A View From Nowhere

By Frank and Christa Thornsburry

All culture everywhere expresses thought—that is, all culture everywhere expresses a vision of what makes life worth living. Culture is an attempt at making collective aesthetic and moral judgments.

For instance, Homer’s Iliad expresses the ancient Greek sense of “the good life” by illustrating the virtues of courage and love of family and country. Shakespeare’s histories provide dramatic images of English heritage and identity that have captivated the English imagination for hundreds of years. And, for the most part, art—both high and low—has been as regional as these examples, meaning the best of human culture has come from a place. It has come from somewhere and has expressed the definition of the good life according to that somewhere.

Indeed, the subtle cultivation of a sense of belonging is always at work in our interactions with culture, and entertainment culture is no different. Entertainment offers us visions of what makes life worth living. We may hope these visions come from real people, artists genuinely answering inescapable questions. But artists’ imaginations are not the only source of the culture that fills our screens.

Genre Versus Taste

In reality, as goes the market so goes the culture. We often think the consumer controls entertainment’s vision of the good life, since the consumer dictates the market with his money. In truth, consumers have no real stake in the production of entertainment culture because patterns of entertainment consumption often come down to genre rather than taste.

People cultivate taste by contemplating specific artistic traditions and universal values such as beauty, or at least they are guided by a coherent worldview. Genre, on the other hand, is a chain of multiple links that connect disparate consumer preferences. For younger people, this phenomenon often culminates in a genre-based archetype or label—hipster, gamer, active mom, or prep. For the more mature, it results in the growing sub-genres of the middle class and the expectations and aesthetics that accompany those sub-genres.

From the shoes we wear to the movies we see, the chain of preferences is vast but also personal, dictating our identity, genre, or label. What do shoes and movies and hairstyles and even food preferences have in common? Often nothing, other than the fact that magazine editors, advertising agencies, and Instagram curators have correlated them to market a product or create a particular aesthetic backdrop upon which advertisements can be framed. When we consume entertainment culture, we likely have these aesthetics in mind rather than a cultivated sense of what is good and excellent according to our worldviews.

If taste truly dictated the market, we could assume democracy has prevailed, and the people have produced their culture. But because genre is the predominant animating force behind entertainment production and consumption, the consumer prefers what he or she has been manipulated into preferring. At the end of the process, the consumer hasn’t dictated the vision of the good life, nor has he or she understood another person’s perspective—person to person, artist to art lover. The result is a view from nowhere.

We needn’t exclude entertainment completely from our lives, but we certainly shouldn’t go into the cinema or log on to the Internet looking for examples to imitate. Yet, this is what we do, and what we are encouraged to do, by both the form and the content of entertainment culture.
Roger Scruton, in Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, argues that good art invites us to see another person’s view of the universe and to think about it, while entertainment invites us only to experience the emotion of the action portrayed. He notes this is especially true of movies. I’ll say this is also true of the culture found on the Internet. Here, the form—the quick shots and first-person camera angles of television and movies, the full immersion into video games, the diminished attention spans on the Internet—leads us to turn off our brains and initiates a process where we merely feel our way into taking the content of nowhere and making it our vision of the good life.

This is not a conspiracy; it is a business model. And who can fault marketers for doing their jobs? The root issue is not market capitalism, its functions, or even its abuses. The root issue is that, in most cases, we conceive of our selves and our culture according to our consumer preferences. We “purchase” our vision of the good life rather than deriving it from a place as humans have done for thousands of years.

Entertainment From Somewhere

We must establish ourselves as citizens of somewhere before we take on a view from nowhere. The problem with entertainment culture is that it is inherently placeless. If it does reflect a place, it does not reflect our place. Thus, the first step in resisting the genres of entertainment culture and in developing actual taste is to establish a rooted sense of identity, which produces worldview, which culminates in taste.

For Christians, self-definition is found first and foremost in the gospel, in God’s revelation to us, and in His communion of saints. We also gain a sense of place through God’s common grace conveyed in the family, the community (town, state, and country), and broader traditions such as the Western tradition. From all of these, we obtain a universe of values and understandings of how to live well and how to understand the origin, purpose, and application of principles such as order, proportion, balance, and beauty. In other words, from these we obtain the tools needed to judge culture well—to have taste. One of the greatest gifts our most local places give us as we seek to redeem our free time and to develop taste is good culture in the form of folk culture.

Folk culture is an important alternative to the rootless, placeless entertainment culture. It comes from a place—usually regional, though sometimes national. It is deeply connected to specific local culture and heritage. Thus, it is also of a people and directly related to community identity. It is made up of skills, ideas, and values handed down from generation to generation. Created by humans for humans, folk culture creates honest solidarity. It offers truth, beauty, and goodness that shape our imaginations and preferences.

A personal example: we are from Appalachia (Eastern Kentucky and Southwestern Virginia, respectively). We are exceedingly thankful for the unique Appalachian identity we share, with its own heritage, music, folktales, and craftsmanship. Every fall, we go home for two important celebrations of Appalachian identity. One is the Apple Festival in Paintsville, Kentucky, featuring local music, artisans, and craftsmanship, and, of course, lots of apples and apple-related treats. Another is the annual Old-fashioned Day at Central Free Will Baptist Church in Norton, Virginia.

The day features cakewalks, mountain food (soup beans and cornbread and mixed pickles and fried potatoes), opportunities for children to make biscuits from scratch, and quilting. The highlight of the day, though, is a traditional apple butter stir-off. The apple butter is cooked in copper kettles over an open fire, with silver dollars in the bottom of every kettle. Each person takes turns in stirring the butter. Both the Apple Festival and Old-Fashioned day offer attendees a sense of heritage and home.

We were further reminded of the beauty of folk art at one of our wedding showers this past spring. Of all the gifts we received, among the most meaningful were the ones my aunts and mother gave us. My aunts had kept the last quilt sewn by my father’s mother to give to her first grandchild who married. My mother had some of the last of her mother’s completed quilt tops sewn into a quilt as well. These beautiful, colorful, skillfully wrought examples of folk art carried with them heritage, family, and love.

Of course, we consume more than just folk culture from Appalachia, and we see ourselves as more than just Appalachians. But folk culture roots us and shows us the truth and beauty found in the traditional, the local, and the homegrown. It humanizes. It provides a sense of belonging, understanding what it is to belong when we explore the folk forms of other cultures.

The Bible doesn’t call people to transcend local and national traditions but to redeem and transform them. Such is the vision of Isaiah the prophet and John the revelator, as the nations, with their local identities intact, fill the new earth. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, our most local tradition is our clause to maintain in the grander contract of culture. Thus we must guard folk art and resist the ever-homogenizing effect as entertainment culture produces a market-driven, bland, one-size-fits-most culture for everywhere, which ends up being a culture from nowhere.

About the Writer: Frank Thornsbury is English program coordinator at Welch College in Gallatin, Tennessee. He and Christa (Hill) were married in June of 2018. They live in Gallatin, Tennessee, where they attend Immanuel Church.