Marginalium

The Risks and Social Costs of High Culture:

High culture now functions like a counterculture, entailing a conscious act of dissent from the mainstream … it carries more social risk than reward. Preferring things that are old, distant, and difficult to those that are immediate and ubiquitous means alienating oneself from one’s community, in some cases from one’s own family. It is at best an inexplicable quirk, at worst a form of antisocial arrogance.