wonderful book too that proves your point with a scientific rigor most classicists could not bring to bear.

I’ve often remarked that art forms have a life cycle. They are born, they thrive in youth, have a second blooming at the peak of their maturity, then decay — sometimes to die, sometimes to lay moribund a while and then begin again.

In the first flowering of youth, when the art form catches fire, the works that thrill the people emotionally and delight the elite intellectually are one and the same. Shakespeare’s plays draw royalty and yeomen alike.  Charles Dickens’ novels delight sophisticates as much as the common man. John Ford’s western movies are riveting to both critics and the general audience.

In the bloom of maturity, the form begins to divide. Late theater brings in the punters with, say, Phantom of the Opera, while sophisticates crowd theaters to see Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. Modernist novels like Ulysses and Sound and the Fury are only for the few, while the many bury their noses in Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan. Audiences flock to Wonder Woman but the intellectual Oscar goes to the obscure Moonlight.

A similar process occurs in cultures generally, I think. A philosopher we both admire, Owen Barfield, points out that language begins by carrying a physical and spiritual meaning simultaneously. The Greek word for breath also meant spirit because the ideas were united. But as the culture ages, the physical phenomenon of breath takes precedence in the thinking mind, while its spiritual quality loses intellectual authority and becomes the province of popular belief.

It is in this later stage of decay, when the stuff of thought and the spirit of life become estranged from one another, that only the very wise among intellectuals can rise above fractalizing analysis and embrace the holistic truth. It is then that the bell curve meme comes into full effect.

There can be sinister aspects to this. Those elites whose power depends on intellectual superiority may become hostile to the simple man’s wisdom, may seek to suppress his faith, his patriotism, his traditions — the unanalyzable truths that turn out to be the very lifeblood of a nation.

But mostly, I think, this process is just the cycle of life in action. We have to take things apart and analyze them in order to know more. We must put them back together to use what we’ve learned. We can’t do both at the same time. We take the car apart to build a better one, but what’s the use of that if we can’t put it together and drive through the countryside? So, perhaps, with faith.

The bell curve meme is built into the system. We could waste time hating the intellectual atheists who led us astray in days gone by. But maybe instead we should welcome home the wise when they finally analyze their way back to simplicity, and adopt once again the faith of children.

Love Dad