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The Happy Marriage of Duck & Dante

Fusing high culture and low culture in a single life can bear good fruit
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In a discursive blog post on high culture and low culture, inspired by my “Duck Dynasty vs. Dante” piece, John Mark Reynolds, who has devoted his career to teaching Great Books, identifies three things that are true, but that he sometimes wishes were not. Among them, that there is great good in pop culture, and that there is danger in cutting oneself off from it entirely. More:

And against these are three other trues that are easier for me:

Aristocratic culture is needed to check popular culture.

The men and women of Duck Dynasty are saved from narrowness by their connection to global church ministry (missions!) and a great work of literature (the Bible). They go to churches that start schools, confess their faults, and are aware of culture tides. The very presence of the men of Duck Dynasty on television, learning from media experts on mainstream networks, proves they are not reactionaries, but educable.

The question is are the aristocrats of media educable by them?

Humans must live small lives.

We are, as Gandalf, would point out small beings. God is great and we are not. Part of “know thyself” is to know that I am not such a much. Sheldon Vanauken, professor and author, lived a rich life, but with few material possessions. He thought large and lived small.

The dialectic is not optional. 

You can choose to read Harry Potter or not. You can decide you do not like Styx or Maroon 5. You can give up on Doctor Who (as I mostly did after David Tennant left).

You cannot be fully human and ignore the way of the mind: the dialectic. We must discuss, we must not assume, we must live examined lives. This is obvious, but nobody, urban or rural, educated or uneducated, is safe from having lazy intellects. Certainly I am not safe, especially from the lazy assumption that finding the truth is impossible!

Read the whole thing (and don’t miss the part where Reynolds, who has read my forthcoming Dante book, says, “I look forward to the rest of you finding in Dreher’s new book on Dante the wit, wisdom, and application of the great poem to a small life”).

The point of my essay is that it’s a false choice to say you can either have Duck Dynasty or you can have Dante — but it’s a choice that many of us accept as realistic. We’re classical education people, but when we had satellite TV, we watched Duck Dynasty in our house. I’ve written in defense of the show many times in this space, and I even took the kids on a pop-culture pilgrimage to the Duck mothership in West Monroe. As Reynolds points out, an authentic life is one that makes use of all the things within it, discerning things of worth from the worthless, keeping the good and throwing out the bad, and creating something new in the process.

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