It is delightful to find a title like An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture, by Roger Scruton. I am ignorant of many things, but I am not an idiot.
Dr. Scruton begins by defining what he means by culture, then giving a quick history of culture from the Enlightenment through Modernism and PostModernism. One central principle of his work is that culture has a religious root and a religious meaning. Within that tradition, the culture is as invisible as the water a fish swims in. Folk music is the music that other folks sing, our music is just what comes naturally to us.
Unfortunately, though Dr. Scruton worries about the "anthropologist effect" which by abstracting and distancing the observer biases the observer to a reductionist view, he applies that same approach to religion. He falls in with the view that religion is constructed to explain the world and to regulate marriage and mourning; instead of a response to an encounter (however confused) with God. He confuses the origins of religion and magic. This means that some of his statements, and certainly his conclusions, have the feel of hanging in mid-air.
This is the more regrettable since his analysis is essentially correct. Side effects of religion include art to assist the worshiper in devotion, "rites of passage" into adulthood and into marriage, a place and meaning for the dead, a community to belong to, and obligations to the living, the dead, and the unborn.
These arts and rites and views and obligations form a web which he calls the common culture, and distinguishes this from "'high culture,' which is a form of expertise." Both of these he distinguishes from "popular culture," which is not derived from religion or from expertise.
When the religion is no longer believed, the art can survive, but the meaning drains away from the rituals and the obligations. The "high culture" is still valuable, but the "common culture" must begin to change, and loses cohesion. With sex desacralized, marriage becomes more of a social contract, and the obligation to the children more of a personal than societal imperative.
The history of the West since the Enlightenment has been of a shift from obligations to God and tribe to obligations to a more abstract country, and of a shift from social obligations to individual liberties. To fill the void left by religion, the 18'th century elevated aesthetics: things valued because of their beauty or fittingness as means of ennobling the human spirit. Of course this meant that these noble artworks needed to be recognized, and a sort of priesthood of aesthetic/cultured men created to guard and explain them. To fill the void left by the sense of community rose Romanticism, which idealized nature and the simple villages and thereby proved that we'd lost them.
He introduces a critical distinction attributed to Coleridge between fantasy and imagination. The fantasy is the desire or image we bring to art looking for a representation of it, while imagination is our response to the art. Fantasy looks for an illusion, but our imagination rouses our response to the artist's thoughts. An example of fantasy is, of course, pornography: the voyeur looks for a representation of his desire, and little else. For imagination he offers the example of someone watching Othello: actively and intelligently empathizing with complex characters. Sentimentality derives from fantasy: the focus of Tennyson's In Memoriam is the grieving poet; the dead man is a pale cartoon.
I don't think the distinction between fantasy and imagination is quite as clearcut as he does.
As religion retreated still farther, and value reduces merely to price, we get modernism, and he takes Wagner as an example. Wagner, he says, tried to use grand music and a grand myth to evoke nobility. Unable to conceive of marriage and raising a family as a sacred occupation, but convinced of the nobility of love, he offers the image of self-sacrificing love, where even the divine can only be redeemed through human love and death. Okaaay . . . But what is worse is what has become of his work in modern productions: the action is invariably caricatured, wrapped in inverted commas, and reduced to the dimensions of a television sitcom. Sarcasm and satire run riot on the stage, not because they have anything to prove or say in the shadow of this unsurpassably noble music, but because the nobility has become intolerable.
In modernity every goal and value is "anthropologized," partly because of the corrosive irreligion and partly in reaction to the empty sentimentality that went before. The "high culture" now becomes empty of any authority (who says xyz is ennobling, and why do I care?). Reaction became a value in its own right, and it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in the sphere of high art which is not in some way a 'challenge' to the ordinary public. The priesthood of high culture now won't recognize anything as cultured unless it shocks.
Dr. Scruton believes that photography, because it reflects what is present now without any filtering of the artist's intelligence or imagination, is very hard to make great art with. Cinema, he argues, has an embedded tendency to degenerate into the flashy, the sexy, and the violent.
Now we come to pop culture, or youth culture (which is essentially the same thing). One of my teenage daughters read this chapter, and asserts that his description of music is unfair. My impressions match his, however--the music is banal, noisy, self-indulgent, inhuman (literally--processed and distorted and sometimes {techno} mechanistic) and despairing. With no meaningful rites of passage and no sense of obligation in sex or in the country, the youth culture becomes entirely self-referential and self-indulgent. Rejection of adult authority is an article of faith, and the lack of intellectual discipline leaves the artists inarticulate.
The past century saw the rise of the "intellectual," the self-appointed wise man inspired to tell us all how to run our lives and countries. A pity so many of them were so disconnected from real life . . . And an even deeper pity so many people were willing to follow them.
PostModernism denies the possibility of truth, and claims that every reality is "constructed," and that every form of authority is an illegitimate power and must be fought. Why this solipsistic (and self-contradictory) manure should be so popular eludes me, but it infects campuses and even popular culture (my observation). This destroys everything, as it is meant to do. Dr. Scruton gives examples of the deconstructionists' prose, and likens it to magical spells of destruction--which I find very apt.
Dr. Scruton concludes by bewailing the destruction of all forms of culture around us, and re-emphasizing that the only way to re-invigorate culture and society is with a common culture, and the only way to a common culture is through a religion or the moral equivalent. We need the Wagnerian 'as if'; we need the vision of ourselves as ennobled by our aims and passions, existing in ethical relation with our kind. But we must fee ourselves of those last romantic illusions--including the illusion that love is the answer. Love is not the answer, but the question, the thing which sets us searching for meaning in a world from which meaning has retreated. How then, should we live, when we live beyond belief? He ends by invoking Confucius as an exemplar of one who does not believe, but lives as if he did.
Dr. Scruton (and you, too) should read Francis Schaeffer's The God Who Is There for a parallel account of the decay of Western society through the philosophers and the arts.
My quick overview does little justice to the book. He is a much better writer than I, and lucidly explains where we are and how we got here as far as culture is concerned. I think the distinction between ideal high culture and pop culture is not quite as clear as he implies. Some popular artists have a deep understanding of life, and will eventually find their work in the canon of high culture. For instance, most comic strips rely on caricature and tired jokes, but a few sometimes remind me of the only-superficially simple Chinese paintings. And within a common culture, if an artwork has a noble meaning, even if the execution of the art is inferior, it is not fair to call it kitsch.
I'm glad he did not call for a revival of religion in order to revive culture. I don't know whether he thinks it impossible to believe anymore, or inappropriate to try to invoke the Almighty in defense of Browning. I say Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you (Matt 6:33).
Read the book.
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