Feels Gone Wrong
The films A Complete Unknown, on Bob Dylan, and In Restless Dreams, on Paul Simon, make vivid to me the huge emotional appeal of becoming a musician like them. It’s not just that you get rich and millions love you. It’s your being part of a big youth movement, all of whom can just see how the world has gone so very emotionally and morally wrong on key issues, but where a few of you can express your feelings so directly, authentically, and eloquently as to compel anyone who listens honestly to agree. You become a hero of the most important and heart-warming story of your age, as your music directly shows how prior generations should give way to yours.
Saying it this way might sound like satire, but I really think this is the key emotional context of say The Times They Are A-Changin’, or The Sound of Silence. I feel it in my bones when I listen to them, and remember how I felt when I first heard them. I also think this is a big part of the appeal of becoming some kinds of novelist; they can show the world what to feel, via authentic and eloquent expressions of character feels.
Of course it is just one big old deep part of me who shouts such feelings to me. I can, with effort, also hear other parts, who wonder how that could possibly offer sufficient evidence for its claims. And the latest part of me, who sees how such processes of cultural change are largely random unless disciplined by selection effects, just weeps. To see how this whole heroic process, evolved long ago for us to trust deeply, could now go so terribly wrong, due to the recent rise of health, wealth, and peace, which feel terribly good and right. We are in deep deep trouble.
I remember when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. I was pleased that they'd finally recognized lyricists as the true poets of today, but puzzled that they passed by real poets like Simon & Garfunkel and Leonard Cohen, to award it to someone whose lyrics I had always found shallow, simplistic, and abstract rather than poetically concrete. I reviewed the lyrics of at least 2 dozen Bob Dylan songs, looking for this alleged poetry or wisdom, and found none.
It wasn't until reading this just now that I realized they gave Dylan the Nobel because of all that, not despite it.
"[S]uch processes of cultural change are largely random unless disciplined by selection effects." This is a nice, succinct statement of your concern about cultural drift.
But it is hard to quantify the appropriate level of concern. Are we in "deep, deep trouble," or is this just another way in which things are not as good as they might ideally be?