The Europe Syndrome

[tbieter]

Here is a remarkable brief essay which discusses the cultural conditions that are necessary for the production of great art:

"Put all three conditions together—no urgency to make your mark, no promptings to think about your place in the cosmos, no difficulty in living a comfortable life—and what you seem to get, based on the experience of Western and Northern Europe, is what I have elsewhere called the Europe Syndrome.

The Europe Syndrome starts with a conception of humanity that is devoid of any element of the divine or even specialness. Humans are not intrinsically better or more important than other life forms, including trees. The Europe Syndrome sees human beings as collections of chemicals that are activated and, after a period of time, deactivated. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible. I submit that this way of looking at life is fundamentally incompatible with a stream of major accomplishment in the arts.

The most direct indictment of the Europe Syndrome as an incubator of great accomplishment in the arts is the European record since World War II. What are the productions of visual art, music, or literature that we can be confident will be part of the culture two centuries from now, in the sense that hundreds of European works from two centuries ago are part of our culture today? We may argue over individual cases, and agree that the number of surviving works since World War II will be greater than zero, but it cannot be denied that the body of great work coming out of post-war Europe is pathetically thin compared to Europe’s magnificent past."
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cf ... rness-7357

In another thread I drew attention to the collapse of the distinction between good and bad art: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8872&p=105780&view=show#p105780 (article link in last message) The only response to the article was one frivolous comment by one who claims to be an artist.

It is difficult to start a serious discussion on an article in this forum!

[tbieter]

Here is a remarkable brief essay which discusses the cultural conditions that are necessary for the production of great art:

"Put all three conditions together—no urgency to make your mark, no promptings to think about your place in the cosmos, no difficulty in living a comfortable life—and what you seem to get, based on the experience of Western and Northern Europe, is what I have elsewhere called the Europe Syndrome.

The Europe Syndrome starts with a conception of humanity that is devoid of any element of the divine or even specialness. Humans are not intrinsically better or more important than other life forms, including trees. The Europe Syndrome sees human beings as collections of chemicals that are activated and, after a period of time, deactivated. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible. I submit that this way of looking at life is fundamentally incompatible with a stream of major accomplishment in the arts.

The most direct indictment of the Europe Syndrome as an incubator of great accomplishment in the arts is the European record since World War II. What are the productions of visual art, music, or literature that we can be confident will be part of the culture two centuries from now, in the sense that hundreds of European works from two centuries ago are part of our culture today? We may argue over individual cases, and agree that the number of surviving works since World War II will be greater than zero, but it cannot be denied that the body of great work coming out of post-war Europe is pathetically thin compared to Europe’s magnificent past."
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cf ... rness-7357

In another thread I drew attention to the collapse of the distinction between good and bad art: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8872&p=105780&view=show#p105780 (article link in last message) The only response to the article was one frivolous comment by one who claims to be an artist.

It is difficult to start a serious discussion on an article in this forum!

___________________________________________
The essay also mentions the detrimental effect of nihilism on the production of great art.:

"A major stream of human accomplishment is fostered by a culture in which the most talented people believe that life has a purpose and that the function of life is to fulfill that purpose.

Imagine two cultures with exactly equal numbers of potentially brilliant artists. One is a culture in which those potentially brilliant artists have a strong sense of “this is what I was put on this earth to do,” and in the other, nihilism reigns. In both cultures, the potentially brilliant artists can come to enjoy the exercise of their capabilities. But the nihilists are at a disadvantage in two respects.

The first disadvantage is in the motivation to take on the intense and unremitting effort that is typically required to do great things. This is one of the most overlooked aspects of great accomplishment. Fame can come easily and overnight, but excellence is almost always accompanied by a crushing workload. Psychologists have put specific dimensions to this aspect of accomplishment. One thread of this literature, inaugurated in the early 1970s by Herbert Simon, argues that expertise in a subject requires a person to assimilate about 50,000 “chunks” of information about the subject over about ten years of experience—simple expertise, not the mastery that is associated with great accomplishment. Once expertise is achieved, it is followed by thousands of hours of practice, study, and labor.

The willingness to engage in such monomaniacal levels of effort in the arts is related to a sense of vocation. By vocation, I have in mind the dictionary definition of “a function or station in life to which one is called by God.” God needn’t be the source. Many achievers see themselves as having a vocation without thinking about where it came from. My point is that the characteristics of nihilism—ennui, anomie, alienation, and other forms of belief that life is futile and purposeless—are at odds with the zest and life-affirming energy needed to produce great art.

The second disadvantage involves the artist’s choice of content. If life is purposeless, no one kind of project is intrinsically more important than any other kind. Take, for example, an extraordinarily talented screenwriter who is an atheist and a cynic. When asked if he has a purpose in life, he says, “Sure, to make as much money as I can,” and he means it. The choice of content in his screenplays is driven by their commercial potential. His screenplays are brilliantly written, but it is a coincidence if they deal with great themes of the human condition. His treatment of those great themes, even when he happens to touch on them, is not driven by a passion to illuminate, but to exploit. If instead he has a strong sense of “This is what I was put on earth to do,” the choice of content will matter, because he has a strong sense that what he does is meaningful. To believe life has a purpose carries with it a predisposition to put one’s talents in the service of the highest expression of one’s vocation.

Thinking ahead to the rest of the twenty-first century, the problem is that the artistic elites have been conspicuously nihilist for the last century, and the rest of the culture has recently been following along. The most direct cause of a belief that one’s life has a purpose—belief in a personal God who wants you to use your gifts to the fullest—has been declining rapidly throughout society, and the plunge has steepened since the early 1990s. The rejection of traditional religion is especially conspicuous among intellectual and artistic elites."
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cf ... rness-7357

An apt example of nihilism in art is the existence and market for "bad art". See http://www.artnews.com/2012/04/12/when-bad-is-good/

[duszek]

What would be the greatest imaginable opposite of the artistic and meaningful life you describe ?
Instead of living one´s talents to the fullest one ...

sits in front of the TV watching chanels at random, allowing one´s attention to dissipate and become erratic, eating fast food and becoming ennoyed because the entertainment is wearing thin ?

And if someone said: my vocation is to be an annoyed couch-potato until I die of over-eating then we would consider this to be an abusive use of language.

So.

What is essential for a vocation is: creative activity.

[duszek]

But how to find out in which direction our creative activity should develop ?

The first step is to become focused and quiet. The attention should be protected against bad distractions.

One danger: one may fall into apathy or inertia instead of into blissful insights about which way to choose.

[duszek]

The simplest way is to fall in love with some art.

D. F. Wallace fell in love with the English language.

This love kept him going for a while and did not preserve him from depression.

Shakespeare also fell in love with the English language, we can assume.
And not only with the English language, with other things too.

[duszek]

Have you fallen in love with law, Tom ?

[tbieter]

Have you fallen in love with law, Tom ?

I was when I began my career. But then I discovered philosophy. She's a jealous mistress. Now I pursue her for her beauty.

[duszek]

How about philosophy of law ?
Plato´s "Republic" is full of it. Not to mention other political philosophers, many of them American.

I am reading at the moment Jed Rubenfeld´s philosophical considerations about why the commitments of a constitution cannot be binding for future generations, why commitment as such cannot or should not bind ourselves. It is a challenging way of reasoning which I need to grasp properly before I start critisizing it, perhaps.

The world is small, I discovered yesterday on the internet that this Jed Rubenfeld is the husband of the famous tiger-mother Amy Chua who makes her daughters work hard. German magazine "Der Spiegel" reported some time ago.