Jack lists egalitarianism among the factors which have contributed to decline:
The third cause of literary decline is our democratic age. This is an age of anti-hierarchy where all great values have been inverted. It emphasises averageness rather than aristocracy. Aristocratic in this sense means greatness. The best literature is hierarchical, aristocratic and elitist ... Their authors are not demolishing the great man for democracy, but preserving his greatness whether for good or evil.Jack quotes George Orwell, showing that the dead hand of politicisation was already making itself felt in the 1930s.
During the past ten years literature has involved itself more and more deeply in politics ... One can see the change in the prevailing literary attitude by comparing the books written about the Spanish civil war with those written about the war of 1914-18. The immediately striking thing about the Spanish war books, at any rate those written in English, is their shocking dullness and badness. But what is more significant is that almost all of them, right-wing or left-wing, are written from a political angle, by cocksure partisans telling you what to think ... [Orwell, 'Inside the Whale', 1940]Jack contrasts the dumbing-down effect of politicisation with the great nineteenth-century novels.
The greatest novels from Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo ... centre on moral transformations of significant men and women, often aristocrats or leaders. Politics was far from their intentions. Their struggles were not about fragmented political identity, but universal truth that everyone experiences and embodied by great archetypes.Jack encourages us to oppose the grimness of modern literature, rather as we might oppose the evil of Mordor. There's certainly a possible analogy there, with Sauron seeking to destroy the middle-class gentility of the Shire, and to replace it with dreary uniformity.
These authors created meaningful characters in meaningful universes where there was objective truth and aspects of objective evil. Anyone can relate to their characters because they affirmed archetypes that have suffused art from the dawn of recorded history.
If I may briefly quote myself, from 'The meaning of mediocracy' (written in 2006):
The key characteristics of culture in a mediocracy are grimness, boredom and dishonesty. Mediocracy's high culture is depressing, vacuous and pretentious. Its popular culture is ugly, aggressive and degraded.One thing Jack's analysis doesn't mention is the anti-middle-class ideology that now pervades all highbrow culture, and increasingly also popular culture.
A couple of articles from July discuss a growing backlash against Hollywood ideology. New company Founders Films, loosely linked to Palantir Technologies, plans to produce an adaptation of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and other movies that avoid leftist ideology. A new movie rating site, Worth it or Woke, criticises woke ideology in Hollywood films. Founder James Carrick mentions, for example, the current dominance of women for traditionally male roles in movie scripts: "women who are written like men, who are stoic, physically imposing, are sexual aggressors, and embody other traditionally masculine qualities". (Or, as I like to call them, blokes with breasts.)
But it's interesting that neither article mentions how middle-class characters, which dominated Hollywood's Golden Age, have been almost completely written out of contemporary TV and movie dramas – except as villains or as otherwise pathological. You only have to hear someone playing classical music in a movie from the 1990s onwards to know that you're probably about to encounter a person who's damaged and creepy, if not a serial killer (and almost always male). It all fits with the Marxist-inspired anti-bourgeois ideology that now dominates the highbrow arts, as well as academia.
I found the Exotic Marigold Hotel movies significant in this connection. A roll-call of British middle-class actors (poshish accents, British middle-class politeness at its best) are consigned to humorous retirement offshore. For that, they're still permitted (just about) to appear as characters we're allowed to like, signalling a kind of nostalgic goodbye-for-ever. For normal everyday life, they're mostly prohibited, judging by their conspicuous absence from (e.g.) BBC drama other than as bad eggs.