Ideology Is Bad For Art

But deep convictions are not the same as ideology

Richard Spitz, “Nazi Vision of Greatness,” 1933

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Ross Douthat’s latest piece for The New York Times is a defense of ideological art—or at least it purports to be such a defense. I’m not sure it is one, because Douthat doesn’t specify what he means by “ideology.” So I’m going to lay out my own view here in the hopes of determining whether we have a semantic disagreement or whether we genuinely differ on what makes for great art, and why people with strong convictions should approach art informed by very different convictions.

“Ideology” is a word of French origins which means, literally, the science of ideas. There’s an implicit Platonism smuggled in with the very term, because it presumes that ideas are real things that can be studied, and layered on top of this is the Enlightenment presumption that the right way to study them is scientifically. The word doesn’t have that eighteenth-century meaning anymore, but those Platonic and Rationalist connotations are retained in the current usage, according to which an ideology is a particular idea with totalizing and scientific ambitions. Marxism is the paradigmatic ideology, a grand idea that not only claims to rationally explain all of human history (based only on certain axioms about the nature of reality that it claims correspond to the axioms of natural science), but that also implies a coherent framework for politics, ethics, even, to an extent, aesthetics.

It seems to me, then, that to ask whether ideology can be good for art is to ask whether putting one’s art in service to an ideology such as Marxism can be artistically fruitful in a distinctive way that, absent that service, would not be available to the artist.

As a contingent matter of personal history, I think the answer to that question is “yes,” inasmuch as it is possible for commitment to an ideology to open one’s eyes to realities and experiences that one otherwise would not have had access to. If Marxism brought you face to face with the reality of working-class life, and you made great art out of that encounter, then I think it’s reasonable to credit Marxism with having made you a greater artist. But it’s the encounter, and what you did with it, that actually made the art, not the ideology. In and of itself, the commitment to ideology is going to be a problem for your art, because it places its commitments above the commitment to the art itself that should be the lodestar for any artist.

That, of course, could be true of non-ideological commitments as well. But it doesn’t have to be. Say you were a committed physician as well as a poet. You could set out to write poetry about the practice of medicine itself, and wind up writing poetry that no non-physician would be able to write—this would be the analog of my “Marxism brought me face to face with the working class, and therefore inspired my greatest art.” You could also write poetry that isn’t about the practice of medicine at all, but that is informed in some ineffable way by your commitment to that practice, work that sees the world as a doctor does even if the subject is, say, a bunch of frozen plums that you ate. This would be the equivalent of saying that Bertolt Brecht’s love poetry was ineffably informed by his Marxism (which I don’t know that it was, any more than I know that “This Is Just To Say” was in any meaningful sense informed by William Carlos Williams’s profession as a physician).

But suppose you said to yourself: “I really believe in medicine. It is a force for good in the world, and I want my poetry to encourage people to become doctors. Therefore, I’m only going to write poetry that portrays doctors as heroic figures, and medicine as beneficial to humanity.” If you said that to yourself, and stuck to it, I would expect your art to suffer. You might still produce some good poetry, but you’re going to have a harder go of it because you aren’t going to let yourself follow the muse. You’ll be ignoring her when she calls you to write something that deviates from your self-proclaimed mission, and, worse, you’ll be trying to dictate to her when she inspires you to write on a subject you approve of.

There’s no reason to expect a physician to take that tack, because nothing about being a doctor requires you evangelize for medicine in that way. But this is precisely the kind of thing that ideology frequently demands, even necessarily demands.

Of course, there are other sorts of deep commitments besides ideology that make strong and even censorious demands. If you’re a committed Jew, can you make art that shows Jews or Judaism in a poor light, that could promote antisemitism or discourage Jews from connecting with their tradition? If you’re a committed parent, or spouse, or child, could you make art that shows your child, or spouse, or parent in a poor light, that might cause them pain and even hurt your relationship with them? I don’t think those questions are necessarily easy to answer. But I don’t think the answer can just be a flat “no,” not if you want to take your art seriously. You certainly aren’t obliged to be Philip Roth, but neither are you free to blithely say “whenever these commitments are in conflict with my art, I will simply sacrifice my art.” Rather, if those commitments really are deep, and yet your muse is calling you to create something that seems to conflict with them, then your art, if you are true to it, will wind up being about that conflict. Much of my favorite art feels to me like it has precisely that character, sometimes overtly so, oftentimes not.

So what about ideology? If you have that kind of deep commitment to Marxism, for example, and your muse calls you to create something that seems to be in conflict with Marxist dictates—or those of the Communist Party—whether with respect to content or form or what-have-you, can you take the route of making the art about the conflict? I’m really not sure you can, not while remaining a good ideologue. Among other things, ideologues are extremely good at smelling that kind of conflicted commitment. It’s considered worse, in many cases, than outright apostasy. You might get great art out of the conflict—avowed or suppressed—between the demands of the art and the demands of the ideology that the artist adheres to. But art of that character is unlikely to make ideological enforcers happy, and therefore inasmuch as those enforcers have power over artists, those artists are likely to suffer, and their art to be suppressed. To credit ideology for any great art that emerges from that crucible is a bit like crediting the Roman oppressors for creating the opportunity for martyrdom.

Of course, probably the most common conflict that presents itself to artists is a financial one: the demands of the market (or of a patron) versus the demands of the muse. If you intend to actually make a living as an artist, then part of your job is to understand those financial constraints and internalize them to the degree that you can navigate them without too much friction, without internalizing them to the degree that they become your actual values and you degenerate into a hack. It’s the difference between saying “I’m going to find inspiration within this sandbox” and saying “I’m afraid my inspiration is going to lead me out of the sandbox, so I’m just going to play in the sandbox, and not concern myself with inspiration.” But the mere fact that we have a derogatory word for someone who has fully internalized the demands of the market and taken its values as the only important measure of artistic value shows that we know that real artistic values lie elsewhere—or, at best, that great art arises out of productive conflict between artistic and commercial values. And, again, I don’t think ideology can, by its nature, admit to that kind of conflict being valuable.

So what of Douthat’s own examples of valuable ideological art? He points to V.S. Naipaul’s novels and essays on the one hand and Tony Gilroy’s films and television series on the other as good examples of excellent art clearly informed by the creators’ ideologies—right-wing and left-wing respectively—and therefore credits ideology as part of the reason that they are excellent art. But are these artists actually ideologues? Or do they just have worldviews, temperaments, particular myths that feel to them alive and true? Is every conservative or reactionary a right-wing ideologue? Is every liberal—or everyone who feels the romance of revolution—a left-wing ideologue?

I don’t think so. To press the case, let me present some more pointed examples. Would Douthat say that Gerard Manley Hopkins, Flannery O’Connor and Marilynne Robinson are ideologues? Would he call Christianity an ideology? If he would, then we really are having a semantic argument—but I’ll nonetheless argue that he should change his language for the sake of preserving important distinctions between ideology and other comprehensive ways of understanding the world. But if not, then why are we using that word for Naipaul or Gilroy?

Douthat ends his piece by saying that conservatives should encounter great liberal or left-wing art—and that people on the left should encounter great right-wing or reactionary art—because doing so will help expand their mental horizons and appreciate that there are things that they may not want to accept as true that nonetheless have the “bell-like ring of truth.” That’s a fine phrase, but since false ideologies cannot plausibly ring true what Douthat has, in so many words, restated is the old-fashioned liberal case for freedom of expression and art as the enemy of any kind of enforced conformity—a case I agree with, but it is both a funny argument to hear from a self-avowed reactionary and a decidedly ironic basis for defending ideology in art.

The liberal case, meanwhile, still makes art subordinate to some other value, in this case the effort to make us better citizens, with more empathy for people on the other side of the aisle. Maybe it will do that for us—I certainly hope it will—but that’s not the fundamental reason to encounter Rembrandt or Rothko, Milton or Marianne Moore. The case for encountering great art that doesn’t reinforce your preconceptions about the world is that the art is great, full stop. Yes, a liberal would say that it’s important as such to put your preconceptions to the test and to keep your mind open, but maybe you’re not a liberal; maybe you think your preconceptions are really important, that they keep you on the straight and narrow path of virtue or right thinking. Nonetheless, an encounter with greatness, such as great art makes possible, is of paramount importance in its own right. You’re short-changing yourself if you don’t even attempt it.

The case for art must, ultimately, be a case for art’s sake. If not, we’re just articulating yet another instrumental ideology that, if believed in too fully, will wind up being bad for art.