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The Deserts of Nations
In "A Mirror for Artists"-his contribution to I'll
Take My Stand, Agrarianism's classic manifesto, published in
1930-Donald Davidson attacked what he called "the industrial theory of
the arts." According to this Maecenas concept, industrialism can be
counted upon to create an artistic renaissance in which not the
wealthy classes only but the plain people will share. Davidson thought
otherwise. "Industrialism cannot play the role of Maecenas, because
its complete ascendancy will mean that there will be no arts left to
foster; or, if they flourish at all, they will flourish only in a
diseased and disordered condition."
I am reminded of Mr. Davidson's skepticism roughly
once a week, while listening to National Public Radio's "Performance
Today," sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts whose
slogan is, "A Great Nation Deserves Great Art." Obvious corollaries to
this axiom are that a woman of great beauty deserves great wealth to
boot, and Lynn Cheney, as Director of the National Endowment for the
Humanities, deserved a great intellect. I doubt, however, that Donald
Davidson would have agreed with these propositions, which would be
ridiculed out of hand by any competent moral philosopher. Nations, to
a greater extent still than individuals, generally deserve exactly
what they have, no more and no less-even when democratic sentiment and
demagogic politicians assure them otherwise.
Jefferson was confident that public schooling would
produce universal literacy, which in turn would promote popular
enlightenment; John Adams wrote that he devoted his life to public
affairs so that his sons might study history and philosophy, and his
grandsons dedicate themselves to the arts. But Jefferson's idea of a
great nation was the polar opposite of Hamilton's (or David Brooks's),
while his expectations for the success of the public school system
were something short of those entertained by a modern philanthropic
behemoth. More importantly, to their more sober and realistic minds,
the development of American high culture either preceded national
greatness, or developed as a concomitant of it. Kenneth Minogue argues
that political policy devised to attain the conditions of freedom will
end, more likely than not, by destroying free behavior, and that the
quest for political freedom is necessarily the pursuit of something
else. The same is true of anything worth having, including art, of the
"great" as well as the not so great variety.
Freedom, art, national greatness-these things
cannot be created by research and development programs, subsidized by
rich foundations, underwritten by federal tax breaks, and promoted by
educational programs. They are natural growths occurring organically,
not artificial creations imagined as a people's just deserts waiting
to be supplied by super-jobbers from the private and public spheres.
In respect of the arts, the most philanthropic organizations can hope
to accomplish is to preserve and transmit fragments of the dead
civilization the parents and grandparents of their founders helped to
destroy. It is meaningless to say that a great nation deserves great
art, if only for the reason that the formula is tautological: Lacking
a distinguished artistic tradition, a nation cannot be said to be
"great" at all. You will never hear a Frenchman say that France, as a
great nation, deserves great art, because he understands that his
country is both great in its artistic past and artistic in its
national greatness. France, in other words, remains a civilization-as
the United States was once (however modestly by comparison), before
it chose to sacrifice that achievement on the altar of economic
success and military power.
The fatuity of the NEA's assertion exemplifies the
truth of Davidson's argument, and indicates the magnitude of the
problem confronting the arts in modern times. Industrial society,
being what it is, supposes that industry and commerce can support and
encourage art without industrializing it. (Or perhaps it assumes that
the industrialization of anything is an improvement over the
same thing in its preindustrialized form.) Its intellectual confusion
is the result of industrialism's inability to understand the concept
of reason in making (Aquinas's definition of art) that is so at odds
with its own shibboleth, which is making for a reason. Donald Davidson
knew better: "For [the arts] have been produced in societies which
were for the most part stable, religious, and agrarian; where the
goodness of life was measured by a scale of values having little to do
with the material values of industrialism; where men were never too
far from nature to forget that the chief subject of art, in the final
sense, is nature."
The Industrial School of fiction popular around the
turn of the last century ( Zola, Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Frank
Norris) is an example of how artistic talent may be narrowed and
impoverished by the constrictive industrial milieu, when it accepts
the industrial world for the world itself. At the opposite end of the
creative process, the iron logic, irreversible direction, and
irresistible momentum of industrialism are all apparent in in the
publishing industry today, the former swarm of distinguished small
imprints having been consolidated and cartelized into a handful of
so-called "major" publishers, themselves owned by corporate giants
whose chief business is manufacturing toothpaste and producing gas and
oil. The rationale given for consolidation was that bigger publishers
meant more money to publish more good books, also bigger advances and
other emoluments for their authors. Instead (it would have come as no
surprise to either Davidson or Maecenas), consolidation has
resulted in the commercialization of a once gentlemanly industry,
including the ruthless imposition of rule of the bottom line, the
trashing of American letters, and the exponential expansion of a
beggarly literary class unable to get its best work (or any work at
all) into print by the "major" publishers. The condition of the
national letters these days appears nearly hopeless. Whether it is or
isn't, the situation is not one that the NEA is in a position to
alleviate or cure, even if it showed any sign of wanting to try
(which, so far as I know, it doesn't).
In the end, the focus of industrialism and the
values that determine that focus ensure disaster for the arts in
industrial society, even more than its logic does. Industrialism has
no use for what T.S. Eliot called the permanent things, since the
permanent things are not susceptible of industrialization: insofar as
they can be "produced" at all, they cannot be mass-produced and
mass-marketed (though they can be exploited in the marketing of
the productible, impermanent things). Nor can what is permanent be
rendered obsolete and made replaceable, at a profit. It is true,
industrialism does its best to make Truth obsolete by offering all
sorts of heresies, diversions, and baubles in its place: inventing and
reinventing religions, churches, philosophies, "values"--even human
nature itself. But industrialism, though enjoying the gift of
seemingly endless production, lacks the God-given gift of creation.
Thus it can fill the world with artifacts, but not with creatures and
the life-given and life-giving creations creatures depend on. (If ever
it should succeed in creating "creatures" of its own, they will be
mere artifacts, too, of course.) Industrialism, then, creates a world
that is ever more artificial and less natural, more passing and less
permanent, like the values and ideas its activity expresses, and upon
which it depends. And to the extent that the world becomes
increasingly artificial, the people who inhabit that world grow
increasingly inhuman-which is to say, unreal.
How can the artist succeed in making art from an
artificial wasteland populated by a mass of industrialized humanoids?
Eliot identified the dilemma poetically in 1922; Donald Davidson posed
it in a political and cultural manifesto less than a decade later.
Eliot's speculative treatment of the problem was theoretical,
philosophical, poetical; Davidson's statement practical, realistic,
and thoroughly down-to-earth. What he was pointing to is only the
fundamental question concerning artistic enterprise in the twentieth
and twenty-first century. How does the artist approach reality by the
venue of the unreal? How does art--whose final subject is nature,
remember--survive its replacement by the artificial environment (the
sprawling suburbs and mechanized supermetropolises) that industrialism
has substituted for the natural-that is to say, the human-one? How do
New Jersey, Houston, or Los Angeles provide artists with the intuition
of the permanent things and their objectification; both of them
necessary to the creation of anything beyond a pale imitation, or
grotesque travesty, of a genuine work of art? The problem is
intensively reinforced by the mass industrialization of education,
communication, culture, and, increasingly, political discourse. It
begins to seem almost assured, as Davidson expected, that the arts, in
the sense of a connected and recognized institution, cannot in the
long run survive the industrial system--and now the post-industrial
one, that looks more inimical still to their future.
The denatured post-industrial wasteland, hardwired
to the empty chaos of cyberspace, cannot provide the kinds, or the
variety, of intense human experience that have historically provided
the arts with their inspiration, subject, and object. That, really, is
the crux of the matter. It was said of Christopher Wren, "If you seek
his monument, look around you." So with the arts in a post-industrial
world. Only these monuments are not living stones, but monuments of a
different sort: they are tombstones, in fact. Novels, poems, plays;
paintings, sculpture, architecture; operas, symphonies, chamber music:
They are, most of them, dead: the creations of dead people deprived of
the naturally grounded lives human nature requires, and art demands.
We know the answer to the question, What can come out of Nazareth? Yet
there is something almost infinitely less than Nazareth here. It is
called New Canaan, or Darien, or Westport. Perhaps the best writer to
have come out of suburbia is John Updike-a talent of Shakespearean
breadth and depth by comparison with subsequent generations of
American novelists. Industrial civilization, ultimately, gives artists
nothing to work with, nothing to get their hands on or their minds
into. Art is rooted in reality. When industrialism removes nature from
experience, denies the permanence of metaphysical truth, and
transforms human multiplicity into a social uniformity imposed by the
logic of democratic consumerism, art in the true sense becomes an
impossibility in a new and unreal world, pioneered and realized most
fully by America.
In order for us to love our country, said Burke,
our country must be lovely. What goes for patriotism goes for art as
well. Before the industrial era, artists did not take for their
subjects the ugly, the perverted, the demented, the chaotic: That
phenomenon was reserved for the industrialized modern age. Art
arranges, rearranges, and heightens reality as the artist perceives
and experiences it. For art to reflect loveliness, there must be
loveliness for it to reflect-as an influence, as a model, and as a
grateful response. Given a nation that is truly lovely, it will see
itself reflected naturally and abundantly, without the aid of a
national endowment. And alternatively. Writers, composers, painters,
and sculptors raised in a wasteland of shopping malls, commercial
strips, industrial parks, blighted farmland, and plastic suburbs will
reflect not just the unloveliness surrounding them, but-since
aesthetics is a branch of moral philosophy, as Burke understood-the
encompassing moral sink as well.
"A great nation deserves a great cuisine."
"A great nation deserves great style."
"A great nation deserves great learning."
"A great nation deserves great piety."
"A great nation deserves great politicians."
"A great nation deserves a great war."
Perhaps national greatness resembles personal
greatness in being a quantity, like freedom, that should not be sought
consciously and for itself, and cannot be attained that way. Perhaps
also the NEA's motto is in need of modification. Or perhaps it should
be scrapped altogether. Whether the great society is properly
accompanied by great art depends on your notion of greatness, after
all. And of art. The important thing to understand is that deserts
have nothing to do with it, anymore than the physique of Arnold
Schwarzenegger deserves the genius of Mozart or Cervantes. |
