A friend mentioned a few years ago the idea that the best way to explain an idea is by communicating it as if you talking to a child. At first, this may seem impractical but I came to appreciate the insight in the suggestion. Very often people explain ideas with technical terms which hides the fact they really doesn’t understand the issue. This comes from the fact that much of the person’s understanding comes from reading in a class without insights from experience.
For a long time I have tried to understand why traditional figurative art is in such conflict with contemporary culture. I came to believe that the root of the crisis is due to one’s view of man in relation to organization. An insight that I believe could be understood by a child. Admittedly, the insight came to me when I was reading a passage on Thomas Hobbes in Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine, but the understand was informed by experience. Most philosophical interpretations of the dilemma of man begin with accounting for man’s relation to God or the cosmos but interpreting the perception of man in relation to world organization I believe is just as significant. Images I assembled illustrate contrasting views of how man is regarded in his relationship to organizational structures.
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) had a very pessimistic view of human nature, he regarded people as wild and disorderly virtual machines. Rather than seeing the cosmos being moved by its love for God as the ancients did, Hobbes viewed the cosmos as a giant machine of parts interacting by impersonal cause and effect. When the cosmos began to be regarded as impersonal, nature began to be feared as a random force of cause and effect. Hobbes extended this view of the cosmos to man and assumed that independent men act in a struggle for the survival of the fittest. He is famous for his phrase, bellum omnium contra omnes (war of all against all). He assumed only a invincible rational government could maintain control a society of wild bio-chemical machines. So in the most simple terms, Hobbles saw a government as good and man as bad.
Fortunately, John Locke’s view of man was in complete contrast to Hobbes. Rather than seeing man as bad, Locke viewed governments and institutions as bad. It is accurate to say Locke was the architect of democracy in the Western world. The phrases in the Declaration of Independence,”All men are created equal” and “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” were almost directly taken by Thomas Jefferson from Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689). In a sense Locke’s work was a direct rebuttal against Hobbes idea of invincible government. Rather than seeing man’s nature as being dangerous, Locke was concerned with protecting man’s nature rights. Locke’s view was founded on the Biblical belief in creation from the theological doctrine of Imago Deli, man was created in the image of God. Although man was given rights, it is difficult to defend them in the state of nature. One can say “I have freedom, the right to the fruits of meaningful labor”. But in the state of nature someone can just take that away. So government was formed with the purpose of protecting the natural rights of people in nature.
At the same time, Locke’s ideal government should be limited by law to protect the people from one branch attempt to hold too much authority. Furthermore, if the government did not preserve the natural rights, the people have the right to revolution.
In the late 20th-century a swing towards Hobbes view of man began to find precedence in culture. Since modern people are raised as children in places under the control of bureaucratic methods there is an increased alienation from life for the individual. Erich Fromm wrote, “Life is structured growth, and by its very nature is not subject to strict control or prediction. In the realm of life others can be influenced only by the forces of, such as love, stimulation, example. Life can be experienced only in its individual manifestations, in the individual person as well as in a bird or a flower. There is no life of “the masses,” there is no life in abstraction. Our approach to life today becomes increasingly mechanical…The approach to men is intellectual-abstract. One is interested in people as objects, in their common properties, in the statistical rules of mass behavior, not in living individuals. All this goes together with the increasing role of bureaucratic methods.”
In the process described by Fromm the institution becomes scared and the individual comes to be seen as bad. The individual is not guided by internal consciousness but by the prescribed roles and rules of rational organizations. The estrangement from spontaneity of life leads to a loss of joy for the beauty of creation. All of nature, including man, becomes a menace to be controlled. When people do not respect their nature as individuals they get caught up in mass movements like Fascism.
The lack of respect for the individual man is reflected in the decision of New York city authorities to remove the Theodore Roosevelt equestrian statue from the Museum of Natural History’s steps. The authorities came to the decision because the statue was claimed to be racist depiction of a white male on a horse leading Native American and an African. One author commented that although the sculptor “portrayed them (the Indian and the black man) in a very dignified way, but their position of subservience remains.” Well, from that reasoning, next week they will ban Star Trek because Lieutenant Uhura, a black woman and Lieutenant Sulu, an Asian man were portrayed in a “position of subservience” to Captain Kirk, a white man.
I feel it’s important to defend the sculpture of Roosevelt because I doubt many understand the spirit in which it was created. The first thing that came to my mind when I saw the statue was the idea of the noble savage. Rousseau is often credited for coining the phrase the “noble savage” but the phrase never appeared in his writing. The idea of an indigenous person who had who had not been corrupted by Western civilization appeared as early as 1670 in John Dryden’s play The Conquest of Granada. The representation of being outside of one’s culture is referred to as the ‘Other’. It is typically of postmodern studies to presume images of being outside of Western culture to be derogatory. But such a view reflects the Enlightenment conviction to progress.
In contrast to the idea of progress by institutions there was the idea of the universal man which I accounted for in my previous article, The Subversion of Macho. C.S. Lewis perceived the degrade view of man in educational system when he wrote is defense The Abolition of Man. The sculpture of the dignified rendering of three men of different races seems to manifest what C.S. Lewis referred to as the Tao. The universal belief in objective value that respects the incarnation of man having the unity of body and soul. Lewis wrote,”Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not.”
It is often claimed that the currents of postmodernism deny the Enlightenment faith in science and technology as instruments of progress. Although it’s true that currents in the 1960’s challenged the notions of the political neutrality and objective value of science, I believe much of contemporary currents are too rooted in the Enlightenment’s mechanistic world-view. For example, New York city authorities approached the Roosevelt monument not as an image of an individual persons but as an “intellectual-abstract,” objects classified as men of different races. Postmodernism is characterized bureaucratic methods, people are classified as groups by race and gender. It is claimed this is done for the liberation of “oppressed” groups, but as Fromm said,”There is no life of “the masses,” there is no life in abstraction.” Since individuals are disrespected as wild bio-chemical machines as Hobbes did, I fear many are marching to the drum of Leviathan. Gene Edward Veith, Jr wrote, “Postmodernists and fascist intellectual of the 1930’s both embrace a radicalism based not so much on economics but on culture. They both reject individual identity in favor of cultural determinism…American academics think of themselves as post-Marxists, but their desire for a government-controlled economy, their cultivated irrationalism, and their reduction of social issues to questions of culture and race are more similar to Mussolini than to Marx. If Marxism is modern, fascism is postmodern.”
My account may have swayed from the intention of giving an explanation that would be understood by a child but I believe my account is not just cerebral stuff that only eggheads think about. I often see images in popular sub-culture that seem to reflect the mechanistic world-view that disrespects the nature of man. For example, I was doing research for an illustration I’m painting of a teenager’s room, I found this photograph of a young person’s room with stencil letters that read: We Are All Selfish Machines. I did a web search and found the band Pierce the Veil released an album called Selfish Machines. Disturbing imagery is sometimes used on labels of alcohol products. The label of 19 Crimes reminds me of images of “criminal types” in Nazi propaganda. I ask,”What is the state of mind of the person who would find this label appealing?” As an artist I mostly focus on imagery that brings me joy. I realize I must have a self-respect for my nature as man to paint beauty as I do. The second commandment of Jesus,”Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” begins with the premise that a person loves one’s self but what if a person hates their-self?
I often reflect on how I came to be as Jacques Ellul would say “positively maladjusted” to the world. An experience I had when I was in high school that I forgot about until I found an old high school newspaper clipping may have influenced me subconsciously over the years. The newspaper clipping was a story about the Teen Arts Festival with an interview with me. A portrait I drew had been chosen to tour in the national exhibit but it was rejected because of a simple issue of a line not being filled on the entry form. I expressed my irritation with the indifference of the organization in the interview. I sensed no individual conscious appreciated the quality of my art, all that mattered to robotic administrators was that the line was not filed out. In addition, the reporter who interviewed me spelled my last name wrong in the interview. So the experience had the positive effect of seeing organizational structures as bad. Miguel A Fernandez refers to this process of active nihilism as Nigredo, a term taken from alchemy which refers to cooking alchemical ingredients extensively to a uniform black matter, a step to the philosopher’s stone. Unfortunately the burning in our society is aimed at man when it should be aimed at the urban-industrial structures which have fortified a vast separation between humanity and nature.