Infinite liberty for every individual presents an ironic paradox: it limits liberty for others. Artistic liberty, on the other hand, presents new ways of looking at the world.
This is the third in a three part series. To start at the beginning, click HERE.
In the final of this three part series, I’d like to begin with a conceptual frame, derived from a logical progression of thought. It goes like this:
People are angry. Ask people why and you’ll get a thousands answers. There are no end to the reasons, and I’m not going to mine the causes here.
One thing about anger, regardless of cause, is that it tends to simplify thinking. Anger reduces the ability for complex thoughts. A common pattern for many proceeds like this:
Yell at someone;
they get angry;
they yell back:
not complicated.
Personally, I think there are others ways to respond to someone who yells in anger, but I’m confident this common action and reaction will resonate for many. I’ll also admit the title’s framing device of “darkness” may sound nebulous. It means different things to different people, of course, but in a general sense, let us agree to a few stipulations. As used here the concept refers to generalized restrictions on individual as well as collective dignity; accelerating expressions of belligerence in widening aspects of day-to-day life; and surveillance of privacy. Taken this way I believe we can reasonably agree that the idea of “darkness” breeds fear. Downstream from fear, those cascading waters pile up into waves of anger.
That’s why as darkness looms, many people find themselves with diminished abilities to contemplate complex ideas. More anger equals less complexity, in other words. As a case in point, Donald Trump, famously angry all the time, often decided to forego the details of his Presidential Daily Brief. It was simply too much information; too complicated.
The nature of artistic experiences works in direct opposition to this tendency. Creative works practically require complexity of thinking, even if the works themselves appear to be simple things, ordinary things.
Therefore, if art presents a non-toxic option for encouraging complex thinking, art becomes a light to shine into darkness.
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I suspect that if if my assertion doesn’t resonate as a reasonable proposition, nothing below will matter. I’ll lean in to that trust, and ask you to stay with me.
For some, a change in routine can upend a person’s life. We get used to things being a certain way, and radical departure from the expected—even a mild departure, in some cases—can be more troubling than the new idea itself.
The Dada movement of the early 20th century upended convention, challenging the dominant paradigm about what was acceptable, or even desirable. Faced with war, disease, political unrest, and stunningly profound transformations in every aspect of modern life, Dada may have been inevitable, but it didn’t fit any previous paradigms. By design, it simply didn’t make sense.
The 20th century was hardly atypical in terms of enabling autocratic rulers, with one profound distinction. With the advent of easily distributed communications through print, radio, and emerging electronic forms, strong willed dictators could impose themselves more dramatically, more quickly and invasively than ever before. Certainly there were plenty of hard-line rulers throughout the centuries, but the mechanisms of centralized social control kicked in to high gear when millions experienced the same messages from industrially distributed sources.
Things changed again in the early 21st century. With social media upending conventionally centralized and often peer-reviewed sources of information, it’s now tough for non-experts to discern what’s real and what’s fiction. Vaccine safety? Climate change? Plastics in the water supply? Like so many subjects, it all depends on whom you believe, which isn’t the same thing as putting stock in actual expertise. Fueled by a collective rush to anger rather than a tendency to pursue comity, the erosion of respect for complex thinking literally fuels itself.
The thing about artwork is that while expertise can add meaningful substance to dialogue, even the uninitiated can be moved to feel something or get engaged. Art can influence us even if we’re not an expert. This is different than opinions about science or engineering or foreign policy, where uninformed declarations can actually be counter-productive. I don’t want to listen to an uninformed opinion about whether bridges should be inspected for safety. I want to be able to count on experts who can properly evaluate the safety of bridges.
Of course, the more society erodes collective trust in the institutions charged with fact-based evaluations, the less safe those bridges become. The more people start evaluating everything as if everyone were entitled to an equivalent opinion, the less reliable “facts” become. The ironic knock-on effect of this is that after facts fail, opinions begin to become suspect, which reduces everyone to potentially malevolent entities. The social contract begins to crack. Facts themselves begin to be taken as weak tools for shaping good decisions because facts begin to lose their credibility. Opinions lose currency in terms of motivating constructive dialogues, because those opinions cannot point to a commonly held set of facts to support their arguments. It’s important to remember that shared facts do not automatically mean shared opinions. But when facts begin to evaporate, opinions become little more than white noise.
Established facts have become matters of debate these days. That’s tragic. I would hate to think that the laws of physics upon which I rely every time I get into an elevator or airplane are only “good ideas” that some faithful engineers hope will work. When I take an aisle seat and stow my carry-on, I’d like to think that those responsible for seeing me safety through the skies have based their calculations on certain conventions that work for everyone. I’d like to presume that aerospace designs avoid reliance on concocted explanations.
In the early days of the Soviet Union, scientists pursued a failed path in terms of feeding the country’s population for this very reason. Rather than follow modern scientific principals, Soviet agricultural leaders pressed a strategy for grain production that denied reality. They abandoned facts and people starved. What’s more, but scientists and farmers who knew better were disinclined to say so, for fear that declarations about what actually promoted good grain production would ring counter to political ideologies of the day.
The risk of the coming darkness is that creative work will be supplanted by pre-approved tropes, or at least painfully standardized vocabularies that conform to sanitized expectations. The coming darkness plunges us back into fear, which consolidates and confines thinking. It abandons facts in favor of ideologies.
Artists have always been at the vanguard of social movements, which generally means creative expressions that have neither been standardized nor sanitized. The emergence of Dada, once again, presents an example. It’s impossible to imagine the transitions between major political eras without the arts reflecting those transformations while simultaneously stoking change. Those changes inevitably tend to be liberal, because arts by their very nature draw from outside influences rather than exclude them. By its very nature art is not conservative, but expansive. Artists often represent liberal edges of society because the very act of synthesizing emotions and experiences and ideas into creative works requires inputs from many sources. Creative work absorbs information rather than excludes information. Art does not typically conserve, thus it is not typically (but not always) conservative.
The looming darkness augers a malevolent alternative. In polarized, antagonized cultures, ideas themselves become suspect. If people believe that the technological light of STEM alone will carry us forward into a majestic future, it’s important to revisit the risks to this deliverance when facts themselves are undervalued. When facts fail, aesthetics become political, effectively short-circuiting the self-correcting gyroscope of culture. If the extreme right wing should manage to capture the mainstream of American life, I fear this careful duality will rapidly sputter.
A reliance on STEM alone will not matter. The extreme right is not only a risk to the American promise, but a risk to the ability for creative, thinking people to discover new ideas in the first place. I’m all for advancements in STEM fields — I spend most of my professional career telling STEM stories—but the moment people start second-guessing creative inventions because of newly imposed social and judicial boundaries, society begins to collapse. It will happen in slow motion at first, and then it will happen all at once.
Philosophers have long asserted that science and art go hand in hand. They do not exist independent of each other for very long. Science does not care about right and wrong, but in a culture that becomes suspicious of ideas and facts —vaccine denial stands as Exhibit A— the reliable engine of technical advancement faces dangerous decline. Science needs robust creative space to generate ideas. Science needs to rely on a shared storehouse of fact-based information that is not subject to changing political winds or social trends. Science needs to count on a stable society rather than a winner-take-all society, and a stable society demands robust creative expressions from diverse voices to make sense of the world. Culture depends on facts to structure opinion, but when opinions themselves become weapons, the most provocative or compelling ideas tend to play it safe and stay out of the light. With expression of new, innovative ideas afraid to show themselves, coupled with a growing lack of confidence in the concept of legitimately earned expertise, the potential grows for social bonds to catastrophically dissolve.
Nonetheless, here we are. We have collectively done this to ourselves, much like we have allowed ourselves to spoil our climate, bureaucratize our lives, and spend our precious, fleeting days fighting, fighting, fighting.
Art most certainly is not the “solution”, just as there is no singular solution to any complex question. But art as a culturally vital prescriptive presents a counter-narrative to the downward spiral of winner-take-all self absorption. To pull out of that spiral, we must first agree that the ground is coming up fast in the windshield, and a course correction is not only a good idea but an essential course of action. That process begins with each of us as individuals, but it must also spread out among our relationships and our networks. There is a moment of decision we must make to illuminate the dark spaces, to consider facts that may be inconvenient, and to forestall the grip of fear from those things that are simply different from what we understand.
Art can be an engine. As creative work inherently expand horizons, seeks to pull in new information, and fundamentally relies on the pursuit of new ideas, it becomes a light in the darkness. In an era where the potential for torch-bearing mobs is no longer just a threatening anachronism, it’s useful to consider this alternative not as a means to burn down what scares us, but as a beacon to help dispel the looming darkness.