Elitism and Art

Behind the ever-present din of complaints about the lack of effectual answers to the question “whatever shall we do about the Arts?” is a question more important, but which remains cloistered. That question, however, should be heard, for although it is scarcely answered aloud, it helps us to understand why the first question is so rarely answered, and the importance of teasing out answers to the second. This obscured question is “What could we do about the Arts—if anything?”. It is not heard because, like all questions which lead toward uncomfortable answers, we find ways—rhetorical composition, for instance—to ensure that we may pass over it with ease.

We are ever doubting what, if anything, to do about the Arts, because we are scarcely capable of doing all that is necessary to facilitate them. From maintaining a lead in weaponry sufficient to deter enemies from drone-striking our concert houses, to replacing aged, aerated concrete which threatens to collapse upon our schoolchildren before they have had chance to pick up an instrument, the greater number of us live at risk of being late for our own funerals, so busy are we trying to do enough to keep a roof over our little corner of the civilisation in earning the means to settle our bills before—if we are fortunate—leaving something to posterity besides a debt: a besieged civilisation; a holey roof; or just-maybe, a musical instrument.

Running hard to stand still until we drop, per commuters spilling onto descending escalators under pressure of relentless to-do lists, is it any wonder that most of us have no doubt why we have little time for Ends—those occurrences for which we live—beyond maintaining our civilisation? For the many as well as the few, our greatest End, if we are so blessed, is our progeny: Life. Yet amidst the fervent effort to sustain Life, which leaves so many of us barely time-enough to sire it, how can there be anything left in us for Art—that is, a transcendental End, its being both beyond and for Life?; how can we live to eat when we are so busy doing what is necessary to eat so as to live? Indeed, we may justly wonder, as we settle into an easy chair at the end of a hard week of labour, how anyone finds the time, as if it were buried treasure, to produce the Artwork upon the walls around us, if we are fortunate enough to have any artwork, or indeed walls upon which to hang it. Pricked by not a little indignation at this apparently magical conjuring, we may wonder: how on earth did they get enough of that (time) to produce this (Art)?

A defining feature of Art (superlative “A”), as recognised in Solzhenitsyn’s affirmation of Dostoevsky’s proclamation that “Beauty will save the world”, is that Art is indeed a transcendent End in being for Life and thus beyond it, whose supreme, totemic value is well-encapsulated in Churchill’s expressed concern that “Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the reverence and delight which are their due.” Another defining feature of Art (superlative “A”), such as Churchill meant, is that it, like Life, ceases to be Art—becomes art (diminutive “a”)—when it is made the mere instrument of an end other than Life: an end (diminutive “e”); that is, an end-which-is-also-a-start: a means to a means; mere nutrition for something greater than itself (diminutive “i”). Whether it be the piped music which clothes the fast-fashion culture of shopping malls or the cycled ditties which scarcely ameliorate a “hold” to speak to a service-provider, only art (diminutive “a”) obtains, for just as we instrumentalise one-another by taking up servile labour—jobs—in the form of the attendant who greets us at the checkouts or the assistant who answers our query, so we enlist music-as-an-art qua oil in an engine: to lubricate those motions of life which constitute its means. We all think oil is important, but we shall never love it, for it is merely a need.

As with all transcendent Ends however, Art obtains when we switch off our engines and, to paraphrase John Lennon, do give time to stop and stare, whether that takes the form of attending a concert, visiting a gallery, or, if we are especially blessed, creating and, in the case of music, performing that Artwork. To be clear, Wordsworth was not quite right to state that in getting and spending we lay waste to our powers, for, on the contrary, trade supports all Ends: indeed markets are as blood to a body: for no-body is an island. Rather, it is amidst unremitting getting and spending—”necessary evils”—that we become “too much in earnest”—automatically doing rather than self-consciously being, as Gurdjieff counselled—to participate in the various transcendent Arts, whether as listener or composer—even if Music of this superlative “M” kind were issued via the speakers of a shopping mall or directly through our phones. For every voice requires an ear, every painting a viewer, and every teacher a pupil. Indeed, for Artwork to work, we must open ourselves up to it like a flower to the light if we are properly to experience it, for we must not only receive, but give, and this much by entering into communion with it: a state-of-grace beyond that of consumption and production.

What, then, is required of us such that we may entertain the gifts of Art? The first thing is to undertake a kind of work opposite from the one to which we are apt to give so much time: we must exercise the restraint necessary “to stop and stare”, or, as Scruton put it, somewhat ungenerously—for many cannot help it—to cease “the idleness of busyness” which so characterises those who know no states beside work and rest. Ceasing to be busy when we are not resting, of course, is readily mistaken for idleness, offending, as it does, the Protestant work-ethic under which most of us have laboured without intermission since the industrial revolution. After all, there is always “something to do”; and anyway, as Guénon observed, it is much harder to keep tabs on inner work than, outer-; but we must for a time put down our to-do lists, stop keeping tabs, and cultivate the requisite state-of-grace to receive the gift of Art.

Naturally, as we see all around us in the West, the rise to overwhelming pre-eminence of extrinsic activity, encapsulated by such terms as “materialism”, “consumerism”, and “productivity”, have led to the inexorable decline and displacement of the common Christian ritual of granting time between work and rest to dwell with God for a time each Sunday. As Christians know, following completion of His creation on that seventh day, He rested; and accordingly, His followers reserve time to celebrate His creation and the sacrifice Christ made for it and so for us, in a spirit of ritual festivity.

Whatever you may think of God, creation, and Christianity, it is via faith communities of all kinds that many people encounter the ritual of “stopping and staring” in a regular, communal form, which enables them regularly to renew a state of being which puts their souls in a receptive state-of-grace. That is, a state of self-conscious stillness in which we open ourselves up—as Schall put it—to what is. Like good pupils before a tutor, we seek for one in whom we may place our faith, and strive to dispose ourselves to learn well from him, and we do so because, as Peck among others alert us: “Life is difficult. And we are here to learn.”

Far from the highfalutin exhortation of an idealistic Man of Letters or doctrinaire cleric, Peck neither signalled the importance of learning to set us on paths to a Life of the Mind or Sainthood, virtuous though devotion to these Ends may be. Nor did he do so to evoke a sense of foreboding at all that life demands. Rather, he directed us to learn in order that we may rise to the challenges which life puts before us: an inducement pregnant with the fact that learning is intrinsic to life; is a condition of it, contra the inanimate—literally, that without a soul; that which is lifeless. For after-all-other-ends-in-fact, we have not only something to do, but someone to be; to become.

How may we cease merely to be servile: to do, soullessly, interestedly; “to work in order that we may live”, and be(come) liberal (literally, free): to be, soulfully, disinterestedly; “to live in order that we may work”, and more particularly, to carry out a kind of work which entails our being free?

Shortly after the Second World War, the philosopher Joseph Pieper penned a seminal Western document of instruction in the nature of this task of self-transcendence: Leisure: the Basis of Culture. Falling, as it did, largely on ears deafened by the fervent efforts of civilizational reconstruction, his guidebook nevertheless charted the “long, narrow path to virtue” we must take if we would restore our humanity and not merely its material substrate. He delineates this path in two ways. For one, he warns against the “non-path” toward a world of “total work”, in which, besides rest—taken, anyway, as “charging one’s batteries”; for no more than a passive aspect of that work—existence is shorn of all other states. For another, he petitions us to cultivate leisure—that state-of-being known to the Greeks and Romans as scholē and otium, respectively—for it is this state which forms the basis of Culture, being those festal endeavours, traditions, and rituals via which life is celebrated and thereby affirmed. In short, by which life is given meaning. Thus his is a modus operandi which punctuates an otherwise-endless doom-loop of means-to-ends-which-are-means-without-Ends which, unabated, would descend into a nihilistic death-spiral, by regularly parting the waves of means to give way for a space to Ends; those states of being for which, in the end, we live; that is, for what it is all about.

What, then, has making way for those states for which we live, notably the experience of Art, got to do with Elitism?

As insinuated at outset, the human enterprise, today so efficiently prostrated within the archetypical factory of enterprise, has come to make an End-in-Itself of “total work”: the false God of which Pieper warned. With weary brows and endless getting and spending just to stay afloat, few souls remain at the end of a week to dispose themselves to receive the gift of real Ends, even if they have not lost sight of them. A solution to this problem, recurrent throughout history, has been for those in a position to do so to “part the waves”, be that via circumscribing the working week, as did Henry Ford, to patronising the national orchestras, as have so many royals down the ages, and which survive today—if only just-barely.

This solution however has limits, for just as “the dose makes the poison”, so excessive “liberation”, as in Marx’s Communist utopia, is to chase a rainbow out of existence, rather than admiring it from suitably afar; for like trying to contain a rainbow, outlandish social engineering requires totalitarian government: an arrangement which ironically confiscates whatever freedom has been earned, replaces humane Ends with the arbitrary whims of unaccountable agents who merely allege to act on behalf of the collective, and who sooner or later bulldoze dissenters until, to take further a remark by Thatcher, they eventually run not only out of other people’s money, but, as under Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the like: out of people too.

The wisdom of the ages thus holds that it is within a Goldilocks zone that Ends are afforded their place in the firmament; and that that zone cannot, as Marx had envisaged, consist of spreading our gold so thinly, as Gurdjieff roughly put it, that not only shall we not profit from specialisation, but rather lose our gold, and thence our lives. For even art and ends require specialisation, and all the more so do the collectively-esteemed Artworks delivered up by a people to form what Arnold termed its “High Culture”: those monuments “for the Glory of God”—which serve as foci of spiritual renewal—as literally in its sumptuous religious buildings—and “to the Good, Beautiful and True”: being the supreme fruits of its humane cultivation, expressed indeed in architecture, but also in poetry, music, dance, literature, and all such other transcendent Ends-in-Themselves. For such noble undertakings, we require not merely the “profane” work of the servile labourer—necessary and respectable though it is—but the “sacred” work of a peculiar personage: the liberal artist. This figure may submit neither merely to tasks assigned by a manager, nor a labour-market in which to hustle as a fungible “jack of all trades”, but to a calling which may be answered only via submission to that long, narrow path to virtue. And he takes this path—for it is the only way—toward mastery, thus sacrificing the lifetime that it takes, to become “a conduit between God and man”. To enable this person to make that sacrifice, as Scruton reminds, requires patrons to make sacrifices too, furnishing not payment for work done, but defrayment of visions to be realised.

The complaint against such lofty ventures, as they are framed in our “inclusive” times, is that their fruits are too subtle, demanding as they do, a good deal of our time, energy, and the acquisition of such heady qualities of judgement as Discernment and Taste. Who in the West would dare to do that today? Indeed, so embarrassed of Culture are many who disseminate it that they fall over themselves to concoct elephant-in-the-room assurances that such Artforms as opera are neither elite, nor elitist, when of course, a defining aspect of opera, no less than Fabergé eggs or Rembrandts, is that it is elite and elitist—which latter I take to mean necessarily and fittingly the former—for this Artform could not yield the Artworks that it does if it were not: long ago, instead, would its props have been crushed for scrap, libretti burned for heat, and all forgotten—trampled into oblivion under the stampede of quotidian affairs, or a band of Marxist revolutionaries—if as forgettable or “problematic” as so many C-list movies it were.

Being at ease with that which is elite, and elitist, is however not easy because, almost-tautologically, that which is elite and elitist is resolutely difficult. Sociologically, it is difficult across many vectors: of prospective and actual elites, it requires that they devote themselves to the lifetime of self-over-becoming necessary to uptake, perpetuate, and advance those transcendent Ends; of the masses, it requires that they undertake to support these efforts and their fruits and refrain from the tempting impulses of ressentiment and envy which may stultify or thwart them; and of those pillars of society with the necessary resources—patrons, employers, educational- and religious institutions, and government officials—it requires that they do their bit to “part the waves” of quotidian trivia, sufficiently to enable the flower of culture to come up to its rightful place at the top of the civilisation and blossom before the sun above, and all around it from below.

The way to achieve ease with that which is elite and elitist, it seems to me, is for a civilisation to work towards an order in which a sizeable part of its membership is inculcated with an awareness of the rewards which come only from the long, hard journey of work in pursuit of the self-betterment which, in the case of a great few, delivers up the Culture (capital “C”) which binds communities together and inspires them toward higher planes. In this respect, an Arnoldian curriculum which affords its students the opportunity to appreciate “the best that has been thought and said”, such as Wagner’s Nibelung, has a strong chance of setting them on the long and difficult path to virtue promptly, so that by the time they are old enough to remake the world in their own image, they will, unlike so many childish revolutionaries, be wise enough to realise that theirs is very probably much less great, and that their first and likely last port of call toward making society better would be to improve themselves—and thence to leave Wagner and other Greats in their rightful place.