It is a commonplace in today's creative writing programs for the professors, and the students themselves, to believe, and to say, and to critique others' works believing, that the purpose of art is to raise questions, not answer them. A story should not settle something, or advocate for one particular point of view (so narrow!) but should similarly bring to our attention the various possibilities. This idea is fashionable across the arts generally, among documentary filmmakers ("Capturing the Friedmans" is supposedly great because it raises questions and doesn't attempt to answer them) and visual artists and nonfiction writers and everyone who thinks of himself as an artist. This is what is in fashion.
I think this comes from art's crisis of confidence in the face of the near-complete and total domination of science, and its bastard offspring "social science," in Western (or do I even need the qualifier Western?) civilization. Since science, and social science, are rational (in social science's case, that's a big stretch, but it's assumed to be rational by the culture, anyway) and our "show me the numbers" society privileges anything that's rational or believed to be rational, art has been trying to find a space for itself, and it thinks that space is the space for critiquing, for raising questions, for opening up.
But this has it all backwards! The fact is that science, itself, is the place for raising questions. Science does not give us answers. We are so used to the opposite belief - that science tells the clear truth about life, that science tells us the answers to things - that this might sound crazy, backwards, loopy. But the fact is, science doesn't, can't tell us how to act, what to do, how to live, what decisions to make, because science is indifferent to, and useless at discerning, what one should do. It can't even conceive of the idea of "should." How can such a thing, that can't even conceive of the idea of "should," possibly answer questions for us? How could it possibly tell us what do to?
Medicine is just one area which reveals this problem. We have the capability, these days, to extend people's lives for years past the point where they can take care of themselves, or think clearly, or even eat and relieve themselves on their own. Medicine is structured around the assumption that extending life is always good, because the number of years, months, and days that a person lives is just that - a number, and science must have its numbers, its quantifiables. Science cannot even begin to ask the question "but is life worth living?" It cannot consider quality of life, except by hopelessly warping and diminishing it (creating a 1 to 10 scale of happiness, or something similarly reductive). Science and medicine cannot answer the question of what is life to be for, and just one of the results of this blind spot is the dreaded "home," the nursing facility or sterile, segregated community where we send old people to die. We have figured out how to extend life, but we have utterly failed to grapple with the question of what those extra years are to be for.
The world according to science is a lonely world that is indifferent to us. The idea that there might be answers there, in science, is indicative of how much we have fallen under science ideology's spell, and how we have allowed it to lull us into a false and tautological hypnotic state (and yes, I use a magic metaphor to point out the pseudoscience behind much of our approach to science). We have become convinced that we are like numbers, that we are predictable and follow rules, and that we just don't know the rules yet, but we will if we keep looking to science to give them to us. Since we think we are predictable, we devalue revelation, creativity, and art, turning ourselves into automatons, and thus make ourselves predictable and overruled.
But this is nonsense. If we turned to the great works of art that humankind has produced, turned to them and really saw them, really felt them not as dusty pieces of history, not as products of churning and predictable cultural forces, but as the heart-changing works that they are, we would see that these works of art are the answers we long for. If we take, for example, the Bible, and read it as it asks to be read, we see that it is very much written to answer questions, not to raise them, as people today insist art should do. The Bible is very much about answering the question of how one should live, and its answer is as rich, complex, and difficult as any answer to that question must be. It doesn't shy away from answering, from trying. Nor do Shakespeare's plays, or the works of Dickens. It is a great and terrible sign of our current blindness that we do not see that the artists who created these works believed very much in answering questions with their art.
Perhaps we have decided, for instance in the case of the Bible, that we do not like their answers. Yet how cowardly, how wasteful, how damning it is that we try to excuse ourselves from providing our own.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Pictures, Words, and Thought
I'm far more struck by this image than I am by anything that has been written about Judge Walker's gay marriage decision. And I think it's interesting and telling that Ross Douthat appears most affected by Andrew Sullivan's critique of his anti- (or at least not entirely pro-) gay marriage piece -- a critique which relies less on logical reasoning and more on pictures from Sullivan's own wedding day. In other words, appeals to emotion are winning the day, at least for me - but this fits very well with the unique conundrum I want to explore, and an understanding that I feel is growing within me every day - that as much as thought matters, and logic and reason must underlie things, ultimately what counts in life is the particular, is things (and specific people).
What I mean is that the logical and rational arguments for gay marriage just don't matter in the same way as a picture of two young men with a story. When Judge Walker "fact-finds" that gender no longer plays an essential role in marriage, I wince; it's fairly easy to attack this, using reason and logic, and indeed gay marriage doesn't depend on the idea that gender doesn't matter. (Gay people, as opposed to, say, bisexuals, are unlikely candidates to mount an argument that gender is insignificant.) There are plenty of valid points to be made against imposing gay marriage from the bench that can only be discredited if one rejects the conservative temperament outright. People who already supported gay marriage hailed Walker's opinion as brilliant; people who already opposed gay marriage called it stunningly arrogant. I don't think anyone changed his mind. The trial, and decision, were supposed to be about making serious arguments, submitting evidence, being logical and rational, yet I see no evidence that a single person was swayed by the judicial process.
Perhaps this is grandiose, but I really do think this points out a real problem with our reliance on "logic" and "reason" and our trusting in the scientific and, more often, the "social scientific." They don't matter. What affects people is not Reason and Rationality (because R & R depend on assumptions and values) but individuals and stories (which don't depend on assumptions and values.) When we look at the above-linked picture, with its very particular two guys celebrating and being affectionate, we cannot disavow, or explain away, or logically counterattack. The picture tells a story, and you can't write a counterargument to a story.
I realize how potentially unintellectual and even anti-intellectual it is to see the world in this way. This can lead to using children as props in political campaigns, to propaganda, to a host of evils. Certainly I think it is necessary to have intellectual arguments to support one's position. But those intellectual arguments are just necessary conditions. They must be strong and sound and not fall to pieces at the first blow, they have to be there, but they're not what really affects people and causes them to change. What affects people is stories. In other words, if something can be poked apart, logically, then it doesn't deserve attention, but logical strength is ultimately insignificant if it doesn't also manifest itself in people and things. It has to be really be there, in the specificity of individuals, of stories. Harvey Milk understood this when he said that the most important thing a gay person could do to advance the cause of gay equality was to come out.
Maybe people who oppose gay marriage look at that picture of those two guys and feel nothing - or even disgust. In other words, they have the same reaction to the picture as they do to the ruling. But I still think the picture makes a point. People's minds are most often changed when they come to know a specific person who is gay. That is the single biggest indicator of support for gay marriage. In other words, a logical argument doesn't win them over, and they aren't shattered by the rational wisdom of an enlightened gay rights activist: they are affected when they simply see and hear from and know someone who's gay. That's what matters to people, and what changes them. Opponents of gay rights increasingly rely on abstractions about marriage and the nature of human beings, and logically link gay marriage to dangers like polygamy and incest, rather than arguing about gay people themselves, because it's important for the cause of opposing gay marriage that gay people remain abstractions, or pawns in logical games that people can make turn out however they want, depending on the assumptions they make about humanity and the values they uphold.
Values are not rational and cannot be derived through reason, as Allan Bloom so devastatingly made clear. So we can argue all day and all night, and never see eye to eye. That is why photographs, and why stories, matter. A story can be wrong, and an appeal to emotion can have destructive consequences. But stories - specificity, concrete people or things - are all we have, and the battle is engaged there. Not in judge's opinions.
What I mean is that the logical and rational arguments for gay marriage just don't matter in the same way as a picture of two young men with a story. When Judge Walker "fact-finds" that gender no longer plays an essential role in marriage, I wince; it's fairly easy to attack this, using reason and logic, and indeed gay marriage doesn't depend on the idea that gender doesn't matter. (Gay people, as opposed to, say, bisexuals, are unlikely candidates to mount an argument that gender is insignificant.) There are plenty of valid points to be made against imposing gay marriage from the bench that can only be discredited if one rejects the conservative temperament outright. People who already supported gay marriage hailed Walker's opinion as brilliant; people who already opposed gay marriage called it stunningly arrogant. I don't think anyone changed his mind. The trial, and decision, were supposed to be about making serious arguments, submitting evidence, being logical and rational, yet I see no evidence that a single person was swayed by the judicial process.
Perhaps this is grandiose, but I really do think this points out a real problem with our reliance on "logic" and "reason" and our trusting in the scientific and, more often, the "social scientific." They don't matter. What affects people is not Reason and Rationality (because R & R depend on assumptions and values) but individuals and stories (which don't depend on assumptions and values.) When we look at the above-linked picture, with its very particular two guys celebrating and being affectionate, we cannot disavow, or explain away, or logically counterattack. The picture tells a story, and you can't write a counterargument to a story.
I realize how potentially unintellectual and even anti-intellectual it is to see the world in this way. This can lead to using children as props in political campaigns, to propaganda, to a host of evils. Certainly I think it is necessary to have intellectual arguments to support one's position. But those intellectual arguments are just necessary conditions. They must be strong and sound and not fall to pieces at the first blow, they have to be there, but they're not what really affects people and causes them to change. What affects people is stories. In other words, if something can be poked apart, logically, then it doesn't deserve attention, but logical strength is ultimately insignificant if it doesn't also manifest itself in people and things. It has to be really be there, in the specificity of individuals, of stories. Harvey Milk understood this when he said that the most important thing a gay person could do to advance the cause of gay equality was to come out.
Maybe people who oppose gay marriage look at that picture of those two guys and feel nothing - or even disgust. In other words, they have the same reaction to the picture as they do to the ruling. But I still think the picture makes a point. People's minds are most often changed when they come to know a specific person who is gay. That is the single biggest indicator of support for gay marriage. In other words, a logical argument doesn't win them over, and they aren't shattered by the rational wisdom of an enlightened gay rights activist: they are affected when they simply see and hear from and know someone who's gay. That's what matters to people, and what changes them. Opponents of gay rights increasingly rely on abstractions about marriage and the nature of human beings, and logically link gay marriage to dangers like polygamy and incest, rather than arguing about gay people themselves, because it's important for the cause of opposing gay marriage that gay people remain abstractions, or pawns in logical games that people can make turn out however they want, depending on the assumptions they make about humanity and the values they uphold.
Values are not rational and cannot be derived through reason, as Allan Bloom so devastatingly made clear. So we can argue all day and all night, and never see eye to eye. That is why photographs, and why stories, matter. A story can be wrong, and an appeal to emotion can have destructive consequences. But stories - specificity, concrete people or things - are all we have, and the battle is engaged there. Not in judge's opinions.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
