Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age
WILMINGTON, DELAWARE
For Suzanne, my beauty
Dostoevsky once let drop the enigmatic phrase: “Beauty will save the world.” What does this mean? For a long time it used to seem to me that this was a mere phrase. Just how could such a thing be possible? When had it ever happened in the bloodthirsty course of history that beauty had saved anyone from anything? Beauty had provided embellishment, certainly, given uplift—but whom had it ever saved?
However, there is a special quality in the essence of beauty, a special quality in the status of art: the conviction carried by a genuine work of art is absolutely indisputable and tames even the strongly opposed heart. One can construct a political speech, an assertive journalistic polemic, a program for organizing society, a philosophical system, so that in appearance it is smooth, well structured, and yet it is built upon a mistake, a lie; and the hidden element, the distortion, will not immediately become visible. And a speech, or a journalistic essay, or a program in rebuttal, or a different philosophical structure can be counterposed to the first—and it will seem just as well constructed and as smooth, and everything will seem to fit. And therefore one has faith in them—yet one has no faith.
It is vain to affirm that which the heart does not confirm. In contrast, a work of art bears within itself its own confirmation: concepts which are manufactured out of whole cloth or overstrained will not stand up to being tested in images, will somehow fall apart and turn out to be sickly and pallid and convincing to no one. Works steeped in truth and presenting it to us vividly alive will take hold of us, will attract us to themselves with great power—and no one, ever, even in a later age, will presume to negate them. And so perhaps that old trinity of Truth and Good and Beauty is not just the formal outworn formula it used to seem to us during our heady, materialistic youth. If the crests of these three trees join together, as the investigators and explorers used to affirm, and if the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light—yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the work of all three.
And in that case it was not a slip of the tongue for Dostoevsky to say that “Beauty will save the world,” but a prophecy.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture”
Prologue: The Four Cultures and Me
PART ONE: FROM IDEOLOGY TO HUMANISM
1. Beauty Will Save the World
2. A Portrait of the Editor as a Young Man
3. Art, Faith, and the Stewardship of Culture
4. Christian Humanism: A Faith for All Seasons
PART TWO: CHRISTIANITY, LITERATURE, AND MODERNITY
5. The Writer of Faith in a Fractured Culture
6. Ever Ancient, Ever New: The Catholic Writer in the Modern World
7. After This Our Exile: The Christian Poet in the Modern World
8. The End in the Beginning: The Paradox of Artistic Creativity
PART THREE: SIX WRITERS
9. Evelyn Waugh: Savage Indignation
10. Shusaku Endo: At the Crossroads between East and West
11. Geoffrey Hill: True Sequences of Pain
12. Andrew Lytle: Myth and Memory
13. Wendell Berry: Marriage to a Place
14. Larry Woiwode: The Overwhelming Question
PART FOUR: THREE ARTISTS
15. Fred Folsom: Grace à Go-Go
16. Mary McCleary: Constructing Paradox
17. Makoto Fujimura: Refiner’s Fire
PART FIVE: FOUR MEN OF LETTERS
18. Russell Kirk: Politics and the Imagination
19. Gerhart Niemeyer: Discerning the Spirits
20. Malcolm Muggeridge: Slow Pilgrim
21. Marion Montgomery: Being and Metaphor
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Prologue
The Four Cultures and Me
An old Albert Brooks film has been rattling around in my head of late: Defending Your Life. You may recall it. A divorced advertising exec fiddles with the CD player in his brand new BMW and plows into a city bus, only to find himself in Judgment City, where he has to account for himself in a jury trial in which the evidence consists of episodes from his life. The worst possible result isn’t exactly hell; it’s being sent back to earth for another attempt, rather than moving forward to a better planet and a better life.
In the version of the film playing in my head, the judges, prosecutor, and defender all bear a striking resemblance to … me. Now that I have arrived at that mid-way point of which Dante speaks, I find myself looking back, trying to figure out exactly how I got here. I may not be quite as lost as Dante’s pilgrim in the dark wood, but I am beginning to realize one thing—just how wrong I’ve been in thinking I always knew what I was doing. The conscious choices I made now appear to me more like the iceberg’s tip. The greater mass—my deeper self—has been below the surface, moved by currents of which I am only now becoming aware.
Reflections of this sort tend to accompany the task of assembling essays written over the course of a quarter century.
I’ve found some consolation in the thought that Dante’s pilgrimage doesn’t really begin at mid-life; in a sense, he’s been on a pilgrimage all along. His youthful encounter with Beatrice, apprenticeship to the craft of poetry, and entanglement with the political vicissitudes of Florence—these and other chapters of his story shape the course of his voyage through the afterlife.
In other words, what happens when Dante the pilgrim sets off with Virgil is not so much a brand new life as it is an altered perspective on the life he already has. It is precisely through Beatrice, poetry, and politics that he will find the path toward redemption.
Gaining Perspective
Not long ago I came across a book that provided something of a roadmap for the pilgrimage I’ve been tracing: Four Cultures of the West. I hesitate to cast its author, John W. O’Malley, S. J., in the role of Virgil, but he has helped me to gain a sense of perspective on my journey—and on whatever coherence the essays in this book may possess.
Four Cultures of the West is a lively, wide-ranging, historical survey of the core styles of thought and vision that have shaped our civilization. O’Malley is a church historian specializing in the early modern period; he has written about the Council of Trent and the founding of the Jesuit order. As it turns out, Four Cultures is a book written in much the same spirit as I read it. In the introduction he says, “I was curious to understand better what had happened to me in the process” of being educated as a Jesuit.
I’m not a Jesuit, but in O’Malley’s story I’ve begun to grasp an order in what formerly was inchoate. Though he is too modest a man to say it outright in the pages of his book, it is no exaggeration to say that the Jesuit order was founded in the Renaissance during a remarkable period in which all four of these cultures were synthesized by Ignatius of Loyola and his followers. At the outset of Four Cultures, O’Malley alludes to the early church father Tertullian’s famous challenge: “What has Jerusalem to do with Athens?” In other words, what do the prophetic, religious cultures of Judaism and Christianity have to do with the “worldly” cultures of ancient Greece and Rome?
The answer given by the West, as it evolved through the medieval and Renaissance eras, was: plenty. Tertullian’s prophetic culture was placed in a dynamic, productive tension with the other three cultures: the academic/professional culture of the philosophers and scientists, the humanistic culture of poets, rhetoricians, and statesmen, and the artistic culture of visual and performing artists.
Another way to look at this synthesis is through the ancient language of the “transcendentals”: if the prophetic culture was fundamentally concerned with goodness and the academic culture with truth, then rhetoric and the arts sought to reflect beauty.
Father O’Malley is aware of the dangers of sweeping generalization. He concedes that there are a number of other cultures, such as the culture of business. But he makes a compelling case for the Big Four as fundamental to our development as a civilization.
In meditating upon the interplay between these cultures—sometimes harmonic and often antagonistic—I’ve come to understand a bit more about my own pilgrimage. Thanks to the love and generosity of my parents, I received an outstanding education, both in and out of the classroom. I was steeped from childhood in all four cultures, but as I came to maturity, I found myself inexorably drawn to the task of promoting two of them because I had seen what happened when the other two ran amok.
In his book Father O’Malley refrains from discussing any metatheory of how the cultures ought to relate to one another. Instead, he sticks to historically grounded description. At first I found this frustrating. I was hoping for some color commentary, some grand, unified theory. But I came to see the wisdom of his method: he hopes that the reader will “make application to your own milieu.”
Wanting It All
As a child growing up in New York City, I attended a first-rate school, went to church on Sunday, had books read out loud to me in the evening, and was taken to Lincoln Center by my parents. The four cultures beckoned.
In school I was introduced to the academic method, which O’Malley notes is analytical and “never satisfied … critical of every wisdom … insatiably eager to ask the further question.” I enjoyed that the method of academic discourse is, as O’Malley puts it, “agonistic and contentious.”
In church I encountered prophetic culture, where the words of Jesus and the Old Testament prophets came from another language altogether, that of revelation—the transcendent slicing through our worldly expectations. Though its method was that of proclamation rather than reasoning, and paradox rather than syllogism, I felt instinctively that the prophetic complemented the academic, that revelation could stand up to reason, and that the foolishness of faith could prevent the mind from falling into excessive pride.
My introduction to cultures three and four came largely through my parents. As a former advertising executive, my father understood business culture, but in reality his heart lay in the tradition of what O’Malley calls “humanist culture,” the province of “rhetoric, poetry, and the common good.” When I was a child he turned away from business to throw himself into the realm of nonprofit causes. His gift as a writer was for the op-ed piece—language preoccupied with the first two cultures but aimed at persuasion, which is the essence of rhetoric. My father was less interested in poetry and fiction, which O’Malley notes are “more circular than linear” and glory “in ambiguity, in rich layers of meaning.” Nevertheless, my father’s love of words and good writing—his passion not only for argument but for the beauty of truth that can move the heart—helped awaken my interest in literature.
From my mother, who read stories and poetry to me at bedtime, I derived a fascination for culture four, the visual and performing arts. She took me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Boston Symphony Orchestra before I could determine that these weren’t cool things for a boy to like. And so they imprinted themselves on my consciousness. In discussing culture four, O’Malley notes the relationship between liturgy and “ritual performance”; certainly Seiji Ozawa, the legendary music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, had the aura of a high priest as he stood, baton in hand, before the orchestra.
In my innocence, I wanted it all, the whole blessed symphony of the four cultures. And of course there was something beautiful and right in that ardent desire. (I would have loved being educated by Jesuits.) But my fall from innocence was this: I hadn’t yet understood my limitations and gifts, nor had I fully grasped the state of the world around me.
O’Malley rightly stresses that the differences and clashes between the four cultures are not always about content. They are in many ways about style, about forms of thought and discourse. The classic example he uses is the debate between Erasmus and Luther on free will. The two men shared many ideas, including a passion for reforming the church, and yet the clash between them was not merely about ideas. Luther spoke in the language of prophetic absolutes, while Erasmus the humanist preferred caution, nuance, and ambiguity—the accumulation of many small truths, rendered beautiful by art, to the monolithically proclaimed truth.
While each of the cultures has its virtues and vices, I came to fear the increasingly imperial claims of the prophetic and academic cultures—at least in the postmodern America in which I came to maturity. A number of the essays in Part One deal with my response to the “culture wars,” which seem to me a conflict between politicized, ideological forms of the prophetic and academic cultures (which often used the arts as an arena in which to fight their battles). Those essays trace a journey that may appear, on the surface, to recount my flight from the conservative intellectual movement—the movement that nurtured me and gave me my start in the world. But I prefer to believe that the path I’ve trod remains true to the deepest wisdom of conservatism.
It may seem odd to criticize a postmodern academic culture that has called into question our capacity to know the truth. But the reality is that this academic culture has failed to take the best insights of postmodernism into account as an incentive to humility, preferring to smuggle its contentious, abstract claims to truth in through the back door. In any case, public discourse has increasingly come to be dominated by warring academic elites; there are fewer and fewer men and women of “letters”—non-academic artists and writers who balance a passion for truth and goodness with the concreteness that beauty demands—involved in the conversation.
At the same time, the acolytes of goodness—whether religious fundamentalists or intolerant secular advocates of tolerance—fire endless salvos from their moralistic fortresses. Just as we lack men and women of letters, so we are without true prophets. But scolds and do-gooders we have aplenty, on both left and right.
The Recovery of Christian Humanism
At a time when goodness and truth, faith and reason, were being so roundly abused, I found myself drawn to the common elements in cultures three and four: beauty and the imagination, which shun ideological abstractions for the realm of flesh and blood. O’Malley says of the Renaissance humanists I came to admire that their imaginative genius consisted in the way they understood context, the layers of historical circumstance and symbolic meaning in which ideas inhere. By studying languages and the way they change, the humanists developed the disciplines of history and textual criticism. They sought precision and clarity but they also understood the value of ambiguity, the difficulty of applying grand abstractions to the messiness of daily life.
The humanists also believed that rhetoric was the use of crafted language to speak to specific contexts. Unlike prophecy or analysis, the primary goal of rhetoric is to seek unity, common ground. Far from being ivory tower intellectuals, humanists frequently inhabit the political realm, but they do so as peacemakers, not firebrands. Finding the right word for the right occasion exemplifies this desire for points of connection. And as O’Malley notes, rhetoric aims not just at the head but at the heart.
But consider the low regard in which we hold terms like rhetoric and oratory today. Their meanings have almost become completely reversed, so that they now are synonymous with falsehood and verbal frippery. Such is the politicization of our times that I’m hard pressed to name anyone beyond Wendell Berry capable of bearing the title of orator.
The Renaissance humanists celebrated rhetoric but they also shared a passion for literature, which they called bonae litterae, “good letters.” Literature and art are even more fully in the camp of beauty; they are in a profound sense, disinterested, without an immediate agenda to push. In art, beauty takes the hard edges off truth and goodness and forces them down to earth, where they have to make sense or be revealed as impostors.
Father O’Malley helped me to see why I’ve become an advocate for beauty as the necessary agent for rendering the claims of truth and goodness meaningful. To borrow the title of a recent book by Andy Crouch, I have chosen to pursue the task of “culture making” rather than merely critiquing culture.
So this life I’m defending has been spent in the realm of creative writing and the arts, though never in deliberate isolation from the other cultures. In particular, I’ve been drawn to the ways that prophetic culture can be placed in tension with the imaginative cultures, precisely because they need each other so much. What happens when prophecy meets art, heaven meets earth—when divine imperatives meet the tangled human condition? When two cultures meet, they challenge one another, preventing them from the excesses particular to their own natures. Faith asks art to be about something more than formal virtuosity and to consider that meaning itself is already inherently metaphysical, even religious. Art asks faith to become incarnate in the human condition without compromise—or evasion—and remain compelling.
When a character in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot says, “Beauty will save the world,” the hyperbole seems over the top. And yet there just may be something profoundly true about it. The late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—as stern a moralist as the world is ever likely to witness—came to believe in the wisdom of Dostoevsky’s insight, as he argues in his acceptance address for the Nobel Prize in Literature. So, too, another writer who experienced the ravages of totalitarianism in the twentieth century came to testify on behalf of beauty. Czeslaw Milosz, in his poem “One More Day,” writes,
And though the good is weak, beauty is very strong.
Nonbeing sprawls, everywhere it turns into ash whole expanses of being,
It masquerades in shapes and colors that imitate existence
And no one would know it, if they did not know that it was ugly.
And when people cease to believe that there is good and evil
Only beauty will call to them and save them
So that they still know how to say: this is true and that is false.
Toward the end of my undergraduate days, I came across a passage in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Nobel Lecture” which I found startling and even a bit disturbing. Solzhenitsyn begins his address on the nature and role of literature with a brief, enigmatic quotation from Dostoevsky: “Beauty will save the world.” Solzhenitsyn confesses that the phrase had puzzled and intrigued him for some time. And yet, he told the distinguished audience, he had come to believe that Dostoevsky was right.
For a young college student, possessed of a boundless confidence in rational debate and political action, the implication that beauty alone could harbor such redemptive powers was unsettling, to say the least. It was the kind of idea one would expect of an Oscar Wilde or some other fin de siècle decadent; it seemed perilously close to a hedonistic endorsement of “art for art’s sake.” What of truth and goodness, the other two “transcendentals”? And yet here were two great Russian novelists, known for their stern, prophetic, and intensely moral sensibilities, as well as for their stark depictions of nihilism and human degradation, applauding the redemptive force of beauty.
But the phrase stuck in my mind, and found corroboration in my studies of the role of the imagination in the social order. Like Solzhenitsyn, I have been won over by Dostoevsky’s wisdom. Whereas I once believed that the decadence of the West could only be turned around through politics and intellectual dialectics, I am now convinced that authentic renewal can only emerge out of the imaginative visions of the artist and the mystic. This does not mean that I have withdrawn into some anti-intellectual Palace of Art. Rather, it involves the conviction that politics and rhetoric are not autonomous forces, but are shaped by the pre-political roots of culture: myth, metaphor, and spiritual experience as recorded by the artist and the saint.
My own vocation, as I have come to understand it, is to explore the relationship between religion, art, and culture in order to discover how the imagination may “redeem the time.” In the process of discovering this vocation, conservatism played a paradoxical role: it both inspired and hampered my search. On the one hand, conservative thinkers helped me to understand what culture is, and they introduced me to the riches of our Western heritage. But on the other hand I found that conservatives were so deeply alienated from modern culture that they had retreated from any serious engagement with it. This retreat, it seems to me, has had damaging consequences for the long-term success of the conservative mission.
For a time, I concurred with most conservatives in their wholesale rejection of modern culture. But eventually I saw this as a very un-conservative position to take. A culture is a delicate, organic thing; however ill it may become, we simply cannot stop caring for it and shut down the life-support machines. When a civilization truly dies, it cannot easily be resurrected.
In what follows, I’d like to retrace of few of the steps that led to my sense of vocation and current ambivalence about the conservative attitude toward culture and the redemptive power of the imagination.
Literature in the Waste Land
I was singularly fortunate in having two distinguished conservative scholars, Russell Kirk and Gerhart Niemeyer, as teachers throughout my undergraduate years. They took me—a raw youth very much caught up in the ephemera of the present—and provided me with a past. By grounding me in the Western tradition, they taught me, in M. E. Bradford’s phrase, the importance of “remembering who we are.” Only then was I prepared to return to the present. Armed with that knowledge, I became aware that the crisis of modernity was not merely the work of Democrats and Communists, but the product of a deeper spiritual malaise.
The essence of modernity, according to Kirk and Niemeyer, is the denial that man can know and conform to the transcendent order, so that he must therefore construct his own order, as an extension of his mind. The motto of the modern project was first uttered by Francis Bacon, who said that “knowledge is power.” Later, Karl Marx would proclaim, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” The political expression of modernity, of course, is the ideological regime, founded on a rigid system of abstractions which are imposed on society by force.
But totalitarian regimes are not the only expression of ideology, or else the dissolution of the Soviet Union would signal the end of modernity. As Kirk, Niemeyer, and other conservatives, such as Richard Weaver, have pointed out, ideology also infects Western liberal societies. Though it can take many forms—logical positivism, deconstruction, and so on—ideology involves a fundamental alienation from being.
While ideology often claims the certainties of an absolutist intellectual system, its effects on the actual experiences of individuals tend to produce feelings of alienation and dislocation. The modern project, which began with the elevation of the self and the assertion of its nearly limitless power, has resulted in a world in which the individual self is a precarious fragment, without ties to true community or allegiance to legitimate authority.
Of course, the alienated self, wavering between dreams of power and bouts of angst, is the subject of most of modern art and literature. Given my love of literature, it was the work of the poets, novelists, and playwrights who explored the fallout of modernity that most attracted me. From Niemeyer I received insights into the novels of Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Arthur Koestler, and Thomas Mann. And from Kirk I was introduced to T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis—a group of extraordinary writers who were once known as the “Men of 1914.”
The figure of Eliot, however, loomed largest in my mind. Eliot was not only the subtlest chronicler of the modern malaise, but also the most reliable guide out of the morass. In poems like “Gerontion” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Eliot portrays, in dramatic monologues, the alienated, detached, and despairing modern self. Eliot’s Waste Land gave the age its appropriate metaphor. Yet even in this poem of spiritual aridity, Eliot reveals his struggle for spiritual healing, listening to “What the Thunder Said.” From the images of hell and limbo in the early poems, Eliot moves on to the experience of purgatory in Ash Wednesday. Finally, his Four Quartets speak of the irradiation of grace into the world, and of redemption through suffering. This final masterpiece records the journey of the isolated self toward integration, which includes a renewed sense of the presence of the past, and fleeting glimpses of union with God.
What gave added excitement to studying Eliot with Kirk was that he had known Eliot and Eliot’s friends, Wyndham Lewis and Roy Campbell. I have always been fascinated by the literary and intellectual communities formed by writers with similar insights into their age, such as Samuel Johnson’s “Club” and C. S. Lewis’s Inklings. These meetings of the minds seem to me to be the essence of living culture, models of artists-in-community engaged with the challenges and opportunities of their time. Even though Kirk had known these writers only in their later years, I felt somehow touched by their vital presence, a fellow participant in their imaginative endeavors.
Modernity vs. Modernism
But there was a contradiction in my thinking at the time that slowly worked itself up to the surface of my mind. Like many conservatives I extolled Eliot as the supreme critic of the modern wasteland, which had produced art and literature characterized by chaos and fragmentation, squalor and ugliness, egotism, sensual excess, and an obsession with primitive paganism as opposed to Western Christianity. Yet I counted among my heroes Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, whose works were prime examples of the aesthetics of High Modernism. How could these facts be reconciled?
When I compared Eliot’s works to those of Stravinsky and Picasso—two modern villains in the conservative hall of infamy—I could not help noticing striking similarities. All three employed the technique of fragmentation of time and space. One could plausibly argue that Eliot’s Waste Land is a Cubist poem, a series of disjointed angles and multiple perspectives. Both Eliot and Picasso were aware that technology and ideology had fragmented our perception of reality; in their art, they used that fragmentation as a starting point, and sought to move through it to new visions of unity.
Another example of the conservative attack on “modern art” concerns the issue of paganism. Here, too, I found that the reality was more subtle than the caricature. Just as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring evoked a pagan ritual and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon used African tribal masks, so Eliot in The Waste Land brought in primitive vegetation myths, as well as the insights of Buddhism and Hinduism. I found that all three artists were interested in paganism precisely because it seemed to possess the awe, sacramentality, and reverence for mystery that had been drained out of late nineteenth-century bourgeois liberal Christianity.
As it happens, Stravinsky, like Eliot, went on to become an orthodox Christian and a self-described “classicist.” Picasso did not make such a pilgrimage, nor did his life reflect a depth of spiritual understanding or moral rectitude. But to deny the imaginative insight Picasso possessed on the basis of his intellectual and moral failings, I came to realize, was both petty and closed-minded. Similarly, when I read D. H. Lawrence I found a penetrating critique of technology and the modern dichotomy between mind and body. Yet I have found that most conservatives prefer to dismiss Lawrence on the basis of his ideas about sexual liberation. Though it may seem a truism to most people, it eventually dawned on me that one can learn from an artist or thinker who asks the right questions, even if one may disagree with many of his answers.
Thus I was forced to account for the fact that many conservatives had succumbed to philistinism. Why did they utter these blanket condemnations of “modern art”? Why would anyone demand that art—a subtle medium, characterized by the indirections of irony, ambiguity, and hidden meaning—preach the “truth” directly? Why categorize artists and writers as good or bad in terms of ideology, rather than of imaginative vision?
The root of the problem, I believe, is a misunderstanding of, or aversion to, the nature of the imagination itself. Part of this can be traced to the Puritan and pragmatic strains in the American character. Conservatives have, by and large, focused their energies on political action and the theoretical work necessary to undertake action. The indirection of art, with its lack of moralizing and categorizing, strikes the pragmatic mind as being unedifying, and thus as inessential. Insofar as the great artists and writers of the past are admired, it is for their support of some idea, rather than for the complex, many-sided vision of their art.
The artist, like anyone else, is a representative of his time. His role, to paraphrase Hamlet, is to reveal “the form and pressure of the age.” By “pressure,” Shakespeare means impression or stamp. While it is true that some art can portray the ideal, the primary burden of art is to grapple with the reality of the present. Only by engaging the present can art achieve universal meaning. Modern artists create works that reflect modern conditions; they explore modernity, as it were, from the inside. The least imaginative of them merely reflect the surface of things. But the great artists dramatize the conflicts of their time, embedding meaning deep within their works.
It was Eliot himself who formulated the best response to those who want art merely to depict idealized forms of beauty. “We mean all sorts of things, I know, by Beauty. But the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal. It is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.” Eliot’s perception is the natural extension of Dostoevsky’s prophecy that “Beauty will save the world.” Just as Christians believe that God became man so that He could reach into, and atone for, the pain and isolation of sin, so the artist descends into disorder so that he might discover a redemptive path toward order.
When it comes to culture, most conservatives are not conservative at all. As Burke, the father of modern conservatism, understood, the outward forms of society must change over time, but in such a way as to preserve the essence or underlying truth of human nature. So it is with art. New artistic styles begin in revolution (Gothic architecture came as a shock to those steeped in Romanesque), but such revolts are against a style that has ossified and lost its capacity to bear meaning.
Eliot, Picasso, and Stravinsky wanted to break out of a lifeless and complacent materialism. They wanted art to be able to do more than describe the surface of things or provide uplifting images of an ideal world. They wanted to shock, not merely to be sensational, but in the sense that the artist can help us see the world anew, as if for the first time, with a shock of recognition.
Ironically, I found that the conservative thinker Richard Weaver, with whom I agreed so thoroughly on most issues, represented the modern-art-is-degraded school of thought. In the chapter of Ideas Have Consequences entitled “Egotism in Work and Art,” Weaver presents the classic notion of the West as experiencing a straight line of descent from the high point of the Middle Ages to the nadir of the twentieth century. His dismissals of Romanticism, Modernism, and jazz appear to stem naturally from his critique of modernity. But even Weaver seems oblivious to the notion that artists can burrow inside the reigning worldview, however decadent, and emerge with insights that offer visions of order. He can satirize the self-indulgence of Shelley’s “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed,” but he says nothing of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s attempts to recover a sense of the self’s relation to transcendence. And his critique of jazz as mere incoherence is a colossal misconception of the high level of order embodied within improvisation.
Most conservatives think of culture as a museum, rather than as an organic continuity. They are all in favor of promoting the classics, but when it comes to contemporary culture, they have simply opted out. To be sure, the modern era has been cursed with a tremendous amount of shoddy, obscene, and meretricious art; everyone has his own list of the scandalous and sensational works that he is tempted to say represent the art of his own time. One can argue that High Modernism reached its limit and had to go the way of all artistic styles. But, to quote an ancient dictum, abusus non tollit usus. The abuse of a thing does not nullify its proper use. If conservatives would look about themselves, they would see that our century has also been blessed with a tremendous amount of superb art. It is perhaps another truism to say that art tends to flourish when civilizations are in crisis.
Politicization or Imagination?
There is another aspect to the conservative abandonment of culture I find distressing: the increasing politicization within the conservative movement. I have witnessed a movement which began with the insights of thinkers like Kirk into the primacy of imaginative vision, or what Weaver called “the metaphysical dream,” turn into a highly politicized phenomenon in which there is more discussion of means than understanding of the ends of human existence.
Despite the gains which conservatives have made since 1980 in politics and economics, they have made precious little progress in the realm of culture. In other words, conservatives have not had much of an impact on the major cultural organs, such as the leading newspapers and magazines, nor have they made their presence felt in literature, criticism, and the visual and performing arts. Samuel Lipman’s lecture at the Heritage Foundation, “Can We Save Culture?” (reprinted in an abridged form in National Review, August 26, 1991), has called attention to this problem. Though Lipman does not penetrate deeply enough into the causes of the conservative retreat from culture, I strongly agree with his description of the symptoms and his concern.
As Lipman argues, liberals have always known the importance of culture; conservatives have left culture in their hands by default. That is why the neoconservatives, who are ex-liberals, have produced New Criterion, the only serious journal of the arts emerging from a conservative perspective. The problem I have with New Criterion is that its raison d’être is ultimately political. It is bound together primarily because its contributors object to the excesses of the Left’s cultural agenda. In other words, it does not arise from a shared aesthetic vision founded on a philosophical and theological understanding of human nature. On the other hand, I have to admit, with a good deal of chagrin, that traditionalist conservatives have been so beset by philistinism that they have produced no alternative of their own.
While such a state of affairs is distressing, it also implies that opportunities abound for conservatives—if they are willing to make the necessary investment of heart and mind. They cannot continue to trim the upper branches of politics while the roots of culture wither and die from inattention. Conservatives, above all, must once again put contemplation before action, or else their energies will be wasted.
No doubt this approach will strike most people as counter-intuitive: for generations now, our minds have been trained to stress the pragmatic over the beautiful. But the power of art to move the heart and thus, bring real change to the world might best be summed up in the words of a character in Mark Helprin’s novel, A Soldier of the Great War. An Italian professor of aesthetics, a man who has been scarred by the cataclysms and tragedies of the modern world, tries to explain the power of art:
My conceits will never serve to wake the dead. Art has no limit but that. You may come enchantingly close, and you may wither under the power of its lash, but you cannot bring back the dead. It’s as if God set loose the powers of art so that man could come so close to His precincts as almost to understand how He works, but in the end He closes the door in your face, and says, Leave it to me. It’s as if the whole thing were just a lesson. To see the beauty of the world is to put your hands on the lines that run uninterrupted through life and through death. Touching them is an act of hope, for perhaps someone on the other side, if there is another side, is touching them, too.
If art cannot save our souls, it can do much to redeem the time, to give us a true image of ourselves, both in the horror and the boredom to which we can descend, and in the glory which we may, in rare moments, be privileged to glimpse.