Knowledge is power, ignorance is slavery -it’s true I’m afraid (but what the Hell am I supposed to do about it?)
Aug 6th, 2007 by abi
I do rather feel like screaming today. You know when you can’t make your mind up about stuff. It’s really lots of interconnected things I worry about. Well, I obsess about them more likely. Until the age of about 20 I believed there is no such thing as a quality judgement in art and it’s all relative. I then completely changed my mind because I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this assertion. I wanted to believe it but it just didn’t tally with the reality surrounding me. Recently a couple of people have separately been chipping away at my theories and I have certainly reconsidered some of them but I can’t accept the totally subjective ‘anything goes’ attitude (I can’t in anything, to be honest). It’s too easy, too insubstantial, too like inadequate wishful-thinking and it leaves so much ignored that I know to be there. So I’m desperately trying to untangle all the thoughts in my head and put them back together in some sensible way but this is when I find that I can’t sleep properly anymore and that I’m at work with lots to do but can concentrate only on what’s in my head and not what’s in front of me.
There are other things too that are actually troubling me more because they’re fundamental to what I consider my life and my profession to be all about. But conclusions are so hard to come by and I can’t build my life on uncertainty.
OK, so this is what I (kind of) believe:
That most, if not all, people are ‘intelligent’. To use an example, I reckon everyone over the age of 17 and quite a few
people younger than that are capable of reading ‘War and Peace’, understanding it, analysing it, and getting something from it. For ‘War and Peace’ you could substitute ‘economic theory’, ‘political philosophy’, ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Japanese Opera’, and as many more examples as you want. Politically, I believe in making things as democratic as possible, in giving everyone a say. I’m quite attracted to ideas like Demarchy and Deliberative Democracy. Trouble is, opponents of these ideas can shoot them down easily because, put frankly, lots of people aren’t up to the job. In my opinion this is not because they’re not intelligent enough, it’s because they either can’t be bothered to learn any more than the bare minumum or because they haven’t had the opportunity or a combination of both. I want to make my life about defeating this and
about making people fit to take part in a proper democracy (as opposed to one where we let other people think for us). This means informing people about the political system and the culture in which they take part and encouraging them to think and debate. In taking this attitude I am being very anti-Libertarian, quite Paternalistic, rather unfashionable, and (allegedly) patronising. But I can’t help it. It’s just the way things seem to be when I look at it honestly.
The criticisms I’ve come across of this view seem to be:
1) Actually most people aren’t particularly intelligent. Myself and my well-educated thinking friends are so because we were born to be so and not because we were educated as such. The ‘mass’ of people will always be self-serving and ignorant and to try to ‘educate’ them in misguided.
2) Often the manifestation of my beliefs is pretty horrible. I remember being part of a ‘reader development’ project in a public library where an elderly lady had ploughed her way through some family-saga type thing and the colleague leading the ‘group discussion’ pressured her into saying something deep about it when perhaps there was little more to say than that she had enjoyed it and it had reminded her of her wartime experiences. We were made to applaud her for saying this and my colleague patted her on the back as if to say ‘well done dear, you’ve read a book and had a thought about it, you really are progressing’. It was excruciating. I felt angered on the woman’s behalf but she herself seemed unaware and was perfectly chuffed at the attention. So I then in turn became troubled by the idea that I was being patronising in assuming I could take up her cause when she was not aware she had one.
… OK, now I’m losing the thread of what I was saying. The sky has gone totally black, I can smell smoke and it’s thundering. All most strange and disconcerting. I think I need some food. And to ring Andrew back again. I keep getting all obsessive and then I speak to him and I calm down and decide that none of it really matters …
…ooh lightning…
Hi! Glad to hear that you’ve recovered your sanity (such as it ever was
).
I would agree with you about the relativism up to a point. I think where you end up tying yourself up in knots is by assuming that all art serves the same purpose. I think what matters is whether the art meets the purpose for which it was created. If you assume that the purpose of all literature is to improve yourself or broaden your mind, then you’re going to run into difficulties, because that’s not the only reason that people read. If however, you accept getting you through your long commute or helping you relax at the end of the day is also a valid reason for reading, you end up with a new category by which you can judge the merits of a book. So you could still rate an escapist novel as being good in terms of escapist novels if it matched certain criteria of, say, writing style, inventiveness, characterisation and humour: but you’d never say it was good in the same terms of ‘War and Peace’, because the two books are trying to do radically different things. You get to keep standards of quality- because there are such things as bad escapist fiction that fails to interest or entertain, for example- but it gives you a greater degree of flexibility.
I also agree with you about the democracy and people getting politically active, with the proviso that it would all be a spectacular mess and wouldn’t work. It’s the old Churchill quote about “Democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others”.
Do bear in mind that people aren’t rational, regardless of intelligence. The trouble with making rational decisions is that it takes time, and at the end of it you often find you don’t have enough information to make a decision in any case. Gut feeling and faith at least give you a result. Of course, while it’s a great system for making sure you don’t get eaten by sabre-tooth tigers, but possibly less good for running a country’s economy. It might be possible to train it out, I don’t know, but that would be a task taking generations.
And faith and belief bring some major complications, not least that pretty much everyone believes in something passionately because of feelings rather than proof. Religion is probably the biggest examples, but it can include things like animal testing and capitalism. People on either side of the divide can put forwards excellent arguments, but the other side is never going to listen because they made up their mind long before. People build their lives around such beliefs, and have so much invested in them that they are very unlikely to give ground. Debate could just become a shouting match. It requires empathy and understanding and the willingness to compromise and negotiate to make a democracy work, and belief works against that.
The amount of knowledge you’d need to make rational decisions on every matter of government is huge, especially when you consider that it would have to be regularly up-dated. The thought of the sheer amount of sociological jargon and statistics you’d have to wade through is terrifying. And there is always more than one side in every situation, so that increases the the amount of information you have to process. At some point you’d have to rely on other people to tell you what to do, simply because everyone would have to specialise to avoid information overload.
Sandy, that first paragraph is wonderful to read. It’s exactly what I’ve kind of always thought but unfortunately it creates its own problems. When I wrote about this in my dissertation I concluded that there were indeed different types of art for exactly the reasons you outlined above. I go through it myself all the time. There’s stuff I read that I could write a PhD thesis on, there’s other stuff that entertains me for a train journey and then I forget about it. And I imagine the that’s what the respective writers intended.
The problem really comes with the terminology. I guess ‘quality’ has to be located in terms of the intention of the book rather than some overall thing. I always had a sneaking suspicion it was so but I couldn’t quite nail it. It’s one of the recent changes I’ve made to my view of things. So you can have a good quality thriller that isn’t intended to stand up to in-depth analysis or reveal great truths about life but it’s still quality if it draws you in and creates tension and suspense. Yes, I admit I have come to realise this (although, as I said, I was kind of there already).
So then we have this art that’s there to get a certain emotional reaction and nothing more. We also, therefore, have this other art that’s joining in the conversation across centuries, across generations, across continents about being human and having the thoughts and feelings humans have. What still irks me is the idea of saying that this is just ‘different’ to the other art and in no way superior. OK, OK, maybe it’s not superior but it’s got to be more important, surely. So I accept there’s the different kinds for different purposes and quality can be located within them and that both are important and maybe (but maybe not) the things that engage in making observations about human life and joining in the ‘intellectual’ side of things is superior. The problem is: what are they? What do we call them? Is one ‘art’ and the other ‘entertainment’? Is one ‘high culture’ and the other ‘low culture’? In both cases, I suspect not. But then what is it?
OK, now I am going to post this lest I lose it and then I will carry on addressing everything else.
As regards all the other stuff. None of this is new to me either and I think you and I take slightly different views because I am hopelessly optimistic and you are, well, something else
I think the only solution lies with education (why do we always come back to education in these debates? I think sometimes I ought to have been a teacher). It’s about giving people the skills to reason and to think.
We’re not born to think logically. It may be we’re not even born to think. We are, as you say, born with instincts and these instincts aim to make things as safe and nice for ourselves as we can and protect ourselves from danger. I think that includes the danger of going mad or getting depressed from thinking too much or arguing too much with our neighbours. So people have to be given the tools and then we send them out into the world where hopefully they can at least reason and question and get involved. Maybe after a few generations we can win out over those ‘instincts’, which is, I think, both possible and desirable.
In reality, I guess people also need to be given time to learn as uch as possible so that they could remain fully informed. We would need to be given a day off every week so that we can go to classes or debates where we read through information and discuss it etc. It’s kind of like Bertrand Russell’s idea in ‘In Praise of Idleness’ (a book which is the closest equivalent I personally have to a Bible). And it has to be free. Free continuing adult education forever. Oh yes, absolutely vital.
I sense I am getting tired now… so much to say but so little time to say it. I definitely need that day a week off to peruse the great questions of life. Can’t you sense my frustration?
Sadly, I am faced by the reality that maybe as my dad claims most people would bunk the philosophy classes and spend their spare day playing Bingo. Ho hum.
And when I was describing the somewhat uncomfortable experience I had with ‘Reader Development’ my main issue with it was that this woman had a read a book that was there to be enjoyed and little else. She had read it, it had entertained her, she had enjoyed it, and for some reason she was supposed to ’say’ something about it that would be useful for everyone else in the room to know. And I thought ‘why?’ I just didn’t get it. It was written to do a certain job, it had done that job, and that was that. But it’s seen as cool now to analyse such things…
I think I’m with Mrs. Lintott on this, who wonders why the History Boys are being made to study the Carry On films to help them get into Oxbridge. She is left pondering whether there was something ‘deep’ in them she was missing before (though we suspect Totty is well aware there isn’t).
I would definitely agree with you that understanding of argument and rhetoric are the foundation of citizenship: then at least you can tell when the bastards are lying to you.
I think one of the reasons that the idea of High Art is falling apart these days is that there is simply too much of it. With several thousand years of world culture, there is more of even the very ‘top class’ material than any one person can absorb in a life time, especially as it usually takes a period of time to build up sufficient depth of knowledge to begin to appreciate the nuances of a discipline . Any attempt to create a canon of High Art is inevitably going to leave out more than it includes, and become more a compendium of the compiler’s personal preferences than a genuine representation of the best art. As a result, many attempts at creating a canon of high art just end up being relativist again! There’s a science fiction book called ‘Nova’ by Samuel Delany that contains the interesting idea of a future where all art has ground to a halt because the sheer weight of accumulated world culture overwhelms any contemporary artist.
Interesting. Think I’ll have to read that.
Again, I agree with what you say but it does rather depress me. You see, I don’t think art is all about what one person makes of it. It’s also about discussion and interaction, about other people being familiar with the same works as you are so you have a shared point of reference. That is disappearing rapidly because, as you say, there’s so much out there and a great deal of it just as worthwhile as the next thing. That’s why I get so excited when people have read the same things I have! It happens less and less. Come to think of it, it might be why book groups are so popular!
I studied the idea of a ‘Canon’ during my dissertation and actually, from being dead against it when I started writing, I actually came out tentatively in favour. Quite a lot of books and articles I read on the subject made the interesting point that because there is so much around we need to create a canon just to keep some kind of control. They all accepted that it would inevitably reflect the tastes and cultural background of the compilers but tended towards the view of ‘we’ll just have to minimise those influences as much as possible but even if we can’t then at least something is better than nothing’. It’s all most interesting.
I was very interested indeed that you wrote …”especially as it usually takes a period of time to build up sufficient depth of knowledge to begin to appreciate the nuances of a discipline”.
See, that’s what I felt was at the heart of the quality debate. I think each art form does have good and bad and while we have now widened the parameters and made them subject to type, intention and genre, I still can’t escape the fact that there are ‘good actors and bad actors’, ‘good painters and bad painters’ and there is ‘good writing and bad writing’. Because there is. It’s just that not everyone has been able to build up suitable expertise to appreciate its nuances and see each work of art in the wider context of everything else that has existed.
I know very little about music and my reaction is a purely emotional one. There’s nothing wrong with this but I am often aware when at concerts with people who are musicians or great fans of music, that the things I like are often the ‘easy’, ‘feelgood’, ‘obvious’ things that to the more trained and experienced ear are somewhat predicatable, empty and possibly not even very good.
The same goes for photography. Someone I know well who argues that there can be absolutely no quality judgements in art is a good photographer. When looking at some photos he’d taken I took a liking to one because somehow on an emotional level it clicked with me. He was being polite about it but I could see he disagreed. When I probed deeper I discovered it was actually a bad composition because the horizon was broken. So I liked that picture but to anyone with experience of the genre it would have been a ‘bad’ photo.
In addition, my literary tastes have changed over the years. Something I thought was marvellous when I was fourteen I will now re-read and realise it’s rubbish because I have such a better understanding of literature in general and can compare it instinctively against everything else I have come into contact with.
It may also explain why some genres are continuously misunderstood. You can’t really get a concept of what’s great and good in science fiction until you’ve read a lot of it just as you can’t really understand what’s great and good in rap music unless you’re familiar with the genre. But at the same time it doesn’t do to say that all rap music is bad and inferior to any other kind of music. That sort of comparison doesn’t work.
Oh well… I have an application form to fill out and ironing to do. I must stop these ramblings and get on with it!