From: jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy)
Subject: to see ourselves as others see us
Reply-To: jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Date: 24 Jul 92 18:12:05

\magnification\magstephalf
\centerline {\bf WHAT IS LEFT OF CULTURE IN THE WEST?}
\bigskip
\centerline{Lev Navrozov}
\medskip
\noindent [The article appeared in {\it Moscow News}.  Navrozov
emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s and lives in New York].
\vskip .5in

When Maxim Gorky published ``The City of the Yellow Devil'' in 1906, a
Russian critic said Gorky ``spat in the face of the world's most
cultured nation'' meaning that the USA had more symphony orchestras per
capita than any other nation...

In that sense the West today is even more cultured than it was in
1906, and the USA is definitely the world's most cultured nation. It
was no accident that during Prokofiev's sojourn in the States after he
fled from the disorganization of Russian post-revolutionary life, he
specially noted both the number and high quality of American symphony
orchestras. Even then the musical elite in the States was far more
numerous than in Russia.

I am talking exclusively of the elite, not the people. ``The people'',
as the favourite brainchild of Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Lavrov, the later
Tolstoy, Alfred Rosenberg and the {\bf Pravda} newspaper of the Stalin era,
are finished. Shortly before I left Russia for the West the audience
at Odessa's famous Opera House were deeply touched by the presence in
their midst of a uniformed sailor. At long last culture has embraced
the people! But before the first act was over, the sailor stood up and
said indignantly: ``When will the strip-tease begin?''

In the West, as now in Russia, the ``people'' have received much of what
the ruling elite has been denying them for ages. Nevertheless, they
don't stage strip-tease shows at the Metropolitan Opera House. The Met
that has seen Chaliapin and the inimitable Galli-Curci, is one of the
islands the elite has reserved for itself in an ocean of ``people'' free
to be vulgar.

Anyway, I am not writing about the ocean of Vulgus (meaning ``people''),
but about the island of the elite.

My next door neighbour, a crane operator, and his wife go out to the
Met. His wife is dressed up in furs and diamonds, and he looks like a
university professor. Indeed, part of the proletariat has joined the
middle class and the cultural elite, the way part of the bourgeoisie
had once joined aristocracy.
 
But there is a ``but'' here.  Everything my worker-turned-bourgeois and
his wife are likely to see and hear at the Met was written in the
17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Where are the 20th-century Mozarts, or
Western Prokofievs I wonder?
 
Last year the West celebrated Mozart's and Prokofiev's jubilees.  I
did not read anything remarkable about Prokofiev on that occasion,
neither in the Western nor the Soviet press.  Let me therefore point
out that I regard Prokofiev's ``repentance'' as not just music
measuring up to Mozart's classics.  It is archetypal music dating
before Mozart and Vivaldi.

Prokofiev had wanted to settle comfortably in the States, exactly like
many people do in 1992. The other day a ``prominent Russian poet''
phoned to ask me ``to fix a place to live'' for his friend, another
prominent Russin poet. A 1992 Russian intellectual needs so little to
be happy! Exactly as much as Prokofiev, the genius and pre-Mozart,
wanted back in 1918.  But musical critics, specifically {\bf The New
York Times} critics, jeered at Prokofiev the pianist, having taken him
for another whimsical avant-gardist who came from the bizarre country
of nihilists and revolutionaries.

Prokofiev had to leave, and he finally settled in the country where
Stalin could kill him any moment, but where he nevertheless was one of
the nation's two greatest composers of the 20th century.

You will note, too, that Western ``culture'' eventually became exactly
what Prokofiev had been accused of: the whim and folly of millions of
Western Philistines. While Mozart and Prokofiev were performed more
widely than any other composer last year, the indigenus Western
composers were creating music by rolling billiard balls into grand
pianos. No one was willing to listen to their music at their own
expense, but being salaried university professors, the composers listen
to one another out of professional duty.

In short, you cannot measure culture by the number of symphony
orchestras playing Mozart or Prokofiev, or by the number of salaried
composers playing billiards on grand pianos. Culture rests on openly and
voluntarily admitted inequality. I am sorry the idea is not mine, but
Berdyaev's who first expressed it in 1922.

Mankind has been growing in numbers since around 1500, to achieve
all-time highs in the 20th century. But it is quite probable that not
one of the six billion human beings living on Earth by the year 2000
will be Prokofiev's equal in music! Could inequality be more glaring
than that? The genius of Mozart or Prokofiev is highly valued.
People---not unversities, nor governments, nor Nobel Prize
Committees---pay willingly to listen to their music. But why?  Here is
the greatest injustice in the history of mankind...

Maxim Gorky was amazed to see millionaires and beggars in America. 
Unlike Russia, people in America
are almost indifferent to this sort of inequality. But the inequality
of genius has been successfully removed from Western life, perhaps
for good. Each American man and woman whom I take to be good
representatives of Western culture, need genius in science, 
technology, and medicine. But not in belles lettres.

Not a single poet in the West lives on proceeds from his publications.
No doubt each poet regards himself a genius. What about novelists?
I have reviewed modern Western elitist literature for the {\bf Nov Mir} 
monthly, so I will only say here that even the Soviet writer Fadeyev
regarded himself equal to Tolstoy. As for Americans, ``not even
Fadeyevs'' all regard themselves as super-Tolstoys by birth right...

The West has accomplished the communist ideal of total equality in
arts. It was Trotsky who announced that ``we shall create music that
will make Beethoven sound like an alley cat concert''. The Soviet
avant-garde {\bf LEF} magazine once published the picture of communism on
its cover: the entire population of the country, deployed over
mountain slopes in tiers, playing their own music, expressing thelr
profound thoughts, reciting thelr immortal poetry (like that created
at the literary circle of the footwear factory, most probably vers
libre).

There are no listeners, readers, or spectators around. All are
creators. Just like an American university. They don't need either
Mozart of Prokofiev there. All are equal. Each is admiring,
appreciating, listening to and reading only himself..

This is how culture dies. Without a murmur. Not at the hands of a
tyrant, but because everyone believes from his green years on that
outside science, technology and medicine he is an unsurpassed and
universal genius: God the creator, the absolute centre of the world,
the Me Eating an Apple...
\vfill\end
--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

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