I don't usually do seasonal or topical posts, but this seemed a propos. Let us give thanks for Western Civilization.
We seem to be in the waning days of Western European civilization and its adjuncts. It had a pretty good run, synthesizing elements from Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Roman civilizations and cultures from around 1100 AD when Notre Dame in Paris was being built and Léonin and Pérotin were inventing polyphony up in the choir loft, to around 2000 AD when it all started to fall apart. See Jacques Barzun's book From Dawn To Decadence: 1500 to the Present for the details of the last phase.
This being so, we really don't need any progressivism in the arts, politics or culture. Down with the avant-garde, that moment is long gone. Instead, in this twilight of civilization let's explore what was before it is gone forever. I could do a list, from Organum to high Renaissance polyphony, to vivid madrigals to meltingly lovely French Baroque to transcendentally profound J. S. Bach, to brilliantly rambunctious opera by Mozart and on an on--and of course, that is just the music. What about the astonishing quantity and variety of poetry and prose? Or the stupendous architecture of the Medieval cathedrals, the synthesis of theology and philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the empirical wisdom of David Hume. And I am completely forgetting the artists: El Greco, Dürer, Hieronymous Bosch, Van Gogh... Really, a comprehensive list would take volumes.
Let us be deeply grateful for all the magnificent art and music and culture generally that those centuries have given us.
Don't mourn too suddenly, the decadence has been mostly homegrown, evident in hindsight as early as those thrilling Haydn symphonies, breaking the shells of order to allow the individualism of melodies with destination, opening the floodgates of what the Romantics allowed without inhibition: arbitrary and willful melodies soon to exhaust themselves in the alienated aesthetic nihilisms of Maestro Schoenberg himself.
ReplyDeleteA century later we feel the new disorientation of globalization in migrations, information, and culture, but just as you describe around 1100 and the centuries thereafter, the impulse of life drives the youth to put it all back together in a new way. More than the infusion of global cultural influences, which western civilization will absorb in great ways, I fear the technological assaults on everything human, living and natural. That problem not only accelerates alienation and ecological crisis, but most fundamentally explodes human attention spans and social relations into loveless, bloodless atoms of emptiness. Again, maybe not during our time, when human relations to technology are still in the phase of stunned dumb, but eventually the pulse of life will rise above it all and figure out how to put all these new things in a proper order.
Will, you're an optimist! So am I, usually, but I'm seeing a lot of decline lately.
ReplyDeleteI mulled over your sobering post for a long while, Bryan, and your wise commentator Mr Wilkin has expressed my concerns in a very pertinent manner. The challenge for western culture (is this term still applicable in the 21st century) is to somehow reconcile human experience with this technological onslaught we face. Has the alienation of the subject reached its apogee? Or, in Foucaultian terms, should we embrace these devastating discontinuities as inevitable signs of the "progress" of this culture?
ReplyDeleteI think that mulling over a post of mine for a long while is the finest compliment of all. Thank you, Anon. Yes, in the normal course of history Will would be completely right, youth would put it all back together in a new way. But what really concerns me is that the youth are not turning up. We have a massive problem with population decline. The birthrate of South Korea, for example, is so low that a third of the population disappears with each generation. Other advanced nations are somewhat better, but all are below replacement rates. If youth are to save us, there has to be youth.
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