In Defense of Being A Cultural Ignoramous

There is something otherworldly about experts who can nibble on some exquisite morsel and identify what type of clover the cow who provided the milk eats.  These pinnacles of cultural judgement have worked for years to refine their tastes to such a degree that if they say something is worth having, you’d be a fool not to listen.  I acknowledge the amount of effort that goes into mastery of that level, and I wish them well for it.

          That said, how fun can life be living on that extreme edge of human existence?  To have refined your pallet to such a degree that save for rare nostalgic exceptions, anything less than fantastic has a chance of being spat into a napkin when no one is looking (or done so blatantly, if one enjoys making statements)?  And by no means is this limited to the culinary arts—similar situations exist in every medium through which culture is transmitted.  The movie critics that pride themselves on how many skewerings they’ve delivered that year or the musical aficionados that shudder if they hear Bach performed by anyone less than a philharmonic orchestra may not travel the same physical roads as the food devotees, but they share the same soul of one who has touched something of the divine and can never truly descend from those lofty heights.  While their critiques drive the masters of those fields in new and bold directions, they lose touch with us common folk. 

            This is the part where I tell you of my clear bias on the subject.  By no observable metric should you consider me anything close to an expert on matters of cultural taste.  I enjoy Jack in the Box tacos, think that Gattica is as fulfilling as watching paint dry, and idly daydream about how I could totally be a DJ if I wanted with zero musical training beyond driving my wife insane replaying whatever song currently strikes my fancy ad nauseum.  I am the salt of the earth, poured out of a bulk-produced batch of store brand table salt onto a microwave dinner.  Of course I am on the side of the cultural ignoramus—who doesn’t root for their home team?  But my reasoning hopefully goes beyond a simple us and them mindset.

            Allow me a slight digression.  My wife and I once enjoyed an evening at a restaurant in Rome with three Michellin stars.  The service was impeccable, the ambience was at the height of sophistication, and the views of the city at night were fantastic.  Even my culturally ignorant self can confidently say the place oozed class—how else do you define a place that has a separate water menu with eleven pages?  All that said, the meal left us…underwhelmed.  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed every bite of it, but not with a noticeable bump in pleasure over a favorite fast food item when I’m in the mood, or my wife’s grilled cheese sandwiches.  Had I been a food expert capable of noting the intricate blend of flavors the chef worked into his or her dish, perhaps it would have been different.  But such details are as lost on me as the beauty of a Van Gogh to an errant pigeon that made its way into the exhibit via an open skylight; the colors are all there, but mostly I’m just looking for something to eat. 

            Beauty is in the eye of the beholder may be a cliché, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.  And while there is a place for maintaining the highest of standards for what makes a recipe or a movie beautiful, so too is there one for lower standards.  My failure to appreciate the finer aspects of the culinary art may mean that my meal in Rome only carried a modicum more satisfaction than what I can get from the Jack in the Box up the road, but it also means my options for what provides that satisfaction are far more available to me both financially and logistically.  The same goes for other forms of culture, where I can base my preference on participating in a given venue or medium entirely off my own low standards, instead of at the heights of cultural awareness.  Again, I am not mocking or decrying those that spend their lives perfecting their tastes to levels I can only dream of.  I see the value in such experts as forcing functions to drive the creators of the world.  When they achieve breakthroughs, eventually those masterpieces trickle down to the ignorant masses in which I reside as a diluted form of their original intention, but one in which I can still feel something of that same joy the expert and creator both agree upon.  I am the child sitting in a puddle, content to splash about with my hands and feet while the adults spend their time dreaming up water parks.  But where their water parks are few and far between and their options shrink the higher their tastes climb, the world is full of puddles that remain just as satisfying to splash in a hundred times from now.