Why Is Popular Culture Intellectually Superficial?

It is Easy!

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Popular Culture: the set of practices, beliefs, and objects that embody the most broadly shared meanings of a social system. It includes media objects, entertainment and leisure, fashion and trends, and linguistic conventions, among other things. Popular culture is usually associated with either mass culture or folk culture, and differentiated from high culture and various institutional cultures (political culture, educational culture, legal culture, etc.).

Intellectual: relating to your ability to think and understand things, especially complicated ideas.

Superficial: (of a person) never thinking about things that are serious or important.

With each passing decade, this popular culture thing has been — more and more — replacing arts with entertainment and genius in crafts with cunningness in business. This is easily proven by the presence of (lack of) things of intellectual value in anything that is popular — movies, music, sports. While the definition itself of popular culture given above differentiates it from high culture, this is no reason to not question why popular things should by default be intellectually superficial.

If you listen to the ‘experts’ (the gurus of success) of different elements of pop culture media, you will not hear them say, ‘be a good musician, writer’ anymore, instead, they all harmoniously agree to the fact that it is more important to be a businessman in your area in this day and age of sophisticated media rather than mastering whatever your thing is. And they say this with audacity and confidence as if it was inevitable and they had meticulously mastered the knowledge of all this.

Where does their confidence come from though? —this is something I am curious about.

I think we need to look at three things to understand why popular culture is the way it is:

1. Business
2. Intellect
3. Mass (People in general)

Let’s look at all these things from an old viewpoint.

Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century Muslim-Arab thinker in his seminal work, Al Muqaddimah, describes commerce as:

the attempt to make profit by increasing capital, through buying goods at a low price and selling them at a high price, whether these goods consist of slaves, grain, animals, weapons, or clothing material. The accrued amount is called profit.

Of course, in his time, media of pop culture wasn’t commoditized as it is today, so we can gladly add what we call content into the list of things that he mentioned and look at popular culture through content.

And then he mentions what a good merchant does:

The merchant who knows his business will travel only with such goods as are generally needed by rich and poor, rulers and commoners alike. (General need) makes for a large demand for his goods. If he restricts his goods to those needed only by a few (people), it may be impossible for him to sell them, since these few may for some reason find it difficult to buy them. Then, his business would slump, and he would make no profit

And then he describes the types of goods to be worked with by a successful merchant:

Also, a merchant who travels with needed goods should do so only with medium quality goods. The best quality of any type of goods is restricted to wealthy people and the entourage of the ruler. They are very few in number. As is well known, the medium quality of anything is what suits most people. This should by all means be kept in mind by the merchant, because it makes the difference between selling his goods and not selling them.

What he says describes the essence of success in commerce (business whatever), which holds true today as well. This in simple terms is: If you want to become a good business person, deal with things of general use and of medium quality.

If from this viewpoint we look at the trends in popular culture content and the advice we receive to be a businessperson, we would be happy to notice that to be successful in our content domain, we need to create works of general use and of medium quality. That is, we need to be good business-people.

But what is ‘general use’ and ‘medium quality’ in content — which by nature is intellectual. Does it mean the mass is of low intellect? While I do understand now that popular culture means most people, I still don’t understand why their intellect should be of medium quality!

Trying to answer a question like — why most people are intellectually superficial would require profound digging and writing which would be too heavy for a platform like Medium — which is after all, medium oriented (it is a business).

But a quick look at history will reveal to us a thing or two. And during my such glance, I discovered a thing called Education.

Education is the means through which intellectual stuff is systematically disseminated into the mass in order to ‘engineer’ people. While it could take various forms, we can call anything education that looks to teach something to multiple people. The education of the highest quality in general human history has always been used by the elites for themselves while modified education has been used to impart the elites’ propaganda to the masses — trying to make people exactly the way they want them to be… until the Age of Learning in Europe and the subsequent Age of Enlightenment in the West, when the concept of modern state with republic and democratic systems of political organizing began getting serious and education was started to be looked upon as a fundamental necessity if such systems were to succeed.

Said this, one famous American called Thomas Jefferson:

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

Describing the value of religious matter (such as judge, mufti, teacher, prayer leader, preacher, muezzin, and the like), writes this Khaldun:

Now, the common people have no compelling need for the things that religious (officials) have to offer. They are needed only by those special people who take a particular interest in their religion.

What I am trying to say by quoting all these archaic things is:

Judging by their taste, the mass doesn’t seem intellectually sophisticated — never has been — and there are social, economic and political reasons for it which are too vast and complex. One of the reasons is that the elites have never seen the advantage of imparting these things to them. However, since the advent of concepts like equality and democracy which demands from everyone to know and participate in social, economic and political affairs, education has been looked upon as crucial and initiatives have been taken to expose people to intellectually sophisticated things.

Yet the mass is still intellectually superficial — proved by the contemporary content of popular culture.

This is surprising because whom we call the mass today (who make up pop culture) have received not only exposure to education — which contains intellectual stuff — but also are blessed with decent economic conditions. There is nothing that should be making them intellectually ‘medium’, apart from:

1. Their voluntary perception that intellectual things are futile
2. Popular culture is distinct from intellectual sophistication as mentioned in our definition at the beginning
3. Over- Commercialization of content which demands mediocrity as a formula for success

For 3, there is evidence: This is the age of capitalism, entrepreneurship, etc. This would mean most people are intellectually dumb and popular culture caters to their dumbness. This would also explain the confidence of success gurus.

For 2, we can say that popular culture is somewhere people go/come to relax and escape from intellectual sophistication and there is no place for intellectual sophistication there. But for that we need to suppose that, people, in general, are intellectually sophisticated. And I am not too sure about that!

As to 1, we need to again suppose that people in general are intellectually sophisticated.

My conclusion (as of now) as to why popular culture is intellectually superficial is this:

While escapism from the tediousness of modern life — which is surrounded by intellectual sophistications — through content is necessary, there is no reason why things of intellectual worth should not be entertaining, fun, and popular and things for fun should not by default be intellectual. I mean there was a time when Shakespeare was popular, and so were Beethoven and Dostoevsky!

This could only mean people of today are not interested in including hard intellectual stuff into their cultural life. One reason for this is that consuming mundane stuff is just easy. I mean, watching a movie about a spider bitten man going through a formulaic story structure is clearly easier than going through an Ingmar Bergman movie which challenges you to look even at cinema differently. Similarly, listening to rap is way more easier than decoding words of Wordsworth. Skimming through TikTok videos must surely be easier than going through the bibliography of Asimov! Watching football is definitely easier than traveling through the caves of Plato!

This inclination of theirs is encouraged and supported by the virus of commercialization in media (content-entrepreneurship) which, from the perspective of Ibn Khaldun, demands mediocrity for success.

With each passing day, popular content is getting more and more superficial and vulgar (if one may use that term). This surely cannot be healthy for society as popular culture is at the end of the day, that which shapes and defines us. Business-like attitude is preached today as if legitimized by some divine power. Such inevitability is dead now and we should remember this when modern market gurus preach to us. For, there are things that are better off not-commercialized, and our life is one such thing. And popular culture and its medium, content is our reflection and solution to life issues.

In regards to the character required for commerce, this is what Mr. Khaldun had to say in the same book:

…merchant must concern himself with buying and selling, earning money and making a profit. This requires cunning, willingness to enter into disputes, cleverness, constant quarreling, and great persistence. These are things that belong to commerce. They are qualities detrimental to and destructive of virtuousness and manliness, because it is unavoidable that actions influence the soul. Good actions influence it toward goodness and virtue. Evil and deceitful actions influence it in the opposite sense…

…These influences differ according to the different types of merchants. Those who are of a very low type and associated closely with bad traders who cheat and defraud and perjure themselves, asserting and denying statements concerning transactions and prices, are much more strongly affected by these bad character qualities. Deceitfulness becomes their main characteristic. Manliness is completelyalien to them, beyond their power to acquire. At any rate, it is unavoidable that their cunning and their willingness to enter into disputes affects their manliness (adversely). The complete absence of (any adverse effect) is very rare among them.

The character qualities of merchants are inferior to those of noblemen and rulers. This is because merchants are mostly occupied with buying and selling. This necessarily requires cunning. If a merchant always practices cunning, it becomes his dominant character quality. The quality of cunning is remote from that of manliness which is the characteristic quality of rulers and noblemen. If the character of (the merchant) then adopts the bad qualities that follow from (cunning) in low-class merchants, such as quarrelsomeness, cheating, defrauding, as well as (the inclination to) commit perjury in rejecting and accepting statements concerning prices, his character can be expected to be one of the lowest sort, for well-known reasons. It is because of the character that one acquires through the practice of commerce that political leaders avoid engaging in it. There are some merchants who are not affected by those character qualities and who are able to avoid them, because they have noble souls and are magnanimous, but they are very rare in this world.

Infer from those words whatever you want!