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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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philistinism

30 Oct 2021 - 06 Nov 2026
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    • What interests me about the idea is that it seems to be definitionally about having the wrong sort of goals. Under the high-culture theory, Art, thinking, the mind are sacred and supposed to be treated reverentially; capitalist production of culture-slop is a desecration. Arteests have high intellectual, spiritual, artistic goals, philistines want to be entertained. JF Martel's book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice makes this case; that art is about pursuing high goals and is threatened by the low goals of commerce and entertainment.
    • A full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional) ideals of his or her group and time. ... "Vulgarian" is more or less synonymous with "philistine": the stress in a vulgarian is not so much on the conventionalism of a philistine, as on the vulgarity of some of his conventional notions. I may also use the terms "genteel" and "bourgeois". Genteel implies the lace-curtain refined vulgarity, which is worse than simple coarseness. To burp in company may be rude, but to say "excuse me" after a burp is genteel, and thus worse than vulgar. The term bourgeois I use following Flaubert, not Marx. Bourgeois, in Flaubert's sense, is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. A bourgeois is a smug philistine, a dignified vulgarian . . . generally speaking, philistinism presupposes a certain advanced state of civilization, where, throughout the ages, certain traditions have accumulated in a heap and have started to stink.
      • – Nabokov, Philistines and Philistinism
    • VGR is a proud philistine: LLMreading is TVfication of text — Venkatesh Rao's Blyg
      • But only in terms of the fiction he like; you couldn't accuse him of being "hostile to the life of the mind". On the contrary, he's a really insightful and productive thinker. But he's not very interested in official respectable culture.
      • Ask Claude
        • vgr_zirp conversation — 2026-11-06
        • You: you seem to have rather philistine tastes in fiction; what would you say to the defenders of high culture?
        • vgr_zirp: The "philistine" charge assumes there's a stable high culture worth defending. I'm not sure there is — my piece "Rediscovering Literacy" [4] argues that what we call high culture is mostly the frozen ruin of something that used to be alive: "discovery began to outpace interpretation and comprehension. We began to discover more and more, but know less and less." The defenders of high culture are often defending a corpse and calling it a cathedral.
        • The more interesting move is my Quora answer on why people don't read more books [6]: "Better books." Not more disciplined readers. The self-serving myth of high culture is that the masses aren't trying hard enough — but if Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes is better than Conan Doyle, that's the adaptation's victory, not a failure of the audience. Pop culture earns its audience; high culture too often just inherits its prestige and then lectures people for not showing up.
        • That said, I'm not a pure populist. The Quora answer on heavy reading [2] is genuinely felt — the idea of book culture as "a millennia-long parade of dead people literally reading civilization into existence" is something I believe. The civilizational-ghost register is real. But you get there through reading, not through defending the canon against the barbarians. Harry Potter got an entire generation to devour seven fat volumes. That's the accomplishment. High culture snobbery mostly produces people who've read the right books badly.
         (really AskZirp)
    • A lot of anti-philistinism is mere snobbery. Textual Poachers makes the case that fannish engagement with mass culture is just as legitimately creative as respectible high art, a perfectly valid way of making meaning despite the elite tendency to sneer at it.