Feature: What Makes Us Civilized?

A distinguished professor of art argues that we have declined as a civilized society and challenges education to reverse the trend.

'...what do we live by and for but that evanescent achievement, the merit of Mankind?' -- Florida Scott-Maxwell

'No feature seems better to characterize civilization than its esteem and encouragement of man's higher mental activities -- his intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements and the leading role that it assigns to ideas in human life.' -- Sigmund Freud.

'The beautiful is as useful as the useful. Perhaps more so.' -- Victor Hugo.

In 'Nature, Art and MSU' (Summer 1986), professor Roy T. Matthews presented essentially an encomium for a distinguished man whom he knows personally, Dr. Ernst Gombrich, prominent art historian and author of The Story of Art. Matthews explained that his purpose in focusing on one outstanding individual was to avoid being limited by the various arguments that then raged, and still rage, in the academic community over programs and courses.

This felicitous decision enabled Professor Matthews to imply that his subject--the arts and humanities--clearly had wider than only local application: It is a fundamental concern for education at all levels nationally and internationally.

Many commentators during the last several decades have balefully noted what may be denoted as a decline in our civilization. If 'cultural barbarism' is not a conflict of terms (that is, if barbarism is not by definition anti-cultural) it anyway represents an erosion of an achieved level of civilization.

Three comments follow, the first made in 1939, the next from three decades ago and the last made this year:

'We are living at a time when the status of man is undergoing profound upheavals. Modern man is progressively losing his understanding of values and his sense of proportions. This failure to understand essential realities is extremely serious. It leads us infallibly to the violation of the fundamental laws of human equilibrium. In the domain of music there is a tendency to...degrade music to servile employment and to vulgarize it by adapting it to the requirements of an elementary utilitarianism.' -- Igor Stravinsky: 'The Poetics of Music'

'Do we not need educated men and women in the fields of public affairs, public health, poetry, social work, politics, theater, education, dance, medicine, public administration, painting and government? Do we not need scientists and engineers who combine with knowledge and skill of a practical kind a sensitivity to human values, a sense of social responsibility, an understanding and appreciation of the arts? The widest sweep of imagination, the deepest level of intuition, the great command of insight are as necessary to the true scientist as to the poet or to the philosopher.' -- Harold Taylor: 'Art and the Intellect'

'`Multiculturalism' has made some people - including teachers - apologetic about Western Culture and values. There is no valid reason for this...Western Civilization is what all the world tries to attain. No matter what our faults - and they are many - the benefits we have given the whole world are incalculable. If we fail to pass on such rich sources of value, we are certainly failing a whole generation - no matter their culture to pass it on to another generation, then, surely, it is dying...In the name of `giving the public what they want' the media have manipulated the public into wanting more and more sleaze...we tend to let the majority response (popularity) determine our values...certainly we must never let mass taste (lack of it) determine what we hear, see, read, eat and enjoy. That is simply to let the barbarians take over. That they are is obvious not only in the crime rate and the rate of imprisonment here (highest in the world!) but also in the level of conversation (inane) the nature of our entertainment (depraved) and the kind of music most Americans listen to (debased). The media cater to the lowest common denominator and [that] gets lower every day.' -- Donald R. Vroon: American Record Guide, Jan/Feb 1994

'Cultural relativism,' subscribed to respectfully but somewhat heedlessly today, refuses to value one cultural entity over another. The result is a 'grey area' of uncertainty where the trivial or the barbaric are regarded as equal to the momentous or the civilized, for example, the crudest carvings with the finest, the wailing and screaming of the musically untalented with the voices of trained singers, the daubs of incompetent painters with the greatest masterpieces ever made and even the practice of female mutilation with advanced surgery. All are equally estimated: 'Sensibilities' must not be offended, every 'creative' act must be recognized and immediately set alongside every other, and so common sense is discarded in a spirit of democratic insanity.

This same fear of commitment to anything also leads to many other stupid attitudes in all spheres of society, including politics, the law and religion. Sports may be the only area exempt, since most games must finish with a winner, and that is that! A 'tie' is unacceptable, and every attempt is made to break it. We must also contend with other negative forces beyond the freezing of the faculty of judgement and the assignment of values. To live, in this hectic century, and soon in the next, is to be ever caught up in a giddying whirl of activity, clamor and confusion, and then to be anaesthetized by various forms of deadening 'entertainment.' As Paul Valery says: 'Crude excitement is the ruling mistress of contemporary minds; and the actual purpose of any work is to tear us from the contemplative state, from the state of happiness whose image was formerly part of the general conception of Beauty...[but] Beauty is a kind of corpse. Novelty, intensity, strangeness - in a word, all the values of surprise have supplanted it'.

We hear a lot of outrage on the subject of drugs and addiction to them, yet virtually our whole society is dependent on `dope' of various sorts, taken to avoid confrontation with the difficulty of living an inward life, the only life that ultimately has any real meaning for us. Almost everything that is signified by the word `beauty,' with its powers of healing and regeneration, our `civilized' environment works to deprive us of our visual environment is especially reprehensible, saturated as it is with poor design, weak and offensive images and the cold impersonality of most of what is mass-produced: all this contributes to isolating the individual from human character and presence.

Many otherwise intelligent persons do not miss the aesthetic quality in their lives, particularly if they were never introduced to it as a vital force. Bertrand Russell says: 'The `practical' man, as this word is often used, is one who recognizes only material needs, who realize that men must have food for the body, but is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the mind. If all men were well off, if poverty and disease had been reduced to their lowest possible point, there would still remain much to be done to produce a valuable society; and even in the existing world the goods of the mind are at least as important as the goods of the body.'

Civilizations earn or lose their pretensions to greatness on the record of their achievements, which is in reality the combined achievement of small minorities within them. And what great civilizations of the past have left to posterity is the remaining evidence of their glory, often attained despite internal as well as external threats. We may be aghast at the record of wars, political machinations, natural disasters, epidemics, etc., but what have endured as living presences are art, architecture, drama, history, poetry, philosophy, etc: the arts and humanities.