I’m in the middle of reading This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, [1] a delightful work by Daniel J. Levitin. I plan to write about this book when I’m finished reading it, but one thing he wrote in his introduction especially intrigued me.
Levitin writes that our culture makes a distinction between “expert” performers and the rest of us. We defer to experts to produce music. In most traditional cultures, it wasn’t that way. In traditional cultures, everyone who could talk was expected to sing. Singing and dancing were both natural activities involving everyone.
Nowadays, expert performers command high prices for their often high-quality work. “Two concert tickets can easily cost as much as a week’s food allowance for a family of four …”
It seems as though we’ve turned over many important functions to the experts. Sports is now something that should be done by experts. The rest of us pay to see them play sports. This is true, even though many of us who pay the high prices for those sports tickets could really use a lot more workouts ourselves instead of sitting on our butts downing overpriced beer and nachos.
In fact, when most of us try to play music or compete athletically, we do so feeling decidedly inferior, because we have been convinced that we are nothing compared to those well-known performers, X, Y or Z. Many woman have developed psychological complexes about wearing clothes, due to the constant notoriety given to professional models. Those “experts” are intimidating.
The same goes for all forms of art, though Youtube and other Internet sites are starting to change that with regard to music and writing. This site is one of the many blogs written by people who are not paid a living wage to write about these sorts of topics (in fact, none of the writers at this site has been paid anything at all to write at this site). Bloggers are thus breaking a taboo of sorts. Is this a source of some of the resentment expressed against bloggers by some members of the mainstream media?
In some fields, it’s really not true that all well-known performers are far superior to all amateurs. Perhaps the experts got an early break and perhaps their continued financial success is path dependent on that early break. I’m especially thinking of music, where many high paid performers have mediocre talent while many local low-paid performers are superb musicians.
The general rule, promoted by the media, however, is that the experts are the experts and the rest of us are the amateurs. With regard to many of the relevant skills, this is literally true, of course. Most of us couldn’t compete with the experts. Most of us would look foolish if directly compared with Albert Pujols or Eric Clapton. But it seems as though a harmful broader message has also been spread in the process: amateurs shouldn’t even try.
We seem to be a culture that doesn’t simply admire the skills of experts. We give homage to them. This makes me wonder whether there’s any connection between this general tendency give homage to experts and the willingness of so many Americans to defer to half-baked religious “experts” rather than doing the hard work to carve out their own meaning of life.
I’m still thinking this one through.
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