Why Popular Culture Matters

"Here Adam, you should have some."  He offered me the cigarette.

"No Ben, I don't smoke."

"Neither do I," he retorted.

"Then what are you doing now?"

He sighed.  "Adam, having a cigarette every few weeks does not make me a smoker."

"And yet you are smoking now."

He sighed again, shaking his head at my uncultured substitution of rigid definitions for socially constructed ones.

While Ben's subsequent critique of my nonsmoker status was predictably specious, some of the other pages in his blueprint for my intellectual and moral modification have been better-founded.  His criticisms of my historical ignorance and anti-social binges are probably legitimate.  Even his 4 AM existential critique of my faith in absolute truth might not have been completely farcical.

But there is one realm in which I decided to given the Ben Field approach a try. I have long harbored a weird sort of instinctual elitist objection to popular culture.  But wandering around Hyde Park apartments late at night with the likes of Ben, I have noticed that the same people who argue about Hegel and Hume and Heisenberg segue freely between these giants and the tabloid gossip of tween stardom and Hollywood rumors.  It is not so good to have to whisper into the ear of an astonished friend, "Who is Jamie-Lynn Spears?" in the middle of a lighthearted debate round.

So popular culture matters because one needs it to participate in the social discourse, and one needs to be able to debate.  That much is certain.  But does it have any other value?  After conceding to Ben's analysis, I though about this for a long time.  I thought there might be hope.  Smart people would not mistake nothingness for somethingness.  I read some Vanity Fair and thought about it a bit longer.  Then I looked back to Frankfurt's seminal essay in the study of bullshit.  While popular culture is neither concerned with persuasion nor any sense of truth-seeking, its blatant superfluousness and lack of any objective except perhaps self-propagation suggests that it is some class of bullshit.

So popular culture is not important.  But one ought to know it.

And here I am, reduced by Ben Field to consume bullshit.

Someone convince me that I'm wrong.