“If the Met’s screaming Wagnerites standing on chairs in the 1890s are in fact unthinkable today, it is partly because we mistrust high feeling. Our children avidly specialize in vicarious forms of electronic interpersonal diversion. Our laptops and televisions ensnare us in a surrogate world that shuns all but facile passions; only Jon Stewart and Bill Maher share moments of moral outrage disguised as comedy.” - Joseph Horowitz, Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siecle
Mr. Horowitz is, of course, using the word "moral" differently from the radical right, for whom the only acts with moral valence are sexual. We seem determined to recreate the social and economic world of the 1890s these days while ignoring the intellectual climate that went with and somewhat ameliorated it. It's as if we were determined to pick the best of the past century or so, throw it out, and concentrate on the worst.
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