Will Durant said, “Civilization is a social order promoting cultural creation.”
In his and his wife, Ariel’s, famous 11-volume series, The Story of Civilization, he goes on to describe how civilization provides a foundation for culture:
It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.
In other words, a sound, stable social order provides a foundation for human flourishing and the arts.
Western Civilization has a long history of cultivating the kind of social order that makes this kind of human flourishing possible.
But that does not mean Western Civilization has been without its conflicts and fractures, maladies that have pushed it to the edge of chaos–which seems to be where it’s heading now.
In another post, I discussed one of the most dangerous fractures in our culture, currently, the censorship of public discourse.
Another fracture in modern Western culture worth pointing out is the degradation of the arts—be it visual arts, literature, poetry, music, architecture, etc.
At first thought, the condition of the arts might seem to some to be an unreliable measuring stick for the health and stability of a culture, but consider the arts are, in part, the basis of culture because they are the manifestation of the most creative aspect of the human mind, the imagination.
In his essay, “The Imagination of Man,” Robert Hutchinson explains,
Instead of saying that truth is stranger than fiction, we may say… that fiction is as strange as truth, and that the best fiction is closer to truth than the commonplace events we encounter every day of our lives. Closer to the truth, so to say, than truth itself, for it speaks to us of the worlds within us that the white light of day rarely or never illuminates. Everything that can happen—for good or ill—is buried within us and directs our dreams, our desires, our ambitions, our choices with its unseen hand. The masters of imagination, entertaining us the while, bring us always nearer to the possession of the “understanding heart” which the Psalmist brought to God.
Art is concerned with what is highest in man and reaches beyond his mundane experiences, beyond his ephemeral emotions, and beyond the faculty of his reason into the obscure recesses of his heart to reveal to him, intuitively, what is possible in the human experience, be it good or be it bad.
Aristotle taught something of this in his Poetics when he compared history to poetry, saying, “one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.”
That is, history informs the world of a particular person who has lived or a particular event that has taken place, while poetry raises the possibilities and potential which men are capable of achieving.
Art, by its very nature, prevents atrophy of the soul by continually restoring “to man’s mind the ideals of justice, of hope, of truth, of mercy, of retribution, which else (left to the support of daily life in its realities) would languish for want of sufficient illustration.”
Traditionally, religion and beauty were both inherent aspects of enduring art.
Because art is, in its essence, the creative imitation of memory, perceptions, and the physical senses, it had always been the natural medium for exploring transcendent mystery; and, because beauty is one of the qualities that give rise to human delight, art that is enduring is intrinsically beautiful and meaningful–or at least it ought to be.
In his book, Beauty, Roger Scruton explains, “Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful.”
To illustrate, this is one reason some books are called Great Books, or “classics.” They are beautiful with meaning, and therefore they are enduring.
This is also why the pessimism, fragmentation, and frequent ugliness which encompasses so much of modern visual art is so concerning—perhaps the extremes of Warhol or Mapplethorpe would serve as examples.
The same medium that seeks what is best in man is capable of being manipulated to seek out his worst. Hutchins notes this danger as well when he writes,
This is what the great works of imagination do to us, and their effect is not without its dangers. The human heart is at once the best and worst of our blessings. So readily and so mysteriously moved, and in turn moving us to the greatest actions of life, its power may carry us to beatitude or perdition—depending on the goal to which it is moved and the means we choose to reach the goal.
Art is powerful to move both culture and individual, much more powerful than it is often given credit for, usually because it is as difficult to quantify its power as it is to qualify its virtue.
To this end, Gregory Wolfe, in his book, Beauty Will Save the World, explains, “Art does not work through propositions, but through the indirect, ‘between the lines’ means used by the imagination.”
That is, art’s power is intuitive, not didactic.
Art can move the culture upward, informing and inspiring the development of the best life available to humanity when it is rooted in a sound social order.
It can also plunge the culture into nihilistic despair, hopelessness, and revolution—which is too often the case with much of modern art that is devoid of the components that civilize a people–a common mythos, language, and religion.
Similar to the manner in which the censorship of public discourse looms ominously over the tearing seams of the culture’s fabric with seam ripper in hand, the degradation of art stands abreast staining the culture’s fabric with unimaginative paint droplets flung indiscriminately from its giant brush.
Again, the solution is simple, and of course, simultaneously, extremely difficult. Robust elucidation starts here, and you can subscribe to stay up with this series.