A take-in-progress:

The failure-mode for a culture is when Harry Potter is the only story left that everyone can refer to.

High culture drawing on low and low culture popularizing high are orthogonal and simultaneous axes of avoiding this outcome. https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/1064926630336966656

BUT the poets and the popularizers can only succeed in creating a cohesive culture with certain characteristic strengths if this IS NOT their intention.

If they're doing it mainly to exert control over the cultural outcome, or to gain power/influence in that realm, it fails

This is an example of what Elster calls an "essential by-product" for those of you following along from home

But wait - how can they create/maintain a cohesive culture if they be aiming to, or maybe can't even be aware, that that's their overall function?

They have a sense of what is important that motivates them entirely out of proportion to whatever influence they expect to have.

Something like a sense of the sacred, or a vocation. But there's a more concrete way to put it...

Rather than treating X as propaganda that he wants to turn into an ideal for his audience through repetition, X needs to already be established as an ideal within an existing group that he truly cares about

For example, @toad_spotted asks about Bartok's modernist folk dances. Well - if composers all have rural relatives they love, if peasant dances are part of their childhood, then it will come naturally that they work them into their opera

Then cultivated aesthetes will consider these melodies not "folk tunes" but - a national style! and peasants will be able to come to them and stamp their feet and feel in their blood what the composer wants them to feel

In a sense Handel's Messiah is much more true to the logic of what Stravinsky was trying to do than "Rite of Spring". Handel takes ubiquitous phrases from the Bible that any churchgoing Briton had heard dozens, hundreds of times, and makes them sing.

That's primitivism

When someone w/ season tickets to the symphony hears "He was despisèd and rejected of man —" there are things there I guess only someone who can read sheet music can really follow and appreciate idk. But he can't understand how the soloist makes the phrase SO moving unless -

he is recognizes that the phrase he finds moving is one that is moving not just to him, but to millions of Christians who have a rough-and-ready grasp of music.

That's how high and low culture integrate each other. And it's why Messiah is still immensely popular even today

But btw - all this assumes there is SOME group, a polis or nation or church, where people DO care about one another, interact, share a common fate

In a polyglot empire that may not be the case, and then you get lame art, woke religion, and Harry Potter

At that point people trying to "do a culture" are more and more doomed to narcissism or agitprop, because they're trying to imitate byproducts of the excellence of real art, not the spiritual impulse itself

Culture re-emerges from very small groups, or ecosystems of groups