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Art: A New History

Mon, 01 Mar 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Yes, it is possible to write a single-volume general history of art, if you narrow the definition and focus on your own enthusiasms. Paul Johnson is best known for his large-scale histories, written in the Burkean tradition of moralizing conservatism. He is also, however, a serious painter himself, and the son of a professional. He suggests that he might have made art his career, but his father warned him that the future would belong to charlatans such as Picasso. Actually, what’s remarkable about Art: A New History is that it’s mostly about what the author likes. This is a commendable approach that all conservative cultural critics should emulate, especially with regard to twentieth-century material.

You can put only so much into a profusely illustrated 777-page oversized book (with still not nearly enough illustrations). “Art” here means physical art objects: painting, architecture, and sculpture, in about that order of emphasis, but also mosaic, stained glass, landscaping, and even tattooing and body painting. For the most part, it’s Western art; the rest of the world enters in as it affects the art of the West.

The author has his theories; or better, his standards. Art, we learn, is part of the essential human search for order and pattern. The highest art, in Johnson’s view, tells the truth about life, which generally means that it is figurative. Still, all art is editing, whether the result is highly formalized or photographically realistic. The healthy norm for art throughout history has been a continuous tension between a canon of technique and the need of individual artists to express themselves. The tension takes the form of long waves, in which generations of complication and refinement alternate with generations of simplicity and classicism.

Johnson deplores the modern prejudices against drama in figurative art, and even against mere size. What the Renaissance called terribilit is not so different from what Burke meant by “the sublime.” The author also insists on the reality of “fine art.” Such works can be created only with notable skill. They repay a second look, and many looks thereafter, as one of the characteristics of fine art is a capacity to delight that outlives its period. In this, as in other ways, it differs from what Johnson calls “fashion art,” in which the level of novelty exceeds the level of skill. Fashion art’s capacity to please is soon exhausted, thus generating the demand for more fashion art, and yet more. When fashion art crowds out fine art, that is a bad thing.

Johnson moves with due caution through the intimidating specialties of Paleolithic art and ancient Near Eastern art, and into the time of the Greeks and Romans. Here the story begins to deal with known artists and acknowledged masterpieces, mostly sculptures of the human figure. Johnson follows the sad story of Greco-Roman painting: little of it has survived (none of much merit) and there is no reason to suppose that the lost works were much better. As for the decline of classical art, all we really learn is that something snapped in the second century a.d. A century later, emperors were reduced to stripping ornaments from earlier monuments to use on their own memorials.

Johnson emphasizes the continuities, both chronological and geographical, between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Northern Europe drove the transition, especially in drawing, more than the Italians have ever been willing to admit. Interesting as all this is, Johnson is obviously chomping at the bit to get to artists who typically did what he does, which is to paint in oils on canvas (or later, on paper with watercolors). Johnson laments that artists of Giotto’s skill were still restricted to the fresco, an awkward and notoriously fragile medium. When we get to Caravaggio (1573-1610), there is a virtual sigh of relief: at last we are talking about oil painting, with chiaroscuro, dramatic subject matter, and a complete grasp of perspective and lighting. Art had achieved the mature form from which it would not begin to decline until the end of the nineteenth century.

No sooner was the paint dry on Caravaggio’s canvases than the first of a series of classical revivals set in to correct what were seen to be his excesses, a dialectic that continued throughout the long climacteric of art in the West. The chief theater of creativity shifted from Italy (where cultural life never quite recovered after the decline of papal patronage) to the west and north. Johnson has a merry time explaining how French governmental interference spoiled French academic painting, particularly by disparaging landscapes. The best portraiture in history was, of course, done in the Low Countries, in an unexampled tradition that continued until the economic eclipse of the Netherlands by England. The rise of the private market for art made that tradition possible. (The same pattern manifested itself in architecture in England, where Whig grandees built fine country homes to rival the tawdry splendor of Versailles.)

Johnson is keen on nineteenth-century landscape painting, chiefly the American Hudson River School (“Illuminist” is the term that later art criticism prefers for this episode), and he also surveys similar work in the rest of the English-speaking world. His nominee for best painting of the nineteenth century is a disturbing interior scene from Russia: Ilya Repin’s “They Did Not Expect Him.” The painting brings the viewer into the story of a man just returning to a middle-class home from exile in Siberia. For my money, though, the truly jaw-dropping illustration in the book is John Sargent’s “Carnation, Lilly, Lilly, Rose.”

The conjunction of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the new treatment of light by J. M. W. Turner marked the great turning point in the history of Western art. Turner was trying to implement Goethe’s theory of sight as the perception of color rather than of shapes, but he had no intention of moving away from figurative art, quite the opposite. As for the Pre-Raphaelites, they were the first “movement,” complete with a manifesto and the will to shock. What surprises now is that they were, as Johnson reminds us, part of a Christian revival, a revival that affected all the arts in the nineteenth century. A string of unintended consequences ensued.

It was in Paris, of course, that things started to go off the rails. The Impressionists were actually a pretty conservative bunch, fine draftsmen for the most part. Like Turner, they thought that the most important aspect of painting was color. They experimented with abstraction as a type of foregrounding. Manet introduced some technical innovations that made painting “faster.” All this was to better represent immediate experience. The real trend, however, was to represent what the artist knew was there, even if that meant abandoning perspective and accurate figure drawing. So the Cubists increasingly did. Soon surrealists learned to treat the artwork simply as an object. Both tendencies moved away from representation. Novelty became easier to produce and found a ready market. Thus the fashion-art engine was ignited, and flights of imposture took off.

Johnson finds much to commend in the twentieth century’s fine arts, including all the major representational artists he can find (not an enormous number, really). He is tolerant of abstractionists such as Kandinsky, whose work can be enjoyed without knowing his theory. Even the theory-minded Mondrian had integrity. For the most part, though, Johnson finds the fine art of the twentieth century cynical, ephemeral, and repetitive. The last point is important: the installations and performance art of the last third of the twentieth century simply repeated the Dada of the early decades, but without the humor of the original. Too much twentieth-century art was perpetrated by great impostors. For Johnson, the arch-impostor was Picasso, a manufacturer of fashion objects on an industrial scale. The fine arts at the beginning of the twenty-first century still suffer from systemic distortions. A cartel of fashion artists, gallery directors, and art dealers contrives to bid up the price of new fashion art and to unload it on the public galleries. (Aren’t people who sell corporate stocks in this manner subject to arrest?)

The fashion artists had entertainment value, and even a kind of skill: people who tried to reproduce Jackson Pollock’s effects, for instance, generally found that they couldn’t. Still, the best measure of Johnson’s contempt for the art of the century just past is perhaps this faint praise of Andy Warhol: “He was not so much an artist, for his chief talent was for publicity, as a comment on twentieth-century art, and as such a valuable person, in a way.”

In product design and in architecture, the original impulse of the Pre-Raphaelite movement had good effects until almost the middle of the twentieth century. It lasted only a few years, of course, but it begat the Arts & Crafts movement, which begat Art Nouveau, which was really just an early form of Art Deco. Johnson loves Art Nouveau down to the last futon, and grieves that so much was scrapped by 1950. (The White House was extensively decorated by Tiffany, Johnson reports, but Theodore Roosevelt got rid of it all: Louis Tiffany, Roosevelt said, had “laid his hands on other men’s wives.”) Louis Sullivan’s skyscrapers were in this tradition. Sullivan actually laid down the principle that “form follows function,” by which he meant that decoration should relate to the purpose of the building, not that buildings should not be decorated. This philosophy produced several decades of fine buildings, from cathedrals to railway stations. (There has yet to be a fine airport, in Johnson’s estimation.)

Unfortunately, by the middle of the century Germany had done for architecture what France had done for painting. Walter Gropius, we are told, suffered from a physical handicap that made it impossible for him to manipulate a pencil, but he was a master of ideology, most of it wrongheaded. Gropius’ Bauhaus sought “a new architecture for the machine age.” This ignored more than a century of experience with industrial design and new materials, much of it as good as building has ever been. Then there was the Bauhaus preference for straight lines over curves, based on the bizarre notion that straight lines were “scientific.” The theories may have been comical (especially when Le Corbusier got hold of them) but their results were unfunny”the three most dismal decades in architecture since the fall of Rome.

In the age of the “machines for living,” according to Johnson, glass-walled libraries baked their books, hospitals killed their patients, and the people forced to dwell in glass-and-concrete boxes showed a marked tendency toward homicide. This assessment is a caricature, but certainly the official architecture of the third quarter of the twentieth century was often both banal and uncomfortable.

Happily, the ice began to break in the 1970s. Major buildings were again free to be ugly in an interesting way. Public works, particularly bridges, were often stunning. Johnson looks benignly on the “Lower Frivolity,” the riotous mixture of styles that such places as Las Vegas exemplify. Such structures are temporary, and they are fun. The problem is the “Higher Frivolity” represented by buildings like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao: they are fun, too, but the joke gets old. In addition, painting and sculpture are reviving, after decades in which art schools made a point of not teaching their students how to draw. Johnson is sanguine: “Human life is short but the life of art is long and the best is yet to come.” Still, the advances in the art of restoration on which Johnson dwells are not the stuff from which Renaissances are made. Perhaps we are looking toward a period whose work will be chiefly the recovery of the great tradition. This book shows that succeeding in that task will be no small glory.

John J. Reilly is the author, most recently, of The Perfection of the West (Xlibris Corporation, 2003). He lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.

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Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos

Sat, 01 Jun 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Robert Kaplan has spent the past twenty years reporting on local collapses of civilization, chiefly in sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. He tells us that, in the future, we should expect more collapse rather than less, and over a wider area. Indeed, he declares that “the paramount question of world politics in the early twenty-first century will be the reestablishment of order.” The period we have entered will be “the most important decades of American foreign policy”—the years during which the terms of the emerging global civilization will be written. We need more than merely new policies to navigate this stretch of history, Kaplan believes. In Warrior Politics , he provides nothing less than the outline of an imperial ethos to guide American elites.

Kaplan says about Western foreign policy pretty much what one wag once said of Queen Victoria: we have pursued goodness to the point of self-indulgence. The result has too often been bloody chaos. Take East Timor, for example. Before the UN insisted on conducting an independence referendum in the region, two things were clear. First, the people would vote for independence from Indonesia. Second, Indonesian partisans would exact revenge violently, unless a foreign security force was placed on the ground to keep the peace. The UN, or rather its members, would not provide such a force, but the do-gooders of the world nonetheless insisted on the international norm of self-determination. The result was disaster.

Particularly since the end of the Cold War, the West in general and the U.S. in particular have been guilty of many such exercises of catastrophic good intentions. We punished military governments in places like Pakistan and Nigeria because they were not democracies, though we knew those countries could unravel if civilians took over. We imposed economic sanctions on nations with imperfect human rights records, even though we needed their help in combating forces that were lethally disposed toward us. Often enough, such policies have been driven by nothing more than the irresponsible harping of the press. We could not have continued to conduct foreign policy like that forever. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, we haven’t been. Warrior Politics does not directly discuss those attacks, but it does explain how our past actions made them more likely.

In essence, Kaplan accuses the Wilsonian tradition of American foreign policy of seeking to apply civic norms to international society. Kaplan describes these norms variously as “Judeo-Christian” and “Kantian.” To use such norms internationally is a category mistake, he claims. Civic morality, in Kaplan’s view, is a morality of intent. We seek to respect the rights of others, and we ask that others respect our rights. The measure of how well we live up to this standard is the disposition of our will to respect it. However, as Hobbes was rude enough to point out, rights become an issue only after order has been established. Only the Leviathan state can provide civic order, and there is as yet no global Leviathan capable of enforcing universal norms. In the world as it is today, the best we can do is an ethics of result. The goals may well accord with Judeo-Christian ideals, but the means to achieve them often cannot.

Among the many technical points Kaplan never clarifies is how the ethical dilemmas of international statesmanship differ from those of sovereigns acting domestically. Obviously, the duties of private persons differ from those of magistrates, since the latter are responsible for the well“being of people other than themselves. This is the case regardless of whether they are focused on domestic or international problems. Is the ethics of keeping the peace abroad really so different from keeping the peace at home? Kaplan’s analysis assumes so, but we are not told why.

Kaplan is at pains to emphasize that he is not endorsing amorality, but rather a morality that is not Judeo-Christian. He calls this ethos “pagan,” though he asserts it formed the core of Winston Churchill’s ethics, not to mention the views of such nominally Christian political theorists as Mach iavelli and Hobbes. The actual pagans he discusses at length are Sun Tzu, author of the fourth century b.c. Chinese classic The Art of War , and Thucydides. Warrior Politics is really a meditation on the ideas of these five men, plus those of Malthus, with reference to the needs of the twenty“first century.

The “warrior ethos” that Kaplan endorses takes something from each of them: Churchill’s animal spirits, Thucydides’ caution against arrogance, Machiavelli’s injunction to “anxious foresight,” Hobbes’ assessment of man as a dangerous predator, and the willingness of Malthus to consider that history need not tend toward the increase of human happiness. Inspired in part by an unpublished essay by Michael Lind on the “honor paradigm” in international relations, Kaplan says that the wise statesman of the twenty-first century should be guided by something rather like the code duello .

In civil society the state protects us, but in lawless regions we must look to self-help, or to strong protectors. The safety of the weak, in fact, depends on the willingness of the strong to use violence on their behalf. In such an environment, the strong dare not suffer insult, lest their credibility diminish and so invite further attacks against them and their clients. There are limits to violence, however. The strong act from self-interest, but only to the point dictated by necessity. To use more force or cruelty than the occasion demands provokes one’s enemies to unite in self-defense.

Kaplan imagines a world in which conventional military conflict is rare but continues through “asymmetrical” means. Terror and assassination will become, he thinks, the preferred methods of attack, not by the weak, but by the ambitious. The leaders of the West, and particularly the United States, must be prepared to function in a world in which democratic mass armies no longer ensure security. Future wars “will feature warriors on one side, motivated by grievance and rapine, and an aristocracy of statesmen, motivated, perhaps, by ancient virtue.”

The role of the United States in all this is unique. While not quite a world Leviathan, it is clearly a planetary hegemon. It does not have the luxury that Great Britain had after the Second World War of handing its place in the world over to a compatible power. If anyone is going to embed human rights and the rule of law in the world system, it has to be us. As Kaplan puts it, “Global institutions are an outgrowth of Western power, not a replacement for it.” At least on a military level, that power lies almost exclusively with the United States.

Kaplan suggests that the world is moving to a greater level of institutional unity. He dwells on an analogy between modernity and the Warring States Period in China. That era resulted, after three appalling centuries, in the Han Dynasty at the end of the third century b.c. Kaplan characterizes the dynasty as a loose system of “governance” for the newly unified but highly diverse Chinese world. Inevitably, he also makes the analogy between the United States and Rome; the point of departure is the frequently made comparison between the Second Punic War and World War II.

The role of the United States, then, will be to oversee the formation of a global civilization we would want to live in. Yet Kaplan believes that American patriotism must be preserved if America is to guide globalization. That is, Americans must cultivate Flag Day and the Fourth of July in the interests of national unity. Kaplan’s model here is the myth-making patriotism of Livy, though one may note that Livy idealized the Roman Republic after it had collapsed, in the first generation of the Empire.

Warrior Politics does not propose a formal system of ethics, not even an ethics of statecraft. Still, while describing an ethos is not quite the same as elaborating an ethics, we may note that the ethical systems that come down to us from the ancient pagans have little to do with the “ancient pagan ethos” of international relations that Kaplan submits for our approval. The eminently pagan Epicureanism and Stoicism were very much philosophies of self-cultivation, not blueprints for empire-building.

Indeed, all of Kaplan’s attempts to apply philosophy to history are problematic. For example, his axiom that “unarmed prophets always fail” has as many historical exceptions as confirmations. He does mention that the unarmed followers of Jesus did “help bring down the Roman Empire,” but without discussing the case in detail. More shocking to First Things readers, perhaps, will be his silence about Christian political theory. Though he mentions Niebuhr’s “Christian Realism” favorably, he does not describe it. He makes a passing friendly reference to Richelieu’s and Bismarck’s “pietism,” but only because he believes that it left them free during business hours to maneuver as Realpolitiker. And his remarks about Just War theory are confined to this: “Grotius’ ‘just war’ presupposed the existence of a Leviathan—the pope or the Holy Roman Emperor—to enforce a moral code.”

Warrior Politics is a call for the American political class to redefine itself in terms of a new goal: the maintenance and consolidation of an international system that is, in some respects, a loosely organized global empire. This is a tall order by anybody’s standards, maybe taller than Kaplan realizes. By telling statesmen to seek the attainable “common good” of peace rather than the “highest good” of justice, he is in effect calling for the end of political modernity, the great age of trouble-making reform. Something else he may not realize is how many of the important questions he raises have long been addressed systematically by theologians and ethicists. Universal peace sounds like a good idea, but it will require a thicker foundation than the code duello .

John J. Reilly is a member of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilization.

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Daemonomania

Thu, 01 Mar 2001 00:00:00 -0500

This book is the third of the projected four in John Crowley’s major novelistic treatment of gnosticism and hermeticism. As in the two prior books, Aegypt (1987) and Love and Sleep (1994), Daemonomania is held together, rather loosely, through the character of Pierce Moffet, a young historian in the 1970s living on a publisher’s advance. We meet him in the first book as he settles down in the Upstate New York town of Blackbury Jambs to write a hermetic interpretation of history (the working title of the manuscript is also “Aegypt”). Through Moffet’s friends and lovers, we are introduced to a local mystery that, in this third volume, builds to a climax of universal significance. His researches link this mystery to a parallel story that encompasses Dr. John Dee (the favorite magus of Queen Elizabeth I), Giordano Bruno, and the uncanny Prague of Emperor Rudolph II. The series makes use of the latest research about werewolves and witchhunts, ancient and modern, and readers interested in the academic study of the occult love it, especially since the author is generous with bibliographical information.

Daemonomania has the distinction of being one of the few books in which the world ends twice, once in 1588 and again in 1979. The author’s notion of apocalypse works like this:

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From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (1500 to the Present)

Wed, 01 Nov 2000 00:00:00 -0500

From Dawn to Decadence is one of those wonderful books that cannot be categorized. Some reviewers have compared it to The Education of Henry Adams , the great intellectual auto biography that seemed to sum up the last fin“de“siècle. The comparison does no injustice to either work. Jacques Barzun was born in 1907, and so has lived through a not insignificant slice of the period he covers, but even he did not know Descartes personally. And yet in some ways From Dawn to Decadence reads less like a history than it does like a personal memoir of the last half“millennium, with people and topics selected chiefly because the author is interested in them. The effect is delightful, though sometimes a little disorienting. Perhaps the one thing you can say for sure about From Dawn to Decadence is that it provides the most cheerful explanation you are ever likely to get for why Western culture is ending.

Jacques Barzun really needs no introduction. Anyone interested in William James, the great Romantic composers, the role of race in historical writing, or a dozen other subjects has already encountered him somewhere. (A book he coauthored with Henry Graff, The Modern Researcher , sticks in my mind after twenty“five years as a philosophy of historiography disguised as a reference guide.) In From Dawn to Decadence , he manages to touch on just about all his lifelong interests, and without turning the book into a mere anthology.

The format is loosely chronological, with the great era of the post“medieval, “modern” West divided into several lesser ages. The whole text is broken up into digestible chunks of commentary and biography. We get assessments, sometimes quite idiosyncratic ones, of almost all the great names of the modern era, but many of the biographies are of persons the author deems worthy“but“obscure. Some of these subjects really are virtually forgotten, such as the ingenious eighteenth“century polymath, Dr. Georg Lichtenberg. Others are just a bit neglected, such as the senior Oliver Wendell Holmes. (Barzun manages to praise this physician and essayist while barely mentioning his jurist son.) A particularly entertaining feature of the book is the brief, apt quotations set into the margins. Had it not been for From Dawn to Decadence , I would never have known that Thursday was bear“baiting day at the court of Elizabeth I.

From Dawn to Decadence has only a minimal amount of political and military narrative, which is something of a drawback since the author routinely makes unexplained allusions to people and events that may no longer be common knowledge. (Do undergraduates today know what Stanley said to Livingston? I’m afraid to ask.) And then there are the fact“checking lapses inevitable in a work of this scope. These will allow readers to entertain themselves by looking for mistakes. More than one reviewer has noted that modern calculus does not use Newton’s notation, as Barzun says, but that of Leibniz. However, this review may be the only place you will read that those long“range shells the Germans fired at Paris (and Barzun) during the First World War did not come from Big Berthas, but from Krupp’s Pariskanone .

Parlor games aside, the author corrects errors that are far more important than the ones he makes. He points out, for instance, that, no, M. Jourdain did not speak prose, and that Molière knew this as well as anyone. It is anachronistic, he reminds us, to suppose that Galileo was tried because the Inquisition believed the Copernican model threatened man’s place in the universe. Rousseau’s works cannot be made to say, he observes with a note of exasperation, that Rousseau was a revolutionary who wished mankind to return to a state of nature. Intellectual superstitions of this sort are probably immortal, but it is a good idea to try to correct them at least once every five hundred years.

While a book as genial as this one can hardly be accused of promoting anything as crudely Germanic as a theory of history, it does present a sketch of the last half“millennium. According to Barzun, the West has been working out a cultural impulse that it received in the Renaissance, an impulse that had become exhausted by the end of the twentieth century. This impulse was not an ideology or an agenda but an expandable list of desires, particular forms of which can be detected throughout all the cultural and political controversies of the great era. The names of these desires are helpfully capitalized wherever they are mentioned, so that Emancipation is graphically shown to play a role in every major controversy from the Reformation to the women’s suffrage movement. Another example is Primitivism, the perennial impulse to return to the original text, to the early constitution, to the uncluttered state of the beginning. Other trends of the modern era have been informed by the desires for Abstraction, Reductivism, and Self“consciousness. Ideas like these can hardly be said to have been the motor of Western history, but looking for their various incarnations over the centuries does make it much easier to view the era as a whole.

Barzun laconically informs us that late medieval Europe was a “decadent” society. I myself had thought that Richard Gilman had permanently retired that word with his study Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet , but Barzun may persuade readers that “decadence” is neither a moral category nor a bit of implicit vitalism. Rather, Barzun says, the term “decadent” may properly be used of any social situation that is blocked, where people entertain goals for which they will not tolerate the means. Decadent societies tend to become labyrin thine in both their cultures and their styles of government, as people create small accommodations within a larger unsatisfactory context. Decadent periods can be sweet, as Talleyrand remarked of pre“Revolutionary France, but partly because they are obviously ephemeral.

Decadence may end in the explosion of a revolution, by which Barzun means the violent transfer of power and property in the name of an idea. Revolutions are great simplifiers that pave over the labyrinths and open up possibilities that were unimaginable just a few years previously. There have been four of these revolutions during the modern era, each more or less defining an age. There was the religious revolution of the Reformation, which first stated themes that would recur through the rest of the era. There was the monarch’s revolution of the seventeenth century, in which the aristocracy was tamed and large, centralized states began to appear. The monarchs, of course, got their comeuppance in the liberal revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Most recently, every throne, power, and dominion was shaken by the social revolution at the beginning of the twentieth.

Barzun seems to believe that the twentieth century was so traumatized by the First World War that it was never able to fully exploit the positive possibilities in what he calls the “Cubist Decade” that preceded the war’s outbreak. Rather, the Age of Modernism (not to be confused with the modern era) largely confined itself to analysis and destruction. Thanks to the First World War, the more distant past became unusable: the sense of living in a completely new age left the past with nothing to say. No restraints remained on the expression of the desires that had characterized the whole modern era. The result was that, by century’s end, the chief remaining impulses in Western culture had developed to a theoretical maximum. So ends an age.

This conclusion would be de pressing, were it not so reminiscent of similar conclusions in earlier eras. Barzun notes that at the end of the fifteenth century, some people held that the sixth millennium of the world was about to end”and history along with it. As is often the case with this kind of sentiment, the people who shared it were on to something, if the end of history is taken to mean the end of history as they knew it. Barzun ends the book on a note of hopeful speculation. He looks back from a more distant time on our immediate future, which he supposes will be an age when history will wholly disappear from even the minds of the educated. Indeed, so completely will the modern age be forgotten that its rediscovery will have an impact quite as revolutionary as the impact that classical culture had on the late medieval world. The result, Barzun hopes, will be another renaissance, when the young and talented will again exclaim what joy it is to be alive.

John J. Reilly is the author of Apocalypse & Future: Notes on the Cultural History of the 21st Century (Xlibris).

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The Archetypes in the Machine

Sat, 01 May 1999 00:00:00 -0400

TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information
by erik davis.
harmony. 368 pp. $25.

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"Intelligent Television"

Thu, 01 Jan 1998 00:00:00 -0500

This season’s most controversial new program, Nothing Sacred , is about everyday life at an urban Catholic parish. At any rate, it is about everyday life as refracted through the multi-layered narrative techniques used in ER and its progeny: handheld cameras, several subplots running at once, and lots of characters on-screen. (The soup kitchen at this parish has as many patrons as the chow-line in the film epic Spartacus .) Considering what might conservatively be called the adventurous attitude that ABC and its parent Disney Corporation have taken toward cultural issues in the past few years, it was never likely that Nothing Sacred would provide many ringing affirmations of Catholic orthodoxy. Even before its premiere, the show raised quite a lot of dudgeon among the defenders of the Church. In any case, the show’s ratings have been so dismal that any assessment of the theology of Nothing Sacred is soon likely to be purely academic. Still, the experiment does seem to have taught one lesson. We now know, from no less an authority than the Nielsen ratings, that reactionary liberalism has no audience.

Nothing Sacred is like the joke about the old dog that was still fit enough to chase female dogs but too old to remember why. The basic template seems to be the movie Mass Appeal and similar stories that feature a progressive young priest who shakes up a parish grown frowzy with social respectability and outdated dogma. The protagonist in this series is indeed a reasonably young priest-Father Ray (Francis Xavier Rayneaux)-who is impatient of obstacles to his good intentions. The problem is that the door he’s trying to kick in is already open. No one objects to his ideas, which in any case tend to get lost in the banter. The senior priest in the parish is a sardonic old geezer who gives the young Turk amused encouragement, punctuated by ironic references to the old days, when people used to believe in Hell. There are occasional ominous references to The Bishop, but he is a distant and alien figure with no real influence over what goes on at the parish. The series has been praised, perhaps rightly, for showing that life in a rectory is more often concerned with practical matters, like running a soup kitchen, than with abstract theological issues. What Nothing Sacred fails to show, however, is why the staff should not forget this parish nonsense and just run the soup kitchen.

The parish church in the show does not teach orthodox doctrine. It does not teach liberal doctrine. It does not teach any doctrine at all. A running gag is the uselessness and tedium of Sunday homilies. (Maureen Dowd of the New York Times wickedly suggested that its moral latitudinarianism was the work of the show’s Jesuit advisers.) The premiere episode dealt in part with a young woman who brings a tape recorder into the young priest’s confessional and asks him for the Church’s view of abortion. In answer, he states neither the Church’s teaching nor the views of the many dissenters. What he does come out with is something along the lines of “You’re an adult and I cannot live your life for you.” Lest we miss the point, the end of the episode shows the young woman pleading with the old priest to give her some sure answers-but he remains significantly silent.

The really odd thing is that a program Ms. Dowd labeled “intelligent television” should take such pains to keep the intelligence to itself. Certainly you learn nothing about Catholicism from watching the program, and one would be tempted to dismiss Nothing Sacred as merely high-concept puff ball, were it not for its Social Gospel mean streak.

The old priest says at one point, “What goes on in the basement [the soup kitchen] is why the Masses make sense.” Certainly the basement is where all the moral fervor seems to have leaked. Now, running a soup kitchen (or a shelter) is not for the timid. If you want to run one in a church in a residential neighborhood, you are going to have to pay careful attention to the neighbors’ concerns about crime and sanitation and property values. Some of these worries will be exaggerated, some will be well-founded. The enterprise will require diplomacy and pragmatism. In the case of Nothing Sacred , however, this is where the old dog remembers why he runs.

Maybe ER -style directing does not lend itself to nuance. In any case, a local man in an early episode, a lawyer no less, is so ill-advised as to raise some objections to bringing hundreds of strange people into the neighborhood every day. The young priest lets into him like a chainsaw. The lawyer’s objections are dismissed as bigotry and greed (he sells property to “yuppie scum,” as Father Ray unpastorally calls them), and become the occasion for a tirade on the persistence of poverty. This speech was delivered in the sacred soup kitchen, but many Catholics have heard it from the pulpit. Not a small percentage, one suspects, left church that Sunday thinking about joining some denomination where it is easier for the congregation to fire stupid clergymen.

Programs with religious themes are proliferating on network television, many of them dealing with the adventures of clergy and their families. Most of these shows seem to be set somewhere in suburban Televisionland, and I suppose the creators of Nothing Sacred should be given credit for presenting what they imagined was a more realistic offering. Nevertheless, the show does a grave disservice. The Catholicism it portrays is so contentless as to kill any interest that non-Catholics might have had in the Church-unless they’re looking for a convenient place to practice social work.

John J. Reilly is a member of the Center for Millennial Studies, Boston University.

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Getting Over the End of the World

Sat, 01 Feb 1997 00:00:00 -0500

Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection
By Harold Bloom.
Riverhead Books/Putman, 255 pages, $24.95.

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The Coming Age of Cathedrals

Wed, 01 Jan 1997 00:00:00 -0500

I rarely have occasion to walk through Times Square in Manhattan, so I found myself somewhat taken aback by how much it had improved when I walked through there one morning last summer. It was still noisy and crowded, of course, but surprisingly clean, with many new facades. If any of the stores specialized in pornography, they were discreet about it. Hustlers and pimps did not lurk under the eaves of storefronts. There was a policeman or security guard on every other corner. If Ridley Scott’s dark, dystopic film Blade Runner is the popular image of the future American city, here seemed to be a city evolving in a different direction.

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After Darwin

Thu, 01 Jun 1995 00:00:00 -0400

The ice is beginning to crack in another section of the cold, hard surface of modernity. The part of the frozen lake that is breaking up this time is Darwinism, or at least Darwinism as a worldview with implications for culture and social policy. And as with the breaking up of Marxism and Freudianism, we may not like what bubbles to the surface when all the ice finally melts.

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Updating St. Anselm?

Sun, 01 Jan 1995 00:00:00 -0500

The Physics of Immortality by Frank J. Tipler.
Doubleday 528 pp. $24.95

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