Culture as Counterculture

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>High culture now functions like a counterculture, entailing a conscious act of dissent from the mainstream. Popular culture—TV shows, pop songs, memes—is every American’s first language, the one we acquire whether we want to or not. When high culture was officially prized, joining the counterculture meant rejecting its values. In the 1950s and 1960s, beats and hippies rejected modernist ideals like irony, complexity, and awareness of tradition in favor of sincerity and immediacy; Allen Ginsberg’s motto was “first thought, best thought.” Today the situation is reversed, and things like aestheticism, pessimism, and the embrace of difficulty are highly countercultural, carrying more social risk than reward.</jats:p>