Thirsting for Art

I was reading Ann Althouse this morning, who often has interesting takes on the issues of the day and found this post: Thrusting for faith. She identified the word "thrusting" as a misreading of the original which was "thirsting" making rather more sense! But what I found interesting as the rest of the quote:

Why are so many, especially so many young people, drawn to this ideology? It’s not because they are dumb. Or because they are snowflakes....All of this has taken place against the backdrop of major changes in American life—the tearing apart of our social fabric; the loss of religion and the decline of civic organizations; the opioid crisis; the collapse of American industries; the rise of big tech; successive financial crises; a toxic public discourse; crushing student debt. An epidemic of loneliness. A crisis of meaning....

“I became converted because I was ripe for it and lived in a disintegrating society thrusting for faith.” That was Arthur Koestler writing in 1949 about his love affair with Communism. The same might be said of this new revolutionary faith. And like other religions at their inception, this one has lit on fire the souls of true believers, eager to burn down anything or anyone that stands in its way....

Back in 1970 I was something of a lost soul. I grew up without religion. My parents were basically atheists though out of a sense of parental duty they sent me--briefly--to Sunday School until I rebelled and occasionally I went to church with my grandmother who was religious. None of that took! With the exception of one teacher I found school uninspiring. My mother was an old-time fiddler, but that didn't fire me up. I did get captivated by rock and blues music and played in a band for my high school years. But that also proved insufficient. Politics? For those of us who grew to maturity in the 60s politics was a pretty weak reed. My father's suggestion that I go to work in a bank I regarded with sheer horror. So I was wandering from one bad job to another: waiter, tree-planter, clam-digger, salal-gatherer and in between sleeping in until noon. Then I discovered classical music and Bach in particular. A friend took a picture of me I wish I still had. I am leaning out of the living room window cradling in my arm a box containing three vinyl records of the Bach Mass in B minor--sort of my version of Moses coming down from the mount with the tablet of the 10 commandments. I lost that copy years ago, but the same performance with the same cover (roughly) is in a DGG Bach Masterworks box on my shelf:

Now classical music wasn't the only thing that rescued me from the Slough of Despond, a chance remark by a friend helped. He had gone off to university, something I had not even considered, and was back for the holidays. We spent a nice evening chatting which included some discussion of ukiyo-e, the Japanese art of woodcut prints which I had recently discovered. As he left at the end of the evening he casually remarked "you really are university material." And next year I did indeed go to university which was the other important turning point in my life. I think the two things that rescued me from an aimless life were first of all Bach and classical music and second of all a decent university library in which I reveled in reading things like Copleston's History of Philosophy and Dante's Divine Comedy.

I think Bach rescued Dmitri Shostakovich as well when he was judge at a Bach competition in Leipzig in 1950, the dark days of the end of Stalin's reign and the 200th anniversary of Bach's death. Shostakovich wrote his own set of preludes and fugues after Bach on his return to the Soviet Union. I am about to put up a post reviewing Igor Levit's new recording.

In any case, I think that art, music in particular and Bach most especially, makes a better than most substitute for religion. At least, it worked out well for me. Here is the Kyrie from the Bach B minor Mass in the Karl Richter recording:

Art is Right Wing?

Reading Ann Althouse this morning, she refers to an old post of hers that sounds rather interesting: Art is right wing. That post itself quotes a comment she made on an even older post:

To be a great artist is inherently right wing. A great artist like Dylan or Picasso may have some superficial, naive, lefty things to say, but underneath, where it counts, there is a strong individual, taking responsibility for his place in the world and focusing on that.

Especially in today's environment, something like this is very provocative. Here is one comment on the post I linked:

There are two separate issues here: the creative element, that is, the art itself, and the artist's personal politics. Those artists who are leftists do not seem to realize that their individualism is at odds with actual leftism in practice.

Soviet and Chinese "art" and "literature" (the words require scare quotes in this context) made a mockery of true art, because their mandatory service to leftism destroyed originality and individualism. Only the dissidents made anything lasting.

I like the mapping out of a distinction between an artist's activity qua artist and their personal politics, but! The second paragraph, while seeming plausible, goes wildly wrong if you know something about Soviet art, specifically music composition in the Soviet Union. Three names come immediately to mind: Sergei Prokofiev, who left Russia in 1918 but in the 1930s spent more and more time going back and forth between the Soviet Union and France and in 1936 he returned permanently and took up residence in Moscow until his death in 1953, on the same day that Stalin died. Dmitri Shostakovich lived his entire professional life under the Soviet regime, born in 1906 he died in 1975. His music was condemned twice, in 1936 and 1948, but he survived both those attacks and continued to compose without ceasing until his death, though he did keep a number of works, such as the Violin Concerto no. 1, in the drawer until after Stalin's death. Sofia Gubaidulina struggled her entire career in the Soviet Union against official strictures and in 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union, she took up residence in Hamburg, Germany.

Two out of the three: Prokofiev, Shostakovich with Aram Khatchaturian on the right.

Gubaidulina is a later generation, of course. The irony here is that a lot of the finest musicians in the oppressive political environment of the Soviet Union, were quite creative individuals whose work was often contrary to the imposed narrative. Of course they were not dissidents--there were no active, living dissidents under Stalin as he either had them shot or banished them, like Solzhenitsyn, to concentration camps. They were forced to write works that were at least superficially regime-praising, like some rather embarrassing cantatas, but most of their output was creatively quite free of those requirements. Examples would include all of Shostakovich's string quartets and Prokofiev's piano sonatas and concertos. Gubaidulina never seems to have written anything directly in service to the regime, but she came along much later.

If we look at the work of artists in Western countries today we seem to see more ideological conformity than in the Soviet Union! Isn't that a surprise? Most of the composers working in the US, for example, seem to be following the same playbook of identity, gender equity, diversity, environmentalism and so on. Art, for them at least, does not seem very right wing. We might look for evidence at Alex Ross' column on Notable Performances and Recordings of 2018:

At a time when some orchestras are unspooling entire seasons devoid of female and nonwhite composers, the L.A. Phil has commissioned twenty-two women and twenty-seven people of color. In October, at an event in the orchestra’s Green Umbrella new-music series, I was shaken by Tina Tallon’s “. . . for we who keep our lives in our throats . . .,” a response to sexual abuse.

Most works mentioned are quite free of political reference though none that I know of are as satirical of the current pieties as Shostakovich's Preface To The Complete Collection Of My Works And Brief Reflections Apropos This Preface, Op.112, or his absurdist opera The Nose.

I guess my point here is that the truth is in the details, not the superficially plausible generalization.

A good envoi here might be Shostakovich's Anti-Formalist Rayok, a work so satirical that it was not premiered in his lifetime:

In January 1989, a much-rumored work by Dmitri Shostakovich titled Anti-Formalist Rayok received its public premiere. Rayok is a single-act satirical opera/cantata for bass soloist and mixed chorus. Each character represents a prominent Soviet political figure: Joseph Stalin, Andrei Zhdanov, and Dmitri Shepilov. The text of the libretto is either taken directly from actual speeches given by these political figures or follows their idiosyncratic style of public speaking.

Of course we are not going to get any of the jokes.

Privacy and Inequality

Sometimes I think about moving back to Canada, but then something like this comes along and I change my mind: Statistics Canada looking at people’s banking records? Now that’s going too far.

The ability for governments to collect data through the information system is so easy that what is being collected should concern citizens. Global News reported this week that the Canadian government will be asking financial institutions to collect and provide data from some 500,000 Canadians without their knowledge. According to Global: “the national statistical agency plans to collect ‘individual-level financial transactions data’ and sensitive information, like social insurance numbers (SIN), from Canadian financial institutions to develop a ‘new institutional personal information bank.’”

What is really irksome is that this information was collected secretly and with no public consultation whatsoever. Privacy, to my mind, is a non-negotiable item.

I also ran across this item, which I think dovetails with the previous one: A question of class: how do social inequality metrics work in cultural organisations?

At the London Film Festival last week, the British Film Institute (BFI) announced it was going to start measuring ‘class and socio-economic background in their funding and staffing’. This move reflects the growing attention given to inequalities in the arts: academic evidence increasingly shows that cultural professions are unequal across ethnicity, gender, age, disability and class.

How we measure class and social mobility to reveal inequality is a thorny issue, however. Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s recent appeal for the BBC to publish information on the social origins of its workforce received some backlash. One columnist objected to the proposal, suggesting that people’s ‘backgrounds would be audited’ and that they would feel ‘judged’.

Oh, you bet! Jordan Peterson proposed a while ago that there should be a "red line" to evaluate when the extreme left has gone too far. There is certainly one for the right: as soon as you espouse racist or sexist ideas, you are adjudged to be beyond the pale. But what on the left is going too far? He proposed that demanding equity or some form of equality of outcome is the benchmark for an extreme left that has gone too far. I think he is correct on this.

There is a superficially plausible argument that goes like this:

• Poverty and want are real problems in society
• Some people have enormous wealth while others struggle
• This is fundamentally unjust
• Therefore we have to structure society so that people have more equal outcomes

There is just enough truth in this to give fodder to social engineers. But when you delve below the surface a number of other problems arise. First of all, the problems of wealth and poverty are global, not merely local. Some countries are wealthy while others are poor. Why is this? The reasons are manifold. Some countries have natural resources that they exploit successfully. Others with no natural resources have enormous human capital that produces wealth. Other countries have both natural resources and human capital but remain impoverished through corruption and failure to administer justice.

The problem with the socialist solution (and when the argument is given in the form above, it is always so the solution will be socialism) is that it begins by robbing the citizenry of both moral agency and freedom. You have no responsibility for your poverty (or wealth), it is instead a product of shadowy forces of evil and oppression. In order to identify who is virtuous and who is evil we have to carefully observe and monitor everyone. Then we will pass laws fixing the inequality. Oh, and whenever this is done the society collapses into a hellhole of crime, disease and hunger. See Venezuela, Cambodia, China under Mao, Russia under Stalin and so on.

The way to resist the early stages of this disease is to insist on the maximum personal privacy and freedom. The road to hell starts with the supposed innocent collection of personal information. It's downhill from there.

One composer who suffered under the totalitarian oppression of socialism (in an extreme form) was Dmitri Shostakovich. In Taruskin's discussion of his Symphony No. 5, described by the powers that be in the Soviet Union at the time as a "work of philosophical depth and emotional force," he notes that it is a "richly coded utterance, but one whose meaning can never be wholly encompassed or definitively phrased." He points out that in Russia in 1937, under the terror of Stalin, "this last was a saving, not to say a lifesaving grace." The work could be read in various ways and this double meaning is why the music could be both reassuring to the commissars and emotionally moving to the ordinary people who cried at the premiere.

In a socialist society ordinary people preserve a measure of privacy and freedom by lying to the authorities, even, or especially, artists.

What Artists Do

I had a commentator complaining recently that I always seem to have it in for academia. Well, I often do, yes, and I think they entirely deserve it! But, in point of fact, there are some brilliant and wonderful people in academia, some of whom I had the great priviledge to study and work with. I recall a terrific philosophy professor from my undergraduate days and a truly great violinist from my teaching days. I recently ran across someone that really exemplifies what academia should be, at its finest. This is psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson of the University of Toronto giving an impromptu talk about an artist named Tadeusz Biernot on the occasion of an exhibit of his work in Toronto. In the process he gives a brilliant explanation of who artists are and what they do and why it is so valuable. This clip begins with two and a half minutes introduction to the artist and the exhibit. The rest is the talk by Peterson.

Just about everything in the talk is interesting and unusual. Prof. Peterson recently became very notorious for criticizing new legislation in Ontario that requires that people in many walks of life must use the pronouns that individuals request. He put up a couple of videos pointing out that individual identity is NOT a subjective whim, but a negotiation between the individual and the people that surround him (or do I mean "her"?).

But Peterson is so very much more than a political gadfly. He is a genuinely brilliant scholar who is very learned in myth, philosophy, history and literature. Here is an excerpt from a lecture in which he talks about the mythology of ancient Egypt and what it might mean to us today:

He is a bit Jungian, but knows his Nietzsche as well. He just seems brilliant and very learned in all sorts of areas. Here is a TED talk he gave on, well, what? Being human?