WHAT PRIESTLEY SAID

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 412, 16 May 1947, Page 15

WHAT PRIESTLEY SAID

"Tees are two democracies, and I admire the one and detest the other. The first is political democracy, which is based on the belief that all the citizens have a right to decide what kind of government they will have. "But there is another kind of democracy, which is gaining ground in many parts of the world now, that I detest. This might be called cultural derhocracy. It professes to believe that the ordinary man or woman is the best judge of everything. It recognises quantity but ‘not quality. It is ready to count heads on every possible issue. It would put anything end everything to a rough and ready vote: ignorance and knowledge are all the same to >t. "Now I believe that if the world is given plenty of time, it will discover the best. Thus, Shakespeare is acknowledged e¥erywhere as a master dramatist. Wherever European music is understood, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven are truly appreciated for their magnificent genius. But this™takes time. There has to be first, a good deal of enthusiastic propaganda on behalf of such genius by persons of \taste and special knowledge. .. . "Shoddy commercialism is of course greatly in favour of cultural democracy if only be cause one man’s shilling is as good as another's. The average run of Hollywood films strongly advocates cultural democracy. In these films it i$ far more important to write a sticcessful dance tune than to compose 2

symphony, and anybody who does not want either to perform .or sit. about in night clubs is a prude or an eccentric. . . . "When Reith was in charge’ of the BBC he used to announce that he proposed to give the listening public what he thought was good for them to hear, and for my part I admired him for taking this stand. "There is a great danger in playing down to a half-witted level. Whole masses of people may be confirmed and rooted in their mental laziness and bad taste. Both films and radio, two admirable new techniques, have done far more harm and far less good than they might have achieved, just because they have been ‘democratic’ in the wrong way. "The farm-hand down the road has a vote that is ‘equal to my vote. That is as it should be. But just as he knows far more about hedging and ditehing and shooting rabbits than I do, so I know far more about books and plays and music than he does, if only because I have given these things my serious attention for the last 35 years. (And he himself would not dispute this.) It is not democracy, but just lunacy, if he and his kind are to be encouraged te dictate to me in the cultural spheres in which they do not even pretend to know anything. And the danger is, that if only the lowest levels of taste and intelligence are allowed to survive, then succeeding generations may find themselves exiled from whole worlds of wonder and delight."