The Snob of Snobs

One of the executive orders signed by President Trump on his first day in office directs those overseeing the designs of civic buildings in Washington, D.C. to attend to beauty and coherence with the styles already predominant in the region. For Washington, that means a strong preference for classical architecture harking back to democratic Athens and republican Rome. In particular, it means a rejection of modernist and brutalist architecture, which disdain the natural human sense of beauty and the meaning of place and tradition. Such architecture is the work, we might say, of cliques congratulating each other over the heads of the little people, who cannot possibly grasp their brilliance. For modernism has saddled Washington with some ugly buildings not even recognizable as civic. The executive order mentions the Hubert H. Humphrey Health and Human Services Building, which, to my eye, looks like an oversized parking garage, and the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, which looks as if a similar parking garage had been summoned to life, and with its curling jaws was about to catch those doomed to work there and, like Milton’s Hell, “yawning receive them whole.”

“It is time,” says the order, “to update the policies guiding Federal architecture to address these problems and ensure that architects designing Federal buildings serve their clients, the American people. New federal building designs should, like America’s beloved landmark buildings, uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit, ennoble the United States, command respect from the general public, and, as appropriate, respect the architectural heritage of a region. They should also be visibly identifiable as civic buildings and should be selected with input from the local community.” What is there to argue with that?

One newspaper report asks, nervously, whether it means that Washington will end up looking like ancient Rome. That splendid city that Augustus boasted to have found in brick and left in marble? Would that be so terrible? But it is not so. The order specifically notes the various styles that have been in concord with the classical. Thus it includes under that category “the forms, principles, and vocabulary of the architecture of Greek and Roman antiquity, and as later developed and expanded upon by such Renaissance architects as Alberti, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Palladio,” and by a wide variety of brilliant architects not too proud to be instructed by the genius of such predecessors, well into the twentieth century, in “such styles as Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts, and Art Deco.”

The most notable thing about the order is not what it says but that it had to be said at all. Nobody before the tidal wave of modernism ever took a perverse pride in offending a people’s heritage or their natural sense of proportion and beauty. Always the message is the same, though the messengers and their objects differ.

So then, the modernist in music says, “If you are listening to Alban Berg, and you check to see if you are bleeding from the ears, it is because you are too stupid to recognize his genius, and you probably can’t appreciate anything more complex than ‘Camptown Races,’ doo-dah, doo-dah.”

The modernist in art says, “If you are looking at a work by Jackson Pollock and you ask whether monkeys got hold of the paint tubes, it is because you are too stupid to recognize his genius, and you probably hang on your walls paint-by-numbers pictures of Lassie.”

The modernist in the Catholic Church says, “If you think that bare interiors are drab and depressing, and that queueing up to receive Communion rather than kneeling is also drab, it is because you are too stupid to understand the symbolism of there being no symbols, and you probably like to wear a hair shirt and have yourself flogged once a week for your penance.”

The modernist of social thought says, “If you think that there are only two sexes, male and female, and that these are oriented toward one another by nature, and that attempts to pretend that there are more than two are buffoonish, grotesque, delusory, or wicked, and if you do not accept that ‘gender’ is whatever we say it is, it is because you are too stupid to understand how liberating it is to learn that male and female mean nothing, and, if you are a woman, you probably like nothing better than to be barefoot and pregnant, and if you are a man, nothing better than to make her so.”

There are modernists in education who disdain the power of memory and prefer the awkward to the clear, the barbarous to the grammatical. There are modernists in the army, though they may not see themselves as such, for whom men are interchangeable with women, and who bristle at the old-fashioned notion that military science is about winning battles rather than about gauzy ideals of equity and changing the world. There are modernists in the theater who love to hate Shakespeare and who are delighted to turn that greatest of poets inside out, making Lear into a woman, or Bottom into a salacious monster, or Portia into a Nazi, or Malcolm into a Machiavellian who would prove to be just as horrible as Macbeth was.

The modernist is the snob of snobs. Let him not dare to say in my presence that all we have here is the old conflict between the learned (himself) and the unlettered, or between people of educated tastes and the groundlings. I know too much about the fruitful interaction between folk art and high art to let him get away with that. Brahms was inspired by Hungarian folk melodies. Vaughan Williams became the greatest writer and arranger of church music in the 20th century because he not only deigned to learn from the tradition; he combed the English countryside for folk melodies, many of which had never been written down, and which he then adapted for hymns. Renaissance drama in England and Spain was made possible by the convergence of two mighty streams: classical learning and the boisterous popular drama that had held the attention and won the hearts of more than three hundred years of princes and priests, carpenters and cartwrights, farmers and fishwives. It is impossible to imagine Puccini without the art songs of the Italian people, such as you might have heard sung by a fellow playing his mandolin in the streets, playing by ear, and likely innocent of sheet music. Chartres Cathedral is the most stupendous work of folk art the world has seen. Robert Frost, who disdained modernism in free verse as dull, comparing it to playing tennis without a net, wrote what people could understand and love in the classical meters of English poetry, and no poet since has so well captured the American spirit in both its brighter and its darker forms.

Frankly, it is exhausting and tedious to have to say these things. It is like having to demonstrate that wheels ought to retain their traditional shape, rather than letting snobs with too much of other people’s money make them oval or square, or randomly lumpy. Perhaps, before I leave this world, people will begin to reject all the oval, square, and lumpy wheels they have been instructed to accept and to pretend to admire. Pitch Nature out the door, and she returns through the window—even if it is plexiglass and has no shape any normal human being would recognize.