Bring Back the Middlebrow

You're more than just a worker. Learning and bettering yourself are necessary to be a democratic citizen.

If you read a lot of history or watch mid-century media, you can’t help but notice there used to be something in America called the middlebrow.

We’re all familiar with lowbrow culture, since most culture these days is lowbrow. Although it’s often dismissed as lowest-common-denominator rubbish, there’s actually nothing wrong with lowbrow culture. A lot of it is great, like rowdy comedies, bubble-gum pop songs, and movies with explosions. Lowbrow just means entertainment that connects with our primal part as human animals, which is why it takes no effort to engage with or appreciate. We all know why explosions are cool. We know why a man tumbling down the stairs is humiliatingly funny. Everyone instantly gets it and takes away a bit of joy.

High culture, on the other hand, is culture that requires some work and preparation. Before you can get anything out of high art like operas, ballets, great novels, or works of philosophy, you have to know some things. You can’t just pick up high art and get it. You might need to become familiar with the specific rules of the art form. You might need to know some things from history, or some wisdom about humanity. High art has many things to teach you, offering glimpses of the beautiful, the transcendent, and the true, but only after you’ve already put in some work.

Middlebrow sits between them.

Unlike lowbrow culture, middlebrow culture takes some work to appreciate. You can’t just pick it up and get an easy laugh. Unlike highbrow culture, middlebrow culture is also accessible to anyone. You don’t need years of study to appreciate something middlebrow. Anyone can just pick it up and get something out of it. Middlebrow culture is therefore culture that pushes you in order to make you better.

Middlebrow culture once was everywhere in America. If you watch old shows from the middle-twentieth century, you always find people learning French, reading literary novels, going to Broadway plays, or learning to cook fine cuisine. All of this is middlebrow. Late night talk shows used to have literary novelists sitting alongside Hollywood actors, treating them on the same footing. Writers like Norman Mailer were household celebrities. Arthur Miller, a playwright, married Marilyn Monroe, and nobody thought it weird at all. There was this poet, Rod McKuen, who became a bestselling author and everyone had his work on their coffee tables—ordinary Americans were buying works of poetry.

I sometimes like to watch old episodes of Dick Cavett’s late night talk show, which ran for years opposite Johnny Carson on ABC. You can’t believe the guests. In one episode, Cavett was talking to celebrities like John Lennon or Orson Welles, and in the next he was talking to James Baldwin or Gore Vidal. You also can’t believe the level of conversation. The celebrities were discussing issues at a level of knowledge and reflection beyond anyone on CNN or MSNBC today. Check out YouTube and see what I’m talking about yourself.

Back then, America was an aspirational country. It wasn’t just upper-class professionals or educated elites immersed in middlebrow culture. It was middle- and working-class Americans too. Everyone in America wanted to become better.

Today, there’s a lot of self-help content, but little of it is middlebrow. Influencers teach you to get fit, be more disciplined, invest, start a company, or talk with the opposite sex. Some teach you spiritual enlightenment through meditation to make you more focused and successful. This content isn’t about bettering yourself, but getting things—becoming happier, more effective, or more successful. Middlebrow culture offers no material reward—reading poetry won’t get you a promotion, six-pack abs, or more money—because the reward is expanding yourself to become smarter, wiser, more reflective, and more complete.

Middlebrow has picked up an unfair pejorative connotation as mediocre and pretentious. Some snobs consider it embarrassing to engage in middlebrow pursuits. To me, it’s not embarrassing but aspirational. I like the idea of people going to museums, trying the ballet, watching shows about history, reading philosophy, or buying great books they struggle to get through. I like the idea of artists and scholars sitting next to Timothee Chalamet on Jimmy Fallon.

What happened to the middlebrow, and why is it important to get it back?

THE SUPPLY-SIDE EXPLANATION

Some say the problem is fundamentally about supply. It’s easier to sell people something they know they want than something they don’t yet know they need. It’s like the story attributed to Henry Ford, in which he supposedly said if he asked his customers what they wanted, they would have told him a faster horse. Selling people good lowbrow content is easy, because everyone already knows they want it. You know from the trailer you’re going to get a belly laugh at middle-aged Will Ferrell streaking a frat party. With middlebrow content, you don’t know whether it’s going to be rewarding until you’ve put in the work and experienced it. You have to choose it, pay for it, and consume it, before you know.

For the same reason, it’s difficult to sustain even significant middlebrow success in markets. In the early years of cable television, people thought a world of infinite channels should support good middlebrow content, so they built networks, attracted viewers, and succeeded—Bravo for arts entertainment, The Learning Channel for educational content, The History Channel for history documentaries. Then they all switched their programming to reality shows and Ancient Aliens. While they were making a nice profit with the original concept, executives realized they could make even more money chasing the bigger market instead. There was money doing what they were doing, but more money doing what everyone else was doing.

Algorithms make everything even worse. In the world before the algorithm, you might at least accidentally browse by something you didn’t know you wanted. You might find an intriguing book in a bookstore, see a new show while flipping through channels, or scan an article in the pages of a magazine. When algorithms feed everyone exactly what they already know they want, no one can find anything new to try it.

All of this is true, but the problem isn’t just markets and supply.

THE DEMAND-SIDE EXPLANATION

If we’re honest, there isn’t much demand for middlebrow content these days either. We’re just not an aspirational culture that way anymore.

When I visit museums, they’re almost always mostly empty. Every city has these beautiful buildings that contain the most precious treasures of humanity—the greatest works of art humanity has created, bones of dinosaurs, feats of science, and thousand-year-old artifacts from civilizations across the globe. It ought to cost more than Super Bowl tickets to get in. There should be a waiting list of a year. The only people there are parents dragging their kids because they know it’s good for them. Few Americans want to get better for the sake of it. If they’re going to put in work, they want something tangible back—a better job, a girlfriend, or a happier life.

Middlebrow culture used to convey some status. Learning French impressed people. Reading hard books made you someone to admire. We no longer celebrate such pursuits, but denigrate them as foolish and pretentious. Wealthy business executives, entrepreneurs, and even politicians, denounce the study of history, philosophy, literature, and art as wasteful. They tell people to pursue practical things, like engineering and STEM, instead. Engineering can get you jobs and money; philosophy won’t make you useful to anybody but yourself.

Philosophy isn’t meant to make you a better tool for other people to use. It’s meant to make you a better, more insightful, stronger person and better citizen.

CITIZENSHIP AND THE MIDDLEBROW

I’ve written in the past about why you should become a better citizen. In a democracy, the people are the government. How can you become a sovereign co-ruler of a democracy unless you understand the world you’ve been entrusted to rule?

What does every monarchy, aristocracy, and ruling family teach its heirs? Is it business management, software engineering, and marketing? Or is it history, philosophy, political strategy, justice, ethics, religion, culture, mythological stories, art, and lore? A ruler must understand the world around them. They must understand human nature. They must expose themselves to the most profound ideas in the greatest books. They must understand the powerful stories that drive humanity forward. They must understand beauty and the spiritual, to understand the meaning of a life, and what their society could become. You can’t chart where a society ought to go before you understand what a society is and how it works.

Knowledge of technology, engineering, and science is important, but when Rome fell it wasn’t because the Romans forgot how to make Roman concrete. Rome fell because people made tragic mistakes that destroyed their society, making the concrete irrelevant. The same technology that people use to make the earth hum with power can also become the bombs that level empires. The most important knowledge isn’t the making of better tools but understanding the societies and civilizations that will decide how those tools get used. If we lack this knowledge and get these decisions wrong, deep knowledge about how to manipulate matter will just destroy us faster.

Knowledge of humanity also lets you see the world in all its colors. A narrow man who reads news about an event in Turkey sees it in just black and white. The truly educated man, who knows about the history of the Ottoman Empire, and the Byzantines, and the tenets of Islam, and the long history of European competition, and theories of international relations, and myths that reveal the repeating patterns of human civilization going back to antiquity, sees the same event in a multitude of colors. When the wiser man walks into a museum, he doesn’t just see a random collection of objects, but a coherent story of the journey of humanity. When he walks into a cathedral, he reads five centuries of history carved into the stones and columns and artwork on the ceiling. The wise man’s world is more vibrant, interesting, and complex, making his life richer and his decisions wiser. He navigates a colorful world obscured to others.

When people tell you this knowledge is useless, they’re seeking to steal your birthright as a citizen and control you. They tell you these things are useless, but mean they’re useless for you. They don’t see you as a co-ruler of a democracy, or else they would care a lot about whether you have the tools to do the job. If you were a force acting on the world, they would want to ensure you had exquisite judgment. They tell you this because they clearly never intend for you to exercise your duty as an equal democratic citizen. They don’t apply this same rule to themselves, their children, or the ones they love. Every business titan, world-beating entrepreneur, elite scientist, and successful stateman I’ve ever heard reads widely, grapples with philosophy, knows history, and appreciates beauty and art. They tell you to study STEM, then immerse themselves in Plato and Marcus Aurelius.

What the world wants for you is to become a useful worker. It wants you educated enough to do the work required, but doesn’t care if you understand anything unnecessary to wield you as a tool. It doesn’t care if you’re a better, more thoughtful, more useful person. It doesn’t care if you have the knowledge a ruler needs. Nor do the narrow minds who transformed the knowledge of humanity into “the humanities.” Instead of allowing you to explore and learn, they seek to colonize your mind with rules instead of ideas. They seek to turn joy and wisdom and transcendence into a dry and didactive and mechanical “social science.” They do this also to control you, to enslave your curiosity and wonder, to convert you from a co-ruler of a democracy into a soldier in their crusade, telling you the sort of world you should help them to create.

There’s a scene in the show Ted Lasso in which Ted gave out the secret to his life—Be Curious. If we want to rule ourselves, much less our democracy, we must be curious. We must know more, learn more, and explore more. We must be aspirational, a society that wants to continually be better. We must train as more than workers, but as democratic citizens. Unless we understand our world, we cannot hope to rule it as citizens making the choices that drive events in our society.

We must bring back the middlebrow. It’s how we become the aspirational and democratic citizens we need to be.

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