The proposition that all men are equal has often been extended to all the creations of men. In modern times, the connection between art and intelligible meaning has been severed, instead bringing art into the realm of personal expression. Rather than art reflecting the truth as translated from a higher realm, or from myth, art is instead taken to be derived from the inner self of the artist.

Art, rather than connecting with a cohesive culture that forms a whole with the historic and mythic record, instead becomes disconnected expressions from individuals, with few if any allusions to works outside an individual piece. The works stand on their own rather than requiring acculturation, learning, experience, and familiarity with the underlying themes and moral outlook of the artist.

When people are held to be all equal, it follows that art which is derived from those equal-people must all be of similar value. Modern art museums are temples to this notion. A broken piano, titled like a sculpture, can be portrayed adjacent to an abstract canvas with no coherent form or meaning beyond the subjective interpretation of the viewer.

Art stops being about a visual expression of a shared overarching philosophical understanding of the culture, and more about the meta-game of showing reverence and contemplation to whatever arbitrary ‘work’ the cultural elite serves up on the museum wall or floor. If they tell you to revere a bronzed pile of dog shit, playing the game means revering that pile when it’s fashionable to do so, and spurning it when it ceases to be cool.

The worship of art-as-self-expression is in turn a method of self-worship. When the equal-man praises the art that comes from the other equal-man’s most inner self, he is praising that infinite loop of self-glorification, self-obsession, a mind gone feral examining and re-examining its own thoughts, no matter how banal those thoughts might be.

Contemporary high-artists, many of whom rely on state support through grants, along with beggary from foundations, tend to feel continual frustration that so few appreciate their perverted acts of self-expression, foisted upon a population that feels no organic appreciation for it.

This shouldn’t be a surprise: it’s what happens when you drop a collectively-constructed culture which is an active collaboration between the living and the dead, instead making it about imposing an individual, un-shared, disconnected inner vision upon an audience that has no means of connecting with it in an authentic manner.

The West, having largely severed its cultural links to the past, finds itself dis-coordinated into mutually unintelligible groups. Despite the conglomeration of what used to be thousands of dialects into enormous language-blocs, people can understand one another less and less.

To shear culture down into something that can be understood like a function, it’s a common mentality shared by a large group of people, buttressed by moral teaching, ritual, and storytelling. When there’s limited commonality between each person, real communication is impeded, and intimacy between friends, family, and strangers alike becomes close to impossible.

There’s a reason why internet-daters list their favorite television shows, movies, and novels on their profiles: they’re hooks to use for conversation. A shared comprehension of art, that which symbolizes human experience, is what makes bonds between people possible.

Given that that notion of shared comprehension has been badly battered by mass subjectivism, the means by which we can forge real connections with one another have been similarly obliterated.

One rhetorical technique used by journalists and other professional speakers is to hold the pretense of being in dialogue with presidents and other sacred figures.

They behave like characters in ancient Greek dramas having an open dialogue with the gods about moral issues. How they perceive the god to feel, or what his true thoughts are on a subject, versus what he has actually said, is a matter for intense discussion and rumination. That a president takes the role played by the gods in the ancient dramas is only sometimes remarked upon, usually by comedians, and sometimes by critics.

When events turn out differently than what was initially expected, sinners take the blame — usually republicans, conservatives, foreigners, bankers, and other typical scapegoats who bear differing levels of real responsibility for the failure of the proposed policy.

Modern playwrights will often try to set ancient plays in modern dress, sometimes updating the language to modern idiom, in a bid to help contemporary audiences connect with an alien past. Although the president is presumably a man like any other, there are numerous myths about presidents that place them on similar levels to the divinely-elected emperors and kings of the past.

For example, the many myths around nuclear weapons, established by movies, television, and propaganda, portray presidents as having the capacity to annihilate the world, as God does, at the press of a button. Millions of people today believe that presidents must work together to avert climate-caused disaster, which is much more superstitious than even medieval people were about the powers of their kings on earth.

Rather than begging the gods to avert pestilence, we turn to the president and his men to avert disaster — but when practical measures, such as quarantines, are suggested, even the most purportedly rational of people will refuse on moral principle to implement them. Instead, we are told to have faith in the mystical powers of intention to curb disease, and potentially the development of as-of-yet-uninvented-and-untested potions to be mass-distributed at the behest of the god-president.

The people remain fascinated by prophets and magic, and it seems the more rationalism is imposed, the more widespread and occulted the beliefs become, even from the minds of the people that hold those occult beliefs.

Returning to my post the other month about Albert Jay Nock’s lamentation about the loss of the Great Tradition, I want to get into the notion of education as a mark of distinction, which elevates some men above others, and is available to an elite rather than extended to everyone throughout society at public expense.

This view contrasts with the viewpoint espoused by Rousseau and his intellectual heirs, in America most notably John Dewey, who believed that education could, by itself, shape the entire character of an individual student and a mass population into whatever the planner hoped for.

If we instead take the other position, that people are given substantially differing characters based on nature, and that education can only develop what is already present (the belief held throughout most of the rest of history), the role education can play becomes more limited. It can direct a person, it can shape moral character, it can bestow knowledge, but it can’t change the fundamental essence of the individual, nor can it change that person’s social character as created by family and social position.

Assuming that the printing press, the internet, and other forms of mass-information provision are here with us to stay, much of what justifies the mass-education apparatus becomes more difficult to maintain. The pretenses were already difficult to maintain by the early 20th century, when public libraries became ubiquitous, and even poor laborers could pay for small libraries and periodicals besides.

Education must be a mark of distinction for it to be a useful construct. It should provide a cultural context for political, commercial, technological, and religious administration of distinct countries. It should provide the context not only for cooperation within nations, but between nations also. It isn’t possible for it to perform adequate sorting functions if it is continually debased to become accessible to more and more people over time.

Information can be mostly free (as in speech, not as in air) and accessible to everyone. Education ought to be a mark of competitive distinction. Restricting access to education of distinction, in the same way that we restrict access to Olympic sports teams, can preserve its utility over time, rather than degrading it over time.

The march of the levelers through the institutions has made it impossible for schools to maintain high standards for their students and professors. It prevents schools, also, from separating themselves adequately into hierarchical forms, denying entry to those who either can’t afford to attend or can’t perform at an adequate level.

No, we aren’t all equal. Our institutions should make peace with that inequality, and restructure themselves to match human reality.