On The Great Chain of Taste
Highbrow, Middlebrow, Lowbrow, and the Philistine (Class Series, Essay 3)
“The true test of class is not the size of your wallet, but the shape of your taste.” — Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983)
America’s real divide is not between rich and poor but between what they consume. Taste marks class as clearly as money, and the chain of taste that once held the nation together—highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow—has fractured beyond repair. Ortega y Gasset warned that “the mass crushes everything different, everything outstanding, excellent, individual, select, and choice.” Today that prophecy is fulfilled: aspiration is gone, vulgarity reigns, and the philistine thrives.
The Ladder of Taste
Every society stratifies not only by money and status but by taste. What a person chooses to consume, whether novels or memes, symphonies or TikTok dances marks him as clearly as clothes or accent. Culture is never neutral. It is a ladder, a map, a code, and on it civilizations rise or fall.
In America, that ladder has long been described in three rungs: highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow. The terms originated in 19th-century pseudoscience (phrenology measured “brow height” as intellect), but they survived because they captured a truth: a hierarchy of culture.
Highbrow was classical refinement: opera, philosophy, the canon.
Middlebrow was aspiration: book clubs, PBS, curated magazines.
Lowbrow was mass entertainment: vaudeville, pulp, wrestling, and now viral clips.
For most of the 20th century, this “great chain of taste” provided a ladder. The lowbrow could climb to the middlebrow by aspiration, the middlebrow could reach upward by cultivation. The highbrow maintained distance but offered translation. It was not egalitarian, but it allowed for mobility.
That ladder is now broken.
The Rise of the Middlebrow
The middlebrow’s emergence in the early 20th century was mocked by elites but welcomed by the masses. Virginia Woolf sneered at it as “betwixt and between.” Dwight Macdonald feared it diluted culture into pasteurized mediocrity. But in practice, the middlebrow was ballast.
It made culture accessible. The Book-of-the-Month Club delivered Hemingway to small towns. PBS carried symphonies and Carl Sagan into living rooms. Magazines like The New Yorker spoke in a register that signaled seriousness without requiring a PhD. The middlebrow was where aspiration lived.
Lionel Trilling, writing for both the academy and the reading public, exemplified this bridge. His essays offered real criticism without jargon. The middlebrow democratized culture without flattening it entirely.
The Collapse of the Middlebrow
Today, that middle rung is gone. The reasons are many:
Algorithms Replace Aspiration.Netflix does not elevate; it recommends more of what you already watched. TikTok keeps you in your dopamine loop. Aspiration requires a push outward. Algorithms keep you circling inward.
Gatekeepers Disappear. Once, editors and critics filtered choices. Book clubs curated Dickens; PBS offered Shakespeare. Now “for you” pages rule. The critic dissolves into the feed.
Media Fractures. The “three networks” once gave Americans common reference points, sitcoms alongside symphonies. Now every class and subculture inhabits its own algorithmic silo.
Economic Polarization. Just as the middle class has thinned, so has the middlebrow. The affluent consume elite culture in enclaves; the masses sink into endless lowbrow distraction. The cultural middle collapses alongside the economic.
Macdonald’s prophecy has come true in a way even he did not anticipate. He feared dilution; instead, aspiration itself has disappeared.
Highbrow in Retreat
Highbrow culture survives, but only as a niche. Symphony halls, university presses, Aspen music festivals, these still exist, but as prestige enclaves rather than national reference points. They function as symbols of refinement for the few, not common guides for the many.
Paul Fussell observed that America has always mistrusted highbrow pretension. Expense often masqueraded as refinement, and refinement itself was often mocked as elitist. In a country that celebrates utility and authenticity, high culture was never fully secure. But in the 20th century, it at least commanded respect. Time magazine once put Leonard Bernstein on its cover; college freshmen once knew who T.S. Eliot was. Today, the highbrow is tolerated as eccentricity.
What remains is branding. The New Yorker tote bag, the boutique “great books” club, the liberal arts conference with TED aesthetics. These are gestures of seriousness, but they function more as lifestyle markers than as cultural authorities. Highbrow taste survives as signifier, not as guide.
The result is insulation. Beethoven concerts are boutique diversions for patrons of the arts, not common reference points. Art museums host galas for donors but struggle to attract working families. University presses publish monographs that circulate within academia but never reach a broader reading public. High culture remains alive, but its reach has withered into irrelevance.
Lowbrow in Ascendance
If the highbrow has retreated, the lowbrow has advanced. Wrestling, reality television, gaming streams, TikTok dances, viral memes, these dominate cultural bandwidth. What was once vulgar is now celebrated as “authentic.”
This is not new. Rome had gladiatorial games; Victorian Britain had penny dreadfuls. Every civilization has produced mass entertainment. But the difference today is scale, speed, and saturation.
Scale: TikTok has more active users than there are citizens in the Western hemisphere. A viral dance reaches more people in a week than Beethoven reached in his lifetime.
Speed: Gladiatorial games happened on fixed dates; TikTok trends turn over hourly. The cycle of spectacle accelerates until attention itself is exhausted.
Saturation: Lowbrow culture is not confined to theaters or tabloids; it is portable, algorithmically optimized, and omnipresent. A phone in every pocket ensures the circus never stops.
Lowbrow does not merely coexist beneath high culture, it overwhelms it. The very concept of aspiration is inverted. A child once hoped to play the violin at Carnegie Hall; now he hopes to go viral on YouTube. The measure of success is no longer cultivation but visibility.
The lowbrow now sets the national tone. Politicians mimic meme formats. Corporations chase TikTok trends. News anchors repackage Twitter clips. The vulgar has become the lingua franca.
Enter the Philistine
There is a fourth type: the philistine. The philistine is not simply lowbrow, caught in spectacle. He is hostile to culture itself. He sneers at refinement, mocks aspiration, and treats art as pretension or waste.
Goethe and Schiller used the term for the narrow utilitarian. Nietzsche sharpened it: the philistine sees culture only as means, never as end.
In America, this type thrives. He may be wealthy, educated, even powerful, but he dismisses philosophy as useless, poetry as indulgent, art as irrelevant. If the lowbrow ignores Homer, the philistine burns him.
The philistine is not just a consumer of vulgarity but its investor. He builds reality-TV empires, tabloids, algorithm farms. He is the short-seller of culture, always betting against refinement.
WASP Cultural Authority
The chain of taste in America cannot be told without the WASPs. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants set the tone for two centuries.
They defined the highbrow through universities, museums, and prep schools.
They sponsored the middlebrow through philanthropy: Carnegie libraries, Ford Foundation programs.
They enforced standards of restraint and understatement, what Fussell called the “top-out-of-sight” class.
As WASP cultural authority collapsed in the late 20th century, so too did the chain of taste. Nothing replaced them. In the vacuum: markets, algorithms, influencers.
Case Studies in Taste
The Book-of-the-Month Club. Once carried Faulkner to half a million subscribers. Today, Amazon algorithms keep readers in genre silos, if they are reading at all.
Public Broadcasting. Once aired Leonard Bernstein teaching Beethoven to children. Today, it survives as niche. YouTube and TikTok dominate.
Airlines. Once marketed a common glamour, now they spatialize class: pods above, sardines below. Even flight has lost the middle.
Consequences
The collapse of the middlebrow mirrors the collapse of the middle class. Both remove ballast.
Aspiration dies: without the middle rung, no one climbs.
Culture polarizes: elites in cloisters, masses in distraction.
Philistinism spreads: hostility to refinement becomes cultural default.
The republic loses its cultural common ground just as it has lost its economic one.
Historical Warnings
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: culture is “the best that has been thought and said.” Without it, society drifts into anarchy.
Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses: unchecked mass taste crushes excellence.
Dwight Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult: midcult dilutes high culture, yet even midcult is gone.
Each foresaw collapse when aspiration disappeared. America now lives in that condition.
Toward Renewal
Revival will not come from algorithms or markets. It will require men and women who see themselves as stewards of culture, willing to preserve, translate, and elevate. The WASPs once played this role; their authority is gone. But the responsibility remains.
What must be done? Three imperatives:
Rebuild Institutions of Aspiration. Support libraries, schools, and cultural spaces that refuse to pander. Build new equivalents in digital form, platforms that push upward rather than spiral downward.
Practice Cultural Asceticism. Choose consciously what to read, watch, and share. Refuse the algorithm’s easy feed. The republic begins in the household: read Homer to your children, play Bach in the living room, teach discernment as habit.
Create New Middlebrow Translators. The bridge must be rebuilt. A republic needs critics, educators, and artists who can translate refinement into accessible forms without debasing it. This is not dilution; it is mediation. Leonard Bernstein’s televised concerts proved it could be done. It must be done again.
The task is not nostalgia for the 1950s. It is recognition that a society cannot survive if its culture is only lowbrow. Without aspiration, democracy collapses into spectacle. Without refinement, freedom curdles into license. The choice before us is stark: steward culture or surrender it.
Toward the Next Inquiry
We have now seen the hollowing of the economic and social middle (Essay 2), and the collapse of the cultural middle (Essay 3). Next we turn to orientation: Cosmopolitan and Provincial, the global elite and the rooted citizen, the Davos class and the heartland. That clash, more than income or taste, will decide the future of nations.
oh wow!