Philistine Supremacy Among Elites

Cultural elites are increasingly treating high‑budget TV and pop stars as if they occupy the same canonical status as classic literature, producing a new hierarchy where mass‑media prestige crowds out sustained engagement with older, ‘serious’ works. This shift is driven by platform incentives, accessible criticism formats, and institutional attention economies rather than the intrinsic comparative value of the works. — If elites legitimize transient mass culture as equivalent to the literary canon, public institutions (schools, reviews, cultural funding) will change what they teach, preserve, and reward, reshaping long‑run cultural literacy and civic formation.