direction and animation by BLU
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production and distribution by ARTSH.it
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sountrack by ANDREA MARTIGNONI

BIG BAG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

When a drug overdose causes Leoni, a troubled teen from twenty-first-century Los Angeles, to have a near-death experience, her soul is lifted from the modern world and flung into a parallel time 24,000 years in the past. There her fate becomes entangled with that of Ria, a young Stone Age woman fighting for her life against the ferocious Illimani, an army of evil led by the vicious Sulpa, a powerful demon determined to destroy humanity.

As the invaders annihilate Ria’s people, inflicting torture and human sacrifice, Sulpa moves ever closer to his ultimate goal: to manifest physically in the twenty-first century and condemn all of mankind to perpetual slavery. The hour is late and any chance of stopping him seems lost. But there is still hope, if Leoni and Ria can rise to the challenge fate has set them. Uniting outside the flow of earth time, they must venture forth into regions of wonder, master their own deepest fears, and fight battles they could never have prepared for, if Sulpa is to be defeated…

The Science Behind Entangled

Background briefing notes on Consciousness, Quantum Physics, Parallel Realms, Time Travel and Telepathy.

A central proposition of Entangled, in tune with the latest findings of quantum physics, is that consciousness exists independently of the brain and may be projected into other dimensions and even into other timeframes. Telepathy, out of body journeys, time travel – all become possible.

In the mid-19th Century, Sir Oliver Lodge, who helped demonstrate the existence of electrical waves, noted that if wireless telegraphy was possible, then so too should “wireless telepathy” be possible.¹

In the earliest days of 20th Century physics, Albert Einstein, in coming up with his theory of relativity, showed that space and time are “intertwined” and that matter itself is inseparable from an “ever present quantum energy field and this is the sole reality underlying all appearances.”²

“Now here the theories become impossibly vague and untestable,” wrote Victor Stenger in the mid 1990s, “so I can only indicate some of the language. In some sense, the wave function of the universe is an etheric cosmic mind spread throughout the universe that acts to collapse itself in some unknown way. The human mind (spirit, soul) is, of course, holistically linked to the cosmic mind and so exists in all space and time. Once again we have an example of what Paul Kurtz calls the “transcendental temptation.”³

One of the more intriguing ideas involving quantum physics and subjective reality is the following: That until the actual human observation of an event, like a quasar exploding billions of lights years from Earth, that event can be said not to have existed during all those billions of years until seen by a human being on Earth. The same is as valid for the entire universe according to this viewpoint. “Our observation had a retrospective effect on events in the distant past of the universe,” wrote C. John Taylor.⁴

The more one studies quantum weirdness, as Timothy Ferris calls it in his bestselling book The Whole Shebang, “it’s not just a matter of getting used to Alice-in-Wonderland oddities of a world in which particles are waves and can leap from one place to another without traversing the intervening space. Quantum weirdness goes deeper; It implies that the logical foundations of classical science are violated in the quantum realm, and it opens up a glimpse of an unfamiliar and perhaps older aspect of nature that some call the implicate universe.”⁵

“With all the breakthroughs in the dynamics of our natural world, the topic of physics and consciousness is becoming more well renowned (sic) by physicists. In the spring of 2003, the Quantum Mind Conference on Consciousness, Quantum Physics and The Brain was held in Arizona, USA. Their web site states, “recent experimental evidence suggests quantum nonlocality occurring in conscious and subconscious brain function, and functional quantum processes in molecular biology are becoming more and more apparent. Moreover macroscopic quantum processes are being proposed as intrinsic features in cosmology, evolution and social interactions.”⁶

The two main characters of Graham Hancock’s latest book, Entangled meet one another in what most people would call an impossible situation, becoming linked to one another across vast distances of time. The title of the book is meant specifically to evoke the quantum physics notion of entanglement.

The theories that involve consciousness and how it relates to the human mind are many and varied. One of the better places to find most of these theories at their most recent stages of development is at the Roots of Consciousness: Theory, Consciousness, and the New Physics web page. This website lays out the development of quantum theory, from its beginnings in the mid-19th Century through to today and is very helpful in assimilating to the complex field of quantum theories.⁷

Order Entangled online with:

By Paul Devereux, originally appearing in the Daily Grail

The site of the Eleusian temple is located 12 miles (19km) west of Athens, Greece, and was the focus of a Greek Mystery cult that lasted for nearly 2,000 years. It was situated around a cave, said to be the entrance of the underworld, where Persephone was taken after she was abducted. In myth, her mother, Demeter, wandered and grieved in the area now occupied by the temple and eventually persuaded Hermes to rescue her daughter. The first building of the temple proper was built at the site c.1500 B.C., and other buildings were added to the complex over the centuries. The mysteries themselves were a 10-day event, held every September and were open to almost anyone, except murderers. The climax was a procession from Athens to the temple for the Mystery Night, where the revelation of the mystery, the epopteia, was to take place. As the candidates for initiation made their way to the temple they imbibed a sacramental drink, the kykeon. They then went through various procedures until a final, and secret, revelatory event took place in a strange building known as the Telesterion. This was unlike any other structure found in ancient Greece in that it had a plain exterior. There has been much debate about the nature of the sacred drink, but by far the best theory states that it was a beer containing ergot, a parasite of rye that contains alkaloids from which LSD can be synthesised. The evidence for this is overwhelming, and is detailed in the new, revised edition of my book, The Long Trip – A Prehistory of Psychedelia (available from Amazon US and Amazon UK).

Many of the notable philosophers and intellectuals of ancient Greece, such as Plato, Aristotle and Sophocles, were initiated at Eleusis. A visionary, mind-altering initiation was therefore at the very roots of Western civilisation – an initiatory experience it has long-since abandoned. Hofmann felt that something like it needs to be re-established if Western culture is to save itself. Aldous Huxley envisaged such a renewed institution in his last novel, Island, but in reality we are still a long way from such a thing coming to pass. We are still arguing about cannabis, for goodness’ sake.

In 2008, British politicians re-categorised cannabis as a dangerous drug after a period of having it in a lower category. They ignored the advice of their own panel of experts and police chiefs who have been arguing for the legalisation of the drug. When pressed about this retrograde step, government spokesmen made the tired old demand that cannabis needs further testing to see if it is safe, along with promoting scare stories about it causing schizophrenia. Yet not only has the drug been tested for decades and found to be safer than many prescription drugs, tobacco or alcohol, the testimony of our forefathers confirms its spiritual and physical benefits. This latter fact was brought sharply into focus in November 2008, when it was announced that archaeologists had found a cache of cannabis in a Yanghai tomb in the Gobi Desert near Turpan in northwestern China. The cache consisted of 789 grams of dried cannabis contained in a leather basket and in a wooden bowl. It was c.2700 years old but had been preserved due to extremely dry conditions. While remnants of cannabis have been found elsewhere in the ancient world the helpful conditions in which this cache was found has allowed it to be the oldest so far that could be thoroughly tested for its properties. The research team found it to have a relatively high content of THC, the main active ingredient in cannabis. In the past, those sceptical of the mind-altering use of cannabis in prehistory have claimed (somewhat disingenuously) that it was only used for making ropes, fabric and so forth, but they can’t get away with that this time. This Chinese sample was clearly “cultivated for psychoactive purposes”, a paper in the peer-reviewed Journal of Experimental Botany states. “To our knowledge, these investigations provide the oldest documentation of cannabis as a pharmacologically active agent,” wrote the paper’s lead author, American neurologist Dr. Ethan B. Russo.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of this find is that the cannabis was uncovered in the tomb of a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, not an Asiatic person. He would have been a member of the somewhat curious Cheshi clan, a group of nomadic people of Indo-European origins who inhabited the region. The tomb also contained bridles, archery equipment and a harp, confirming the 45-year-old man’s high status. The researchers assume he had been a shaman.

Another intriguing side issue regarding this case is that a British laboratory that monitors crop quality for producing Sativex (a cannabis-based medicine approved in Canada for relieving pain in conditions such as multiple sclerosis, certain cancers, and so forth) was used to conduct the tests on the cannabis find, but it took months to cut through the red tape hindering the entry of the sample into Britain from China – a perfect cameo of how eccentric our modern Western attitudes to mind-altering drugs are compared with our ancestors.

As long as decisions about visionary substances are made on the basis of ignorance or political expediency, the creation of a new Eleusis remains merely a dream. Bernd Debusman, a Reuters columnist, underlined such stupidity in a December 2008 column. He points out that the failed “war on drugs” has helped to turn the United States “into the country with the world’s largest prison population” (it has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners). This failed war “has helped spawn global criminal enterprises that use extreme violence”. Among other things, Debusman points out that it has been estimated that legalising and regulating drugs would inject a total of over 76 billion dollars into the U.S. economy alone. Perhaps with the global financial collapse governments would be wise to consider this…

Ignorance needs to be banished – “know drugs” rather than “no drugs”. Decision-makers ought to be able to differentiate between dangerous, addictive drugs and those visionary substances that are mind-enhancing. On the other hand, altering consciousness is no light matter, and shouldn’t be simply another form of careless, hedonistic consumption that predominates in the popular counter-culture – it needs the framework, discipline and knowledgeable guidance that an Eleusian-like system would bring to bear.

Another ignorant view held by our politicians and shared by the mainstream culture as a whole is that the altered mind states caused by visionary substances are somehow hallucinatory, sham experiences. It is hard to counter such a false perception by pointing out that enhanced consciousness cannot by definition be illusory when the collective mindset promulgating such a misperception is itself not sufficiently enhanced to know that it is mistaken.

A new Eleusis would let badly needed light reach into the gloom of our modern civilisation’s general state of consciousness. The fruits of this would be for us to know collectively, as a culture, that the nature of reality is much greater than we currently think we know. It would humble us; make us aware that we have read but the first few pages of the great book of nature. It would link us to vast realms of knowledge, and pull us back from our isolation outside the gates of Eden into the folds of a consciousness that communes with the biosphere as a whole, and perhaps even greater consciousnesses beyond. It would make our political decisions, whether regarding the environment, foreign relations, the economy, scientific endeavour or social structures more informed, more humane, more sustainable. Anthropologists have noted that in antiquity, the use of visionary plants has seemingly triggered the flowering of some civilisations – our own modern culture is in desperate need of such a new flowering, otherwise it will leave the stage. As I remark in The Long Trip, if this proves to be the case, then the Earth, in the ages that belong to it alone, will surely birth a new species more capable of continuing the great adventure of consciousness.

by Sophia Goulandris

An Ancient Greek text advises a man to visit a temple and offer up some pomegranates, for he has displeased a god and been afflicted with a withering feeling of love. Further along, Capellanus’s De Amore puts forward Eleanor of Aquitaine’s courtly jury system for the consideration of the cases of lovers in tight spots. A monk’s treatise from the 13^th century warns you that if your girlfriend is really quite sexy, she’s probably a witch, while a few hundred years later his Puritan counterpart mercifully argues that women might grow ill or mad if they don’t experience regular sexual release (within the confines of marriage of course, and do remember to thank God for your orgasm and wash your hands post-coitus). Be modest, sweet and sad in the nineteenth century. Gently whip your girlfriend’s behind under a portrait of Queen Victoria, and get her to take pictures of your pulsating member. Close to the end, a lightly dust-covered dust jacket tells her to have the dinner waiting, and permits him to seduce the secretary (but pull out) before going home to that roast chicken. And so on. Love and sex – in the arts and in life, the one answering the other – are conventionally separated at birth.

Nabokov’s fiery novel Lolita acts as nitro-glycerine to this Love Theory. It does this by presenting us with a love story whose core is cloaked in a haze (Dolores Haze), confusing the Western love mythology that has been sexlessly reproducing for centuries. Lo-lee-ta? We’ll find it in the Fiction section, obviously. But is it on the Romance shelf or on a higher shelf, out of reach of corruptible innocents?

Sex versus Love was the main talking point during a short Canadian television spot broadcast soon after the publication of Lolita, where the dickie-bowed host mediated the meeting of Nabokov and renowned American literary critic Lionel Trilling (given his bird-like face, a name that must have delighted Nabokov’s fondness for allusive nomenclature). Nabokov agrees with Trilling’s remark that the book is about love and not about sex, but it is his interpretation of why most readers have come to the opposite conclusion that is so revealing. He observes disdainfully that, “it is because they think in clichés. For them, sex is something so well-defined, there is a kind of gap between it and love. They don’t know what love is, perhaps, and perhaps they don’t know what sex is either”. There is the clear implication that Nabokov ‘knows’ what sex is, and what love is, and the rest of us don’t. But why? Well, because he’s an artist, similar to Lolita’s protagonist, Humbert Humbert – though Nabokov is admittedly a member of a more benign class of the Man o’ Letters species than ‘ol Hum. “I think that the creative artist is an exile in his study, in his bedroom, in the circle of his lamplight. He’s quite alone there; he’s the lone wolf. As soon as he’s together with somebody else he shares his secret, he shares his mystery, he shares his God with somebody else.”

Humbert leads Nabokov’s artists’ separatist movement in justifying his nymphetophilia: ‘You have to be an artist’ to discern ‘the little deadly demon among the wholesome children’. But more arresting is Nabokov’s idea of ‘sharing’ a secret, a personal God. What we witness in Lolita is a deeply personal relationship; we can’t relate to it, it confuses us and, most importantly, ‘gentlemen of the jury’, because of these things we have no right to judge it. Nevertheless, there seems to be a more fundamental unease here. Civilisation is the result of a sharing of ideas, grouped reactions, mutually recognizable emotions.  While this is of course exactly what makes art and literature possible and appealing, it also leaves us in a would-be infinite world irreversibly abridged by categories, norms and ethics.

The inspiration for Lolita came from a newspaper article that Nabokov had read, concerning an ape that had been given a stick of charcoal by a scientist. This ‘poor creature’ produced the first known artwork by an animal – an outline of the bars of his enclosure. As Nabokov sees it, one of the bars of our own jail has been forged by the popularity of psychology and popular psychological self-analysis – specifically of the Freudian bent – that had already spent fifty years digging itself deep into the American psyche by the time Lolita was published. He spoke openly of his contempt for Freud in another television interview in 1966, spitting, “I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me”. The quality of crudeness is perhaps the key to unlocking Nabokov’s dismissal of most of the critical reviews of the book at the time, because although their conclusions varied, there was always the assumption that such a controversial subject matter could not be read simply as a love story but had to be symbolic or concealing some moral lesson. Lolita was, variously, a ‘satire on sex, a mirror of human frailties’, a ‘joke on our national camps about youth’, or a ‘cutting expose of chronic American adolescence and shabby materialism’.

Inevitably, critics also zeroed in on hero Humbert’s ‘deviant neuroses’. Nabokov would probably give the kiss-off to the very idea of Freudian ‘neuroses’, but the first four chapters of the novel, which the narrator terms ‘my ‘Annabel’ phase’, might as well have been written under the subtitle, ‘My Psychosexual Development: Unfinished Business’. Annabel was the thirteen-year-old Humbert’s golden-boughed first love, a nymphet in the making. His sun-bleached memories of this young holiday romance detail a passion that was mutual, spiritual, sweet and that ‘might have been assuaged only by our actual imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other’s soul and flesh’. But all attempts at the final throw-down were artlessly checked: ‘I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.’ Freud’s ‘Genital Stage’ stopped dead in its tracks. No wonder he’s a nonce.

But as fitting as this example might be, we can be sure that this account wasn’t included so that we could scientifically assess Humbert’s mental deficiencies. It is simply part of what the author claimed was the only objective of his story, which was the ‘dream of the book’. Nabokov never made it clear that he thought Freud et al.’s theories were completely baseless, but ‘crude’, perhaps because they constituted a kind of heavy-handed spring cleaning of the mystery of human interaction. A youthful Humbert considers taking on a degree in psychiatry but rejects it as a racket for the ‘manqué talents’ and in his early attempts ‘to be good’ he even summons psychoanalysts who have a crack at ‘pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes’.

Nowadays we’re accustomed to these trite pop-psych buzzwords. From the mouthbreathing famechasers tramping about on shows like Jerry Springer, baying terms like ‘empahrmint’ and ‘codipindint’, to self-help books with titles like ‘I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional’, psychology has been compressed into fun-size candy and delivered into the hands of wayward children. We think we ‘get it’; or if we haven’t got it we can go to Waterstone’s or turn on Dr. Phil and get it there. The seeds for all this hokum were already budding when Nabokov was writing Lolita. Humbert tells us about ‘a fool’s book’ called Know Your Child that Lolita’s mother has, with questionnaires about her child’s personality, adding up to ‘a kind of inventory’. More mature forms of interaction – love – are no more exempt from the effect of sellable theories of expected human behaviour: ‘The sincerity and artlessness with which [Mother Haze] discussed what she called her ‘love-life’… were affected by the same stuff (soap-operas, psycho-analysis and cheap novelettes) upon which I drew for my characters and she for her mode of expression.’ Once we start formulating and articulating our thoughts in a kind of mechanic synchronisation with the prototypes developed to typecast all of humanity in the name of art or science, we take off on a road of devolution, rather than the ‘progress’ that these domains are supposed to inspire.

Lolita is a book full of secrets. This has very little to do with the plot and everything to do with the way it was written. An annotated copy of the novel is about three times the width of a regular edition, and if you think you will solve those riddles by endlessly flipping back and forth between the prose and the notes, you will not only disappointed, but find yourself further away from that bolted door than you were to begin with. Nabakov himself is as an outsider to Humbert’s series of private jokes; the author’s role has been to construct a pyramid for this love, one that is impassable to the reader and also fortified against Freud and co. As that’s how real love is: impenetrable to all but its own architects.

Further viewing

Click here to watch the thrilling Trilling/Nabokov debate about Lolita (CBC): Part One and Part Two

And Part One of The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis. Freud said he had discovered primitive sexual and aggressive forces hidden deep inside the minds of all human beings – forces which, if not controlled, lead individuals and societies to chaos and destruction. This series is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.

The windows of American Apparel heaved with neon T-shirts and trippy prints, while Empire of the Sun’s heady synth came floating out from trend mecca Urban Outfitters.

It seems that something psychedelic is sweeping popular culture right now, with art, music and fashion symbiotically harking back to an era when flower power was not just about pretty patterns but the gateway to a world beyond conflict, recession and material worries; a world where community and ideals can take root.

Over at the Victoria and Albert Museum, its new exhibition, Decode: Digital Design Sensations, explores recent developments in digital art in a visually psychedelic way.

Beyond the explosion of colours and cosmic patterns, the focus is very much on the role of the audience, examining the influence of interactivity within the realm of art.

Blurring the boundary between subject and object, the show invites the viewer to contribute to ever-evolving installations.

Co-curator Shane Walter says: “Many of these pieces do not have a fixed point and are continually developing so that every time you revisit the exhibition it will be a completely new experience.”

The psychedelic revival is not only confined to the world of visual art. The 2010 spring/summer ready-to-wear shows were testament to the world’s current obsession with trippy prints, with designers such as Mary Katrantzou and Peter Pilotto embracing bright, mind-boggling patterns.

Doyen of geometric designs Alexander McQueen took the digital trend to a new level with cosmic prints and alien-inspired shoes.

Just looking at the dresses is tantamount to getting high, with clashing shades and fluorescent shapes turning the human form into some kind of intergalactic animal.

Sharp lines and fearsome shoulder pads have given way to a world of fantasy beyond our own – a colourful land of infinite possibility.

“Alexander McQueen’s much talked-about show was inspired by his apocalyptic ecological forecast.

“It was dramatised by digitally produced reptilian prints to psychedelic effects,” says Victoria Meekings, spokeswoman for the fashion department at Harvey Nichols.

“All these rainbow-brights are a much-needed jumpstart to both the New Year and our wardrobes.”

The high street, too, is brimming with optimistic tie-dye, stellar prints and illusory graphics.

All Saints’ fearlessly psychedelic T-shirts, with sacrificial images and hippie slogans such as “love is the law”, are being snapped up by every trendy teenager. Suddenly, flower power is cool again; it’s not so nerdy to care about a higher cause.

Nothing explores this better than the billion-dollar blockbuster Avatar, with its day-glo plants and surreal blue-skinned 10ft characters.

Telling the tale of a greedy corporation hellbent on mining a defenceless planet, the film has all the ultraviolet glory of a psy-trance rave in Goa but with a vital message.

Planetary consciousness has never been so important: we must respect the land we live off and our place within a system much larger than ourselves.

Tim Burton‘s Alice in Wonderland, to be released this March, explores a different psychedelic tenet: things are not always as they seem, and an altered perspective could be the key to future success.

Metamorphosis and re-evaluation help Alice to discover how she can save Wonderland from the fearful Red Queen; powerful potions and mysterious mushrooms are the building blocks for happiness.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the music scene is also undergoing a psychedelic revival.

This time it’s not in the form of acid house but nostalgic synth and euphoric melodies from New York‘s MGMT and the Australian pop duo Empire of the Sun. They evoke a world of childish freedom, brimming with colourful face paint and outlandish costumes.

The Australian duo are very clear about their goal: “We want to be free, we want to have a good time, we want to change the world.”

Not, they point out, by making people commit suicide on some special night wearing Nike trainers but by bringing the people “good things”. Underneath their carefree trippy exterior these bands are deadly serious about the need for positive transformation.

“Psychedelic influences originated with The Beatles on Sgt Pepper, and also The Stones circa Their Satanic Majesties,” says Paul Rees, editor of Q magazine.

“Before MGMT or Empire of the Sun there were The Flaming Lips or Mercury Rev. Kasabian’s current album is riddled with psychedelic influences and there are whole swathes of US alternative music rooted in it. In short, it appears ageless.”

So, this return to psychedelia is no quick flirtation with Sixties and Seventies fashion.

This is about communal dissatisfaction with the status quo, with (dare I even say it) global recession, with wasted dreams, jobless graduates and innocent men laying down their lives on the front line.

What the psychedelic fascination offers is not just escape but a fresh perspective, a glimpse into a world beyond our daily routine.

Whether you jump right down the rabbit hole or simply dare lose yourself for a moment in your iTunes visualiser, there has never been a better time to turn on, tune in and drop out.

The detonation of the atomic bomb irreversibly altered man’s relationship with the world he inhabited. Absolute finality had been the exclusive preserve of story-tellers, of fictions, of narrative; the bomb now threatened to end to the human narrative itself, to put an end to not only history but the conditions by which history might exist at all

By Adam Gyngell

The detonation of the atomic bomb irreversibly altered man’s relationship with the world he inhabited. Absolute finality had been the exclusive preserve of story-tellers, of fictions, of narrative; the bomb now threatened to end to the human narrative itself, to put an end to not only history but the conditions by which history might exist at all. In 1948, Andre Breton admitted that he had once been seduced by the ‘temptation for the end of the world.’ Apocalypse had represented the thrill of revolution, the absurd carnage of meaningless devastation. Now, having come through another global war and the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Breton decided on behalf of his generation that ‘we no longer want the end of the world’ (Conrad 1998, 39). Nuclear apocalypse would represent nothing, nothingness. The end of the world, Breton realized, could happen: but the event would be purely destructive, annihilating. It would not be hermeneutic, it would not be revelatory, it would just happen. Insofar as we represent it at all, we are not representing it. Like Riddley’s paper, nuclear holocaust occupies a blank space. We can write about it only by writing ‘about’ it, by writing around its perimeter, by circumnavigating an empty centre. Nuclear holocaust is intrinsically alien to narrative, aggressively extinguishing the very possibility of narrative itself. Nevertheless, we look to narrative to see what it can ‘tell’ us about nuclear holocaust, to see whether it can tell us about it. Steven Connor astutely notes: ‘apocalypse is as much a challenge to our capacity to conceive, represent and narrate it, as it is to our will to avert it’ (Connor 1996, 201). Indeed, one might say that the atomic bomb and its aftermath have become suitable icons for the post-mortem condition of post-modernism: for the post-modern, as Lyotard notes, is ‘that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself’ (Lyotard 1984, 81).

Nuclear holocaust is framed from the longer perspective of future time: rather than the end, the disaster becomes a distant point of origin, a cataclysmic past that is reconstructed through surviving texts and oral myths. The apocalypses of these post-apocalyptic representations are historical events.

Narrating the annihilation of the world and its inhabitants, the writer occupies a liminal space after the end, becoming a survivor and witness of his own apocalypse. In Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, the need to circumscribe an apocalypse that cannot be circumvented is taken as a matter of national policy. The government authorize a history of the nuclear holocaust to be written on glass bricks, encased in a cement cellar on Australia’s highest peak. Nuclear holocaust is a (non)event that puts an end to history. Yet the decision demonstrates an attempt to historicize an event that will put an end to writing, an event that has not taken place and that, in taking place, will end rather than initiate its historicity. No one will read this history; Dwight’s belief that ‘there should be something written, all the same’ (Shute 2000, 77) is indicative of the impulse towards resisting the absolute finality of nuclear holocaust, towards providing the satisfaction of narrative closure that nuclear ending prohibits. Indeed, the document is characteristic of the way writers find means of framing the apocalypse, of defusing its finality: the idea that it could be the end of the narrative, or the ending of narrative itself, is strenuously resisted. Rarely does the end of the narrative coincide with the end of the world. The existence of the ragged remnants of humanity provides the psychic space needed to contemplate and articulate nuclear annihilation. Faced with the prospect of an end without appendix, with the task of imagining an event that is terminal, authors construct scenarios ‘after the end’. Apocalypse must be displaced chronologically and ontologically. Nuclear holocaust is framed from the longer perspective of future time: rather than the end, the disaster becomes a distant point of origin, a cataclysmic past that is reconstructed through surviving texts and oral myths. The apocalypses of these post-apocalyptic representations are historical events. Remainders and reminders survive: the people who inhabit these post-apocalyptic worlds try to discover, through deciphering its traces, the nature that war, and of our own situation before its outbreak. For Riddley’s community, all quests for forgotten knowledge resemble the excavation of wrecks from the earth. These speculative fictions point back towards an apocalypse that is an erasure, a blank space that characters try to interpret and understand by articulating the fragments that remain. The worlds they portray are characterized by the absence of written texts and literacy. As a result, nuclear holocaust becomes an enigma which survives only outside the order of conventional discourse.

Nuclear holocaust thus exists on the margins of the text: the bomb falls in an unspecified past before the start of the narrative (like the shadow of nuclear destruction in Orwell’s 1984) or beyond the last page of the book (as in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow). Authors invariably write about nuclear war without confronting it directly. Speculative fictions dodge the realities of human apocalypse by transferring it to other times, other species, other galaxies. Nuclear annihilation itself is seldom portrayed in narrative: peering into the crater, writers nervously edge back to the narrative safety of solid ground. The most challenging narratives are those that attempt to render holocaust in the narrative present, rather than placing it in the assumed narrative past. Yet, in the present, it is an event that annihilates the very possibility of narrative representation. It can only be known in advance, in projections, predictions, and premonitory narratives: it exists in the tense of science-fiction, the future-conditional of what ifs and maybes. The few works that take us through the blank of the atomic blast itself are forced to question their own capacities of representation. Set in the distant past or projected future, apocalypse finds a narrative frame: the end of narrative is signalled by and within narrative itself.

R. J. Lifton has observed that the hypothetical space of nuclear disaster cannot be inhabited by the imagination. Writers find themselves skirting round the perimeter of the gaping chasm of disaster, unable to conceive or represent it except by indirection. Nuclear holocaust offers a test of the limits of the human imagination. The Editorial in August 31^st 1946 New Yorker explained its decision to print Hersey’s Hiroshima in full: ‘in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive powers of this weapon…’ (Hersey 1981, 15). The bomb and its effects are ‘all but incredible’: the very language used to convey its power is stretched to its elastic limits; one would not believe it were it not for knowledge of its very real existence. Its consequences exert an even greater pressure on the resources of the imagination: confronted with the picture of mass obliteration, radioactive contamination, and even human extinction, the mind recoils. Denied a cosmic perspective, the human imagination, trapped in the confines of the individual consciousness, finds itself engaging with something too big to comprehend, too final to overcome. If nuclear holocaust defies human imagination, then it constitutes an even greater challenge to artistic representation. Devoid of its symbolic or allusive mediations, nuclear holocaust precludes the possibility of a narrative structure: imagining the destruction, one is projected into a dead time that falls outside the human tenses of past, present and future.

Lifton discovered in the hibakusha or ‘psychic numbing’ of Hiroshima survivors a metaphor for what one might feel if one tries to undergo and absorb the experience of nuclear annihilation: ‘the human mind cannot bear very much of this reality’ (Lifton 1967, 33). The memory of the Japanese holocaust acts both as a brake and a stimulus to the apocalyptic imagination, exposing the limits of our language and our imaginations. Nuclear holocaust is ‘unthinkable’: it is not only meaningless, but consumes all potential for meaning, all systems of human thought, in its destructive fire. When we try to articulate the totality of the obliteration, we are left facing a blankness, or emptiness.

When proposals were being made for the Hiroshima Ground Zero Memorial, one survivor suggested a large, empty open space to represent nothingness – because ‘that was what there was’ (Lifton and Falk 1982, 108). Disintegrating people, the blast left white shadows on the walls and pavement: like these spectral outlines, narrative can only register a blank, a mark of absence, when it comes to delineating the bomb and its aftermath. Lifton notes that many Japanese survivors describe their state at that time with the phrase muga-muchu, ‘without self, without center’ (Lifton 1967, 26). The Japanese who lived through the blast are ‘Empty Ones’: the words they grasp to give expression to their experience take the form of negation, of cancellation. In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot explores the problems of addressing a holocaust in language: ‘it is that which, in thought, cannot make itself present, or enter into presence, and is still less able to be represented or constitute itself as a basis for representation’ (Blanchot 1986, 33). Nuclear holocaust manifests itself as ultimate absence, an annihilation that is purely destructive, a return to the nihil from which the world was made.

The atomic bomb and the prospect of universal annihilation place an interminable stress on the capacity of language to articulate the realities of the nuclear age. Ideas that were formerly unthinkable now required a semantic structure, a new language. In Physics and Philosophy, Heisenberg questions how we might understand nuclear physics when we cannot speak about the atom in ordinary language. Physicists found themselves confronted with a mystery, a power that defied the vocabulary that first tried to encompass it: sub-atomic particles whose behaviour could be explained only in the densest mathematical equations. We see the human world replaced by a statistical one: death and destruction are reduced to a neat collection of fractions and figures. Our vertiginous sense of dislocation, our awareness of the helplessness of words to express such precise annihilation, is one shared by those whose task it is to narrate nuclear holocaust. Derrida observes how, faced by the bleak prospect of nuclear ending, we seek to neutralize its horror, “to translate the unknown into a known, to metaphorize, allegorize, domesticate the terror, to circumvent (with the help of circumlocution…) the inescapable catastrophe’ (Derrida 1984, 201). Unable to comprehend the unprecedented destructive force of nuclear war, we are reduced to rolling out clichés, exchanging dead metaphors.

Nuclear war is ‘unthinkable’: it is a site where language stops, for reasons of both internal logic and social proscription. If the unthinkable cannot be thought, it is both in terms of possibility and prohibition. Striving to reveal the secrets of apocalypse becomes an attempt to uncover forbidden knowledge. The scientists at Los Alamos strove to unlock the secrets of the universe.  In doing so, they discovered the means by which the world might be destroyed. In 1944, while work on Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project proceeded, Niels Bohr arrived in Washington from Europe. He warned that the plan to release nuclear energy through a bomb constituted ‘a far deeper interference with the natural course of events than anything ever before attempted’ (Jungk 1958, 345). Scientists, Bohr reckoned, were dealing with something beyond their control, beyond their comprehension. A decade earlier, Szilard had been quick to realize the potential dangers of nuclear chain reaction, and called on his colleagues to keep the discovery secret from the Germans. Szilard was painfully aware of the need to restrict this knowledge.

Unlike the apocalypses of the Bible, nuclear holocaust precludes the possibility of a ‘secret pointing to salvation’. It offers no revelation, no judgment, no definition. The title of Derrida’s seminal essay, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, does not imply that the world cannot be destroyed by nuclear war: rather, it underlines that there will be no revelation, ‘not now’. Nuclear holocaust makes revelation of meaning impossible: it represents ‘the historical and ahistorical horizon of an absolute self-destructibility without apocalypse, without revelation of its own truth, without absolute knowledge’ (Derrida 1984, 27). As in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, the apocalypse that will consume the world is an absurd accident. Death is accidental, random, meaningless. At the point of critical mass, the light does not illuminate, but incinerate.

Derrida famously observed that nuclear apocalypse as a ‘phenomenon is fabulously textual… a nuclear war has not taken place: one can only talk and write about it’ (Derrida 1984, 23). Denied its all-consuming reality, nuclear holocaust can exist for Derrida only within the secure confines of the text. It seems suitable, then, that the history of nuclear war itself seems to be so ‘fabulously textual.’ Over thirty years before the Alamogordo explosion, Wells’ The World Set Free depicted a devastating global war fought with ‘atomic bombs’ – a Wellsian coinage. Dedicated to Soddy and his ‘Interpretation of Radium’, the novel would later influence Szilard in his development of the nuclear chain reaction: a discovery that paved the way for the first atomic bomb. The bomb germinated in the mind of a writer of speculative fiction. By 1980, faced with the nightmarish prospect of human extinction as a result of global nuclear conflict, the American Office of Technological Assessment compiled a mammoth report called The Effects of Nuclear War. The report concludes by abandoning its hypothetical empirical assessments of a surviving society, ending, ironically: ‘In an effort to provide a more concrete understanding of what a world after a nuclear war would be like, OTA commissioned a work of fiction’ (O.T.A 1980, 9). The bomb’s genesis was located in a work of fiction: staring at a future more unbelievable and overwhelming than the most dystopian of novels, it seems appropriate that a work of fiction should be commissioned to find its solution.

Apocalypse is a product of the imagination. The scientific imagination has produced weapons with the destructive capability to end the world, leaving no remainders, no aftermath. Within the artistic imagination, the end becomes a permeable boundary, an event that can be rehearsed, reversed and repeated – like the looped footage of blossoming mushroom clouds, accompanied by Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’, at the end of Dr Strangelove. In a world where there is no-one left alive to watch his film, Kubrick permits this primal scene, the sight forbidden to humanity on pain of death, to repeat itself indefinitely.

© Adam Gyngell, 2009

In most rich countries, the old distinction between high and popular culture is breaking down

That’s increasingly true. Every other Saturday, Darren Henley is at the Priestfield football ground cheering on his beloved Gillingham. In the evening, he goes to a concert by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic or the London Symphony Orchestra, because he is also the boss of Classic FM, a radio station that sponsors those orchestras.

Cultural incongruities are popping up everywhere. When the Guardian, which sponsors the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, picked ten visitors to interview, one turned out to be a check-out clerk at Tesco who saved all his money during the year so he could go to the festival for his holiday. He was far from the most unlikely visitor who might have been found. High-ranking officers from the SAS (Special Air Service), Britain’s crack covert-operations regiment–who have to remain anonymous–have been known to spend their holidays each year travelling from their base at Hereford to Hay for lectures on Wordsworth and Darwin.

The sharpest of all these cultural contrasts, though, was the one taking place at the Royal Opera House itself the night Russell Southwood was queuing. Every seat had been taken not by the furs-and-cufflinks brigade but by readers of the Sun, a newspaper not noted for its opera coverage. Amid huffing and puffing from connoisseurs, 2,200 readers of Britain’s biggest-selling daily, accompanied by a trio of page-three girls (modestly attired), descended on the house of Handel and Callas for Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”. The paper celebrated with an inch-high headline: “Well Don, my Sun”.

In most rich countries, the old distinction between high and popular culture is breaking down. Isolated examples of this have been seen for a long time. In the 1960s Karlheinz Stockhausen, a doyen of avant-garde music, appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ “Sgt Pepper”. In the 1990s the Three Tenors found a mass audience for Puccini. But what used to be a characteristic of individuals or particular occasions is now becoming the defining feature of the whole culture.

Millions more people are going to museums, literary festivals and operas; millions more watch demanding television programmes or download serious-minded podcasts. Not all these activities count as mind-stretching, of course. Some are downright fluffy. But, says Donna Renney, the chief executive of the Cheltenham Festivals, audiences increasingly want “the buzz you get from working that little bit harder”. This is a dramatic yet often unrecognised development. “When people talk and write about culture,” says Ira Glass, the creator of the riveting public-radio show “This American Life”, “it’s apocalyptic. We tell ourselves that everything is in bad shape. But the opposite is true. There’s an abundance of really interesting things going on all around us.”

One of the commonest complaints by cultural doomsayers is that nobody reads good books any more. Yet in the past two years, the Oprah Book Club in America recommended Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and three novels by William Faulkner–good by any standard, and they all made the bestseller lists.

That may seem Pollyanna-ish. But consider these straws, all blowing in the same direction. In 1999/2000, there were 24m visits to Britain’s biggest museums. In 2007/08, the figure was 40m. Between 1999 and 2001, Britain scrapped entry charges, so the increase is partly attributable to that. Still, it was a lot of people. And another factor is the popularity of blockbuster exhibitions, such as the Terracotta Army show at the British Museum–which are seldom free, so scrapping charges cannot be the sole explanation. In most of the great cities of the West, museums now dominate the lists of most popular tourist attractions. More people go to the Louvre each year than to the Eiffel Tower; in London, three museums–the Tate, the British Museum and the National Gallery–each attract more visitors than the London Eye.

In 2006 the New York Metropolitan Opera started an experiment to reach a new audience. It began transmitting opera performances live to cinemas. In the first year it broadcast six productions to 98 movie houses in America; 325,000 people watched. The second year, it transmitted eight operas to 935,000 people. This year, there will be 11 productions, 850 cinemas in 28 countries and a forecast audience of 1.2m: roughly 100,000 people per show, compared with just 3,700 at the Met itself. A few dress up in finery. Many more stood outside in Times Square, New York, this year staring at the digital displays that usually advertise Panasonic or Disney, watching the Met’s opening-night concert.

* * * * *

One of the commonest complaints by cultural doomsayers is that nobody reads good books any more. Yet in the past two years, the Oprah Book Club in America recommended Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and three novels by William Faulkner–good by any standard, and they all made the bestseller lists. This year, Waterstone’s, which owns over 300 bookshops in Britain, asked two celebrated novelists, Sebastian Faulks and Philip Pullman, each to choose 40 titles and write a few words of recommendation. The chain then piled copies of the books on tables next to the entrances of its main shops and waited to see what would happen. Faulks and Pullman hardly dumbed down their choices: they included Fernando Pessoa’s “Book of Disquiet”, Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim”, and Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in Style”. The sales increases for these books over the same period the year before were, respectively, 1,350%, 1,420% and 1,800%–clear evidence of latent demand. If you offer it, they will come.

Literary festivals show the same thing. The Arts Council tries to keep track of their number: 43 in Britain in October alone. Some are tiny, like a weekend festival in Mere, a village in Wiltshire. Others are huge. Next year, the Hay Festival expects to sell 165,000 tickets for events over two weeks. When it began, in 1988, there were 2,000 visitors. Its director, Peter Florence, says the audience has grown, about 15% a year for the past 20 years. Now, he is branching out abroad, helping organise festivals in Cartagena (Colombia), Granada, Havana, Nairobi and Beirut. Not far from Hay, in Cheltenham, another literary festival has also grown, from 67,000 visitors in 2005 to over 87,000 this year. It, too, has children: the Cheltenham jazz, science and classical-music festivals have all flourished on the back of the literary one.

Of course, it may be just that there is more of everything, from serious-minded literary gabfests to drunken holidays in Benidorm. “In the past 20 or 30 years”, says Ira Glass, “there have always been little pockets in the culture where people do interesting work. But now there are so many more places, so many more people who are willing to try anything. The result is that there’s a lot of crap, but there’s also more stuff that’s good at every level.” And the internet, with its instant searches and e-mail newsletters, makes it much easier for people to know what is happening and how to get it.

Where you can make direct comparisons, the serious end of a market is holding up as well as or better than the popular one. Take television. There certainly is no shortage of chewing gum for the eyes. But a clever quiz show such as “QI”, which one might have expected to have lasted a season, is now in its sixth year on BBC2. The even more upmarket radio programme “In Our Time” was the BBC’s first podcast, in 2004, and it was an instant hit. Janice Hadlow, the new controller of BBC2, recently told the BBC staff magazine: “I want to see intelligence in popular programming. It’s good to see it cropping up in all sorts of different places–not just those programmes where you might expect it.” A series like “The Wire”, which its creator David Simon admits “requires thought and commitment to watch”, has survived poor ratings to become a critical smash. Barack Obama was one of many to call it the best show on television. The Los Angeles Times used it as an example of what “is generally acknowledged to be something of a golden era for thoughtful and entertaining dramas”.

Television, opera and perhaps museums might be said to be absorbed passively. But that is not true of literary festivals, nor of some of the new businesses taking advantage of changing public taste. In a former grocery shop in Bloomsbury, Sophie Haworth, who used to run the Tate’s education programme, has just opened the School of Life, aiming to bridge the gap between adult education and self-help. Haworth calls it “a one-stop shop for the mind”. It is more rigorous than most self-help groups and more fun than adult education. Its courses are sold out for months ahead. So are public debates for 800 people on propositions like “It’s wrong to pay for sex”, staged by Intelligence Squared. When the company started, says Jeremy O’Grady, one of its organisers, he was virtually offering free tickets to tramps on the streets to fill the hall. Now you can hardly squeeze in. “Marketing people always think the public is seduced by glitz and instant gratification,” says O’Grady. “But we’re less shallow than we think we are.”

Lastly, lest you think the School of Life and Intelligence Squared, which cater for thousands, are typical of the new cultural endeavours, consider Classic FM. Before it came along in 1992, Radio 3 had a monopoly over Britain’s supply of broadcast classical music. But (as is often the way with monopolies) it catered for insiders far better than for anyone else. As Henley says, Radio 3 “super-served the connoisseur”. You almost needed permission from the Royal College of Music to listen to it. During the day, Radio 3 strode about in a corduroy jacket; in the evening, it changed into white tie and tails. “Classical music had a language and a set of values that made it very elitist,” argues Henley. “It said: ‘This is the music. This is what you wear. These are the rules.’ But when we talked to people, they said that while they loved the music, they all thought they were the only ones put off by the way it was presented. It was like a club where the door is always locked. From day one, our aim was to blow open the locks.”

Classic FM’s launch was nothing short of sensational. Within four months, it had 4.2m listeners–twice Radio 3’s audience at that point and a vivid example of latent demand. “The audience was always there,” Henley says. “We just identified a need that wasn’t being fulfilled.”

Now, with 6m listeners a week, Classic FM is easily the largest commercial radio station in Britain (BBC Radios 1, 2 and 4 are bigger but are not commercial). One in nine of Britain’s adult population are regular listeners. They are not just the cardigan-wearing classes, either. At least 1m Classic FM listeners also tune in to Radio 1. So do about 400,000 children under 15 and, during the spring, half of all those who call the station’s musical-requests programme are students who, it seems, switch from pop, rock or dance music at exam time to something that helps them concentrate or relax. The station’s presenters embody its crossover appeal. One, Alex James, was the bass player for Blur, one of the leading Britpop bands of the 1990s; another, John Brunning, was lead guitarist for the 1970s band Mungo Jerry.

Like any good marketing operation, Classic FM divides its audience into segments. It labels them nervous discoverers, background listeners, classics as pop, popular enthusiasts and connoisseurs, and it provides programmes tailored to each. In the morning, when there are more background listeners and nervous discoverers (the youngest of the groups, also the Radio 1 listeners), the music is bright, breezy and interspersed with news and talk. In the afternoon, programmes turn more soothing for the popular enthusiasts (older, affluent, more women than men). In the evening when listeners have time, and connoisseurs tune in, you get traditional concerts.

The station goes out of its way to be user-friendly. For new or occasional listeners, it sells guidebooks (“The Friendly Guide to Classical Music”). For the enthusiasts, there is a monthly magazine. Last Christmas, it even held a “Barbie at the Symphony” concert in Liverpool’s Philharmonic hall–“The Nutcracker”, “Swan Lake”–for another target audience: doll-loving girls (and their parents).

This leaves it open to accusations of dumbing down. It is certainly true that a good deal of Classic FM’s output is undemanding; the most ferocious and rebarbative contemporary music is banned. But it plays the world’s greatest music in proper recordings. It takes the classical canon beyond the traditional audience of connoisseurs and, with its magazines and books, tries to engage new audiences more deeply with the music it plays. Darren Henley’s quest is unfinished. “I’ve no doubt”, he says, “that one day, everyone will listen to classical music, maybe not all the time, but at different stages of their lives. It offers people a spirituality, an otherworldliness that they want. We hear that from our listeners all the time.”

* * * * *

Philippe de Montebello, soon to step down after 31 years as director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, is fond of saying “the public is a lot smarter than anyone gives it credit for.” He seems to be right. But why? It’s unlikely people are more intelligent than they used to be. Perhaps the elites that enjoy high culture are now bigger for some reason? Perhaps popular tastes have changed in such a way as to benefit high culture? Or perhaps it has nothing to do with changes in the audience, and more to do with the artists and institutions, who have become more skilled at attracting people? Answer: all of the above.

Hard though it may be for professional pessimists to credit, educational standards have risen appreciably over the past 40 years. A good way to measure this is to look at how many people have degrees in each generation. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris has worked this out and found that 29% of Britons between the ages of 25 and 34 have what it calls “type-A tertiary education” (basically, universities). But the share is little more than half that in an older generation (16% of those between 55 and 64). This reflects the expansion of universities in Britain since the 1960s. And in case you suspect the effect is merely a result of relabelling polytechnics as universities, the OECD has allowed for that, too. It calls the polytechnics “type-B tertiary education” (ie, vocational and higher training). Type B education in Britain has been flat. The growth has come from universities alone. In a literal sense, there has been an expansion of mass intelligence: more people have been trained at universities to want, or expect, more intellectual stimulation.

People with degrees are much more likely to go to museums than anyone else. Two researchers from Oxford University, Tak Wing Chan and John Goldthorpe, studied the influence of income, occupation, social class and education on whether people go to theatre, dance, cinema, music and the visual arts. They concluded that education is by far the most important factor. “The higher individuals’ education level,” they write, “the higher, one might say, is their capacity for cultural consumption.” They also looked at whether people tended to concentrate on one thing (going to the movies, say) or to engage with lots of art forms. They found that university graduates were far more likely to be “cultural omnivores” than “cultural univores”. Others have found the same thing. In 2007 the American research group MRI looked at the viewing and reading habits of the elite market, which it defined as those who went to, or subscribed to, at least two of the following: the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, HBO, theatre, art galleries or classical concerts. They found that of this group, a third also read People magazine, watched “American Idol” and subscribed to the cable sports channel ESPN. One of the features of the market for mass intelligence is its heterogeneity.

There is a second, indirect link between education and culture, albeit one that is hard to pin down. Over the past two decades, education has been increasingly rewarded; in the “knowledge economy”, university graduates have done much better than others and the value of a degree has soared. People with degrees also go to cultural events more often so, though there is no necessary connection, there is a correlation: education, culture and income or status tend to go together. A study by the Pew Research Centre in America last year measured this correlation by proxy. It found that 60% of people with incomes of less than $20,000 a year said they had a low knowledge of current affairs; 15% had a high knowledge. For those on incomes of $100,000 and over, the shares were almost exactly reversed: nearly 60% high, less than 20% low. Keeping abreast of current affairs is obviously different from going to the opera or science festivals. Indeed, going to an arts event is often an escape from work. But it is also a way to gain status, to network and to use and burnish the thing that helps you at the office: knowledge.

An alternative explanation for the growth of mass intelligence comes from Peter Florence of the Hay Festival. Forty or 50 years ago, he argues, the public appetite for debate and intellectual curiosity was partly met by politics. The 1960s was a period of political ferment. Later, the current of public interest ran through television and radio; the BBC and ITV played a huge role in bringing theatre, opera and the rest of it to a wider audience. The tradition of public service, he thinks, “nourished an appetite for culture that has survived the splintering of monolithic public-service broadcasters and been encouraged by the rise of the internet”.

No doubt these long-run trends have played a role. But if they were the sole explanation, you would expect the market for mass intelligence to have developed slowly, imperceptibly. And one of its striking features is how rapidly it can appear–as Classic FM, Waterstone’s and the Met have all shown. The behaviour of arts providers makes a big difference too. Most successful arts organisations are busy blowing away a certain dustiness and injecting a sense of fun and style. Adult education and debating societies used to mean draughty halls and comfortless benches. The School of Life, in contrast, looks like a designer shop and the Intelligence Squared debates take place, says O’Grady, “in the most comfortable leather seats northern Italy has to offer”. This year’s Christmas programme at London’s Southbank Centre includes a Quentin Crisp lookalike contest and a concert by an orchestra using instruments scavenged from rubbish–drainpipes, traffic cones, discarded soy-sauce bottles.

When arts organisations do this, they can not only expand their audience but sometimes create new ones in the most unexpected ways. This is what Naxos Audio Books has done with recordings of classic books on CD and tape. Its bestsellers include abridged versions of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (three CDs) and a four-CD account of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. Amazingly, Naxos sells thousands of copies of an unabridged version of “Ulysses” (22 CDs). “When I first proposed it, my colleagues thought I was mad,” says the company’s founder, Nicolas Soames. “At the start, it was just a hunch. I thought that if we read writers like Dante or Milton aloud, it would make them live again for a new audience.”

What was most remarkable was the origin of that audience. “I was a judo journalist,” Soames says, “and when I visited judo groups I found that everyone wanted to learn. The -do in judo means ‘the way’ and the concept inculcates in those doing the sport a strong desire to learn. These people would never sit down and read Dante or Joyce. But they would listen to them if they were read well enough. Now we know there is a group of people I call self-improvers who want a wide range of intelligent stuff, including the classics.”

From opera in cinemas to audio books for judo-players: the expanding market for intelligence is certainly unexpected. But what does it really amount to? Is it a profound cultural change or a mild shift upmarket? Here are three tentative conclusions. First, the growth of a market for intelligence may not imply anything about the quality of art being produced. Artists and patrons do separate, if related, things. Accusations of dumbing down are legion. On the other hand, the LA Times’s view that this is a golden age for serious television might be applied more widely. It is hard to believe that those who accuse arts institutions of dumbing down would want audiences to be smaller.

Second, the growth of intelligent interest may help resolve an argument that exists in universities between those who say culture is really all about class or income, much as it always was, and those who say that, no, sweeping statements about class are no longer relevant, and that these days personal taste, not class or money, is what matters. The new audience suggests both schools are partly right (or wrong). Taste has become fantastically heterogeneous: people do indeed watch and read whatever they want; intellectual snobbery is breaking down. But as Drs Wing and Goldthorpe have shown, one group–those with university degrees–read more, watch more and mix and match more than anyone else.

Third, what does all this say about the widespread view that societies are dumbing down, educational standards are crumbling and people’s ability to concentrate is collapsing? The reply must be that it cannot be true across the board and that for a significant number, the opposite is the case: people want more intellectually demanding things to see and hear, not fewer. Surely both things are happening at once: part of the population is dumbing down, part is wising up. But something has changed. H.L. Mencken, the so-called sage of Baltimore, said: “No one in this world…has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” A growing number of people are proving him wrong.

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Winter 2008