Almost everywhere I glance these days, this new century, the 21st, is looking very much like an old one - the 19th. Let me explain.

Back in the 20th century, from World War II until around 1980, almost all serious contemporary painting and architecture and music was abstract, modernist, even harsh sometimes. And what's returned since is the kind of work that was supposedly outlawed by the 20th century - respectable paintings of recognizable people and things, respectable buildings made from traditional materials in traditional forms. And respectable music that isn't grating and sometimes has melody.

And during this same time, old distinctions between ambitious high culture and trivial low culture have been blurred or erased. Tell me: are Philip Glass and Quentin Tarantino and Cirque de Soleil high or low culture?

Today's swinging mix-and-match cultural hodgepodge is generally called "postmodern"...but to me it's very much like pre-modern America. Back in the middle of the 19th century, characters for instance in popular plays delivered these outrageous self-referential asides to the audience. A single evening at the theater might feature Shakespeare and vaudeville. A concert could encompass music of Chopin and Stephen Foster. And in lower Manhattan in New York, P.T. Barnum's American Museum had museum displays but also had freak shows and lectures and a shooting gallery.

Same thing in the media. Back in the 19th century newspapers depended less on advertising than they have recently, and commercial free media today is now the new big thing. In the 19th century, newspapers were small and quirky and really partisan - like today's blogs, among other things.

But our wholesale time travel back to the 1800s is not all good. When I was in public school in Nebraska in the 1960s and '70s, evolution was not controversial or a "theory." Darwin versus Genesis was no more a debate than round Earth versus flat Earth.

The thing is, back the late 20th century, all of these settled questions about art and religion, all these big fat conventional wisdoms seemed unassailable, irreversible. That's just the way it was, as Walter Cronkite used to say. And I guess at the zenith of any cultural era, that's always the way it is.

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