The dictum “less is more” is usually attributed to the German
architect Mies van der Rohe. It is a saying easy to mock. There are
many circumstances, however, for which we are tempted to regard it
as Algernon (in The Importance of Being Earnest) regarded one of his
own mots: “It is perfectly phrased! and quite as true as any
observation in civilized life should be.” When it comes to cultural
life, at any rate, we believe that Mies’s stern observation is far
preferable to Robert Venturi’s smirking riposte, “Less is a bore.”
For one thing, Venturi’s rejoinder—or rather the spirit it
heralded—turned out to be a license for cultural pollution,
A.K.A. postmodernism. For another thing, if there are plenty of
circumstances in which “less is more” is inapplicable or just plain
wrong, there are also many circumstances in which mere proliferation
is a disaster. Less isn’t always more; but when it comes to the life
of the mind and the vitality of high culture, more isn’t always
more either.

We had occasion to ponder this seeming conundrum recently while
reading “All Culture, All the Time,” the cover story of the April
issue of Reason magazine. Written by Nick Gillespie, a senior
editor at Reason, this long and thoughtful essay argues vigorously
for more being more. According to Mr. Gillespie, we are living through a
cultural renaissance. “During the past few decades,” he writes, “we
have been experiencing what can aptly be called a ‘culture boom’: a
massive and prolonged increase in art, music, literature, video, and
other forms of creative expression. Everywhere we look, the cultural
marketplace is open and ready for business.” He cites the increased
numbers of books sold and bookstores that sell them, the increased
number of stores that rent videos and the number of VCRs and
television sets with which to watch them. Many network stations used
to go off the air for several hours a day: now most are
broadcasting around the clock. There are more art galleries, more
museums, more symphony orchestras, more dance companies, more
theaters, more internet sites and more computers to access them—in
short, there is “more and more of everything.”

Mr. Gillespie couldn’t be happier about this development. He sees it
as part of “a broad-based, centuries-old trend that also includes
generally longer lives, increased wealth, and the greater personal
autonomy that accompanies such developments.” Just as the stock
market has fueled extraordinary economic prosperity, so the “culture
boom” has enriched us individually. “Relatively speaking,” he
concludes, “we’re all aristocrats now.”
Mr. Gillespie not only
regards this as an excellent thing in itself, but also hails
it as an effective check on those “moral crusaders and cultural
critics”—“commissars” he calls them at one point—who worry about
cultural standards and who are disinclined to equate “more” with
“better.” For while Mr. Gillespie thinks that “the culture wars,
like competition in economics or politics, are a marker of a
healthy, diverse, engaged society,” he is profoundly irritated by
the idea of “a ‘common’ or ‘national’ culture,” “received
interpretations,” and the polemics of “cultural commissars, whether
conservative or progressive, who argue that culture should be
didactic and instructive toward a single set of desired ends.”

Mr. Gillespie dilates enthusiastically on this point. He is a firm
believer in the old adage chacun à son goût: “One man’s ‘pap,’
after all, is another man’s Proust—and we’ve entered a phase where
people are increasingly willing to argue the point. Proclamations of
artistic or social value can no longer be issued ex cathedra but
must now be submitted before a skeptical audience.” Among other
things, this “decentralization” of culture allows people “to opt out
of someone else’s cultural value system… . People are freer now
to look elsewhere, to pursue their own interests to their own ends.”
This is a very good thing, Mr. Gillespie insists, not least
because “the most vibrant cultures, like the most vibrant economies
and political systems, are ones in which people are as free as
possible to define and choose what is valuable and meaningful to
them.”

It sounds wonderful. Freedom. Choice. Autonomy. Liberty. These are
lovely words. And although it is not at all clear that the
historical record supports Mr. Gillespie’s claim that “the most
vibrant cultures … are ones in which people are as free as
possible to define and choose what is valuable and meaningful to
them,” we appreciate the generous spirit that informs his encomium.
Nevertheless, we have serious reservations about Mr. Gillespie’s
diagnosis. Consider: “One man’s ‘pap,’ after all, is another man’s Proust.”
What can that mean? Mr. Gillespie assures us that the burgeoning
“consumption” of culture he sees everywhere “hardly means that
cultural standards have been obliterated, any more than freedom of
religion means that theological standards have disappeared.”

Would that it were so. But in a cultural situation like the present
what we see is not so much the “multiplication” of standards, as Mr.
Gillespie would have it, as the degradation of standards. Indeed,
the multiplication of standards always entails the degradation of
standards. And today, when so much popular culture is
indistinguishable from moronic pornography, Mr. Gillespie’s
populist cheerleading is especially ominous.
He is happy that, when it comes to music,
“consumers” can freely choose among “Mozart, Mingus, and Marilyn
Manson.” But even to mention Mozart together with Marilyn
Manson—a freakish rock star named for Marilyn Monroe and Charles
Manson—is to give the game away. (In fact, we believe that to
mention Mozart in the same breath as the jazz bassist Charlie Mingus
is almost equally problematic, but we will not pursue that issue
now.)

The hard truth is that in a sitution where “one man’s
‘pap’ … is another man’s Proust,” what one faces is not cultural
“profusion” but cultural chaos. Mr. Gillespie’s essay is accompanied
by several charts plotting the upward curve of books sold, VCRs
owned, concerts attended, art works purchased, and so on. It is indeed
“more and more of everything.” But mostly, alas, it is more and more
garbage. Nor is that all. The deeper problem is that the
proliferation Mr. Gillespie champions not only elevates pap to
the status of Proust. It also tends to reduce Proust to the level of
pap. Here as elsewhere the “multiplication” of standards is at
bottom prelude to the abandonment of standards. The “culture boom” that Mr.
Gillespie celebrates involves more boom than culture. Far from
transforming us all into cultural “aristocrats,” it impoverishes us
by making the possession of worthwhile culture increasingly
difficult and increasingly fragile.

Mr. Gillespie would doubtless
ask, “Who’s to say what’s worthwhile?” If one man’s pap really is
another man’s Proust, this question can have no answer. But of
course, the very idea of “pap”—“something,” the dictionary tells
us, “lacking real value or substance,
and considered unsuitable for
the minds of adults”—shows that Mr. Gillespie’s equation is
specious. Our language and our behavior constantly bear witness to
the fact that we recognize artistic and moral standards independent
of our personal likes and dislikes. If we sometimes fail to
live up to those standards … well, that is something traditional
theology easily accounts for. In the cultural realm, it is something
that criticism can account for, which is one reason T. S. Eliot was
right when he defined the critic’s task as “the elucidation of works
of art and the correction of taste.” As Eliot recognized, more is
by no means always better.