The Tyranny of Pop Music

[Bryn]

Scruton quote "The decay of manners that we have seen in recent times is to a large extent a result of the loss of withness and the rise of atness in its stead".

Mmmm, well, there does appear to be less manners on forums, and on the roads. Whether manners are worse in general now than in the past I don't know but I have noticed that manners tend to degrade when folks are separated from each other, like in cars or on forums.

Nah. that just old Scrote 'at it' again, rather than being 'with it'.

[NatBalance]

Nah. that just old Scrote 'at it' again, rather than being 'with it'.

:) Wrong way round I think you'll find.

[Serial_Apologist]

:) Wrong way round I think you'll find.

Less a case of the wrong way round, more a matter of one added to one to make five.

[ahinton]

Given that Roger Scruton's observations on "social" dancing" as far less of a contact sport than once it was is fine insofar as it goes and can be accepted as broadly correct with or without regard to he value judgements that he attaches to it (although one might also argue that it was also less of one before the Roaring Twenties than it became during them - and more of one in earlier times again during the rise of the Viennese waltz).

Whether and to what extent the notion of "the loss of withness and the rise of atness" figures here perhaps belongs more closely to the realms of opinion rather than those of fact but, in the context of changes in "manners" in their various guises it's and interesting thought and I believe that he may have a point, although I rather struggle to appreciate the significance of the TV presenter's apparent rôle in this, at least to the extent that the one-way-trafficness of such presentation is by nature and of necessity "at" its audience rather than "with" it - and one might even argue that the recent rise of audience participation in certain such presentations reduces the "atness" and increases the "withness", however limited and at times unedifying this might be (same goes for tweets/emails/phone-ins et al on certain radio programmes that shall remain nameless).

The cult of the individual is one thing but the isolation that might be seen to manifest itself in people dancing with and for themselves as distinct from with a partner is perhaps from the same stable as that which inhabits texting, tweeting and emailing when it takes the place of the face-to-face conversation which, one might argue, is more "in your face" than what Roger Scruton bemoans.

"He appears to reserve particular scorn for dancing to techno-style music that is "loud enough to make conversation impossible and, provided the pulse is regular enough, to jerk the body into reflex motion, like the legs of a galvanised frog"" is clearly borrowed from his piece on pop music and conveys a broadly similar message - and, once again, those particular characteristics of techno and the like to which he draws dismayed attention are not exactly incorrect.

That said, Roger Scruton opines that he likes dancing but is no good at it and I should perhaps take my cue from this to shut up because I dislike it intensely and would probably be considerably less good at it even than he claims to be, insofar as it's a subject and an activity that holds not a shred of interest for me (pace my comments about SCD); I simply feel no motivation to attempt to dance to techno, rock'n'roll, big band standards of the mid-20th century or anything earlier and no music of any kind provides any such motivation for me, so I find it difficult to say anything much more constructive on the subject than that if people like dancing in any way to anything then let them get on with it as long as they don't expect me to do it as well (or as badly!).