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Mark P's avatar

Russell Kirk insisted that conservatism was "the negation of ideology." It took me a long time to figure out what he meant by that. Likewise, Michael Oakeshott wrote that conservatism was a "disposition," not an ideology. In both thinkers, there was a deep respect for cultural traditions over contemporary political platforms. I myself find explicitly ideological art to be tedious. https://kirkcenter.org/conservatism/ten-conservative-principles/

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Noah Millman's avatar

I think that properly understood neither liberalism nor conservatism are ideologies -- are "isms." They're both dispositions, temperaments, perspectives, with an associated set of virtues and character traits. And they're complementary -- we need them both.

There are, of course, right-wing and left-wing ideologies as well, and sometimes they are useful -- but they're most useful when treated as tools rather than as ideologies.

Like, consider economics. It's a discipline, founded on some propositions that are conservative (people are inherently self-interested and change behavior in response to incentives) and some propositions that are liberal (people generally know what's best for themselves and free exchange is presumptively positive-sum). It's extremely a useful discipline -- we ignore it at our peril. But it can also be a totalizing way of understanding the world -- an ideology -- and when it becomes that I think it can become quite destructive.

So I don't know that I agree with Kirk that conservatism is *the* negation of ideology, but I certainly prefer *a* conservative temperament that understands itself that way, and is therefore wary of raising, say, Darwinism to the status of an ideology, just as I certainly prefer a liberal temperament that understands itself to be inimical to ideology (as it should -- ideology is inherently illiberal inasmuch as it tries to close the mind around a single totalizing idea) and is therefore on guard against raising, say, intersectionality to the status of an ideology.

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Nicholas Weininger's avatar

Surprised to see no mention of Orwell either here or in the Douthat article. If anyone could be said to (a) be motivated by sincere left-wing ideology to come face to face with working class realities, (b) make great art out of doing that, and (c) relentlessly critique the pieties which his ideology might otherwise lead him to embrace while doing so, it's Orwell. Plenty of right-wingers, for just that reason, try to claim his writings as "right-wing art", but if you look honestly at what he actually says it is very hard to defend that claim.

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Shawn Ruby's avatar

"There's an implicit platonism*"

Ideas meant forms for Plato, not cognitive conceptions.

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Sufeitzy's avatar

Very interesting note and responses.

My personal opinion is that when art becomes propaganda is when it fails as art.

Propaganda is highly time-dependent. Once you’ve lost contact with the object of propaganda, the art either stands transcendant, becomes nostalgic, or irredeemable kitch. And it may oscillate.

Someone mentioned medieval art, some medieval art is kitch, which is what propaganda becomes when it’s untethered from purpose.

USSR, Maoist, other classes of propaganda art is pure kitch, today.

Likewise LGBT rainbow art is pure kitch even before being assessed as propaganda. [Conversely gay eroticism as gay art which was kitch (Tom of Finland) began to transcend its purpose, and now looked at quite differently.]

A late middle-age religious work - take the Imperial Abbey of Ottoburen, the Basilica. It is in one context pure religious excess - Baroque kitsch - but it’s mind-blowing today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottobeuren_Abbey#/media/File%3ABasílica%2C_Ottobeuren%2C_Alemania%2C_2019-06-21%2C_DD_108-110_HDR.jpg

Time changes art.

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Kit's avatar

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work—Goethe

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Noah Martin's avatar

I'm curious what you would say about the great theological/philosophical poems of the past, such as the Divine Comedy, or De Natura Rerum. While I agree that it would be wrongheaded to call, say, Gerard Manley Hopkins an ideological poet because he wrote Catholic poetry, Dante's poem seems to engage with Catholicism in a more ideological form, by virtue of writing directly about the totalizing cosmological structure. If Marxism leads someone to realize the sufferings of the working class, and then makes great art about it, you attribute the improvement of the art to the subject, not the ideology. But the subject of Dante or Lucretius' poems is, to an extent, the worldview itself. Lucretius was writing about the totalizing Epicurean worldview, not a lesser subject it brought his attention to.

(Perhaps you can point to his poetic deviations from strict Epicurean dogma, like metaphorical invocations of the gods, as proof that he was in tension with it, but I hesitate to grant the point; these are clearly poetic devices, and not a rejection of the Epicurean tenets on gods. Though, maybe the need to draw on imagery beyond the concept itself to write good poetry about it is an inherent tension between the form of poetry & ideology? Would a Soviet censor allow obviously metaphorical invocations of non-Marxist ideas?)

Maybe you still can deny that Thomism or Epicureanism are ideologies or sufficiently analogous to ideologies; they sure seem to me, in these instances, to be "a grand idea that not only claims to rationally explain all of human history but that also implies a coherent framework for politics, ethics, even, to an extent, aesthetics." But is it impossible for there to be a Dante or Lucretius of Marxism? What about Marxism would inherently prevent this? Surely, if possible, it would be great ideological art.

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metaphysiocrat's avatar

I think ideological fidelity and "I'm wrestling with my prior ideological commitments as I deal with tough cases for it" are actually pretty reconcilable within a certain set of ideologies (or overarching moral and intellectual frameworks, if you don't like "ideologies" for all of these) - think of these as "historically unfolding ideologies" such as liberalism, Marxism, Catholicism, or Rabbinic Judaism. In all of these, the assumption is that the ideology has pretty strong claims on the individual while also being revised in light of continuing historical experience, and one of the main roles of intellectual elites is to engage in discourse that continually reconciles the less core claims to be in concord both with collective experience/situations and the more core spirit of the ideology. Art can easily be a part of that process.

Note of course this can be very compatible with authoritarianism and censorship, as in Catholicism or Leninist variants of Marxism. In these, the artist may be a good ideologue and "wrestling through" ideological contradictions, while having to falsely hobble her work to accord with the censors, who (sincerely or insincerely, and with greater or weaker arguments) judge it heretical. But within such frameworks "wrestling through" *per se* isn't heresy, it's just that it's both necessary to the whole (correct) revision process and necessarily dangerous (of veering off into heresy.) And indeed I think you find an informal version of this dynamic even within traditions that are explicitly opposed to formal censorship and find even informal censorship problematic, such as liberalism.

There's also the much broader sense of "ideology" in terms of needing to have some kind of framework or world-model in order to make meaningful interpretation of the world at all, but I know that's not what you're engaging with or questioning here.

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Noah Millman's avatar

I explicitly said that great art can emerge from the kind of struggle you're talking about within an ideological context. Are you saying that ideological censorship is *good* for art *because* it produces that struggle? If not, how are you disagreeing with me?

It sounds to me like you are arguing that art can be good for ideology, inasmuch as it can force it to correct itself. That may well be! But the question at hand was the opposite: whether ideology is good for art.

I do not question the need to have some perspective on the world, and I explicitly tried to distinguish between things that I would call ideologies and other ways of seeing the world, such as Christianity. I'm glad you recognize that. But it seems to me that even as you recognize my contention in that regard, you don't really agree with it -- which is fine, but it does mean that we both have to watch whether we are just having a semantic dispute or a substantive one.

As an aside, I can accept a use of the word "ideology" to refer to a narrow dogmatic requirement of authority, like, say, the Tudor and Stuart ideologies of divine right and absolute royal supremacy. Obviously, the promulgation of an ideology like that -- and the institution of censorship -- didn't prevent Shakespeare from writing great works of art. Did it *help* Shakespeare to write great works of art though? That's the question at hand. If it did, I would argue that it would have to be by fostering a creative double-consciousness, where he had to find ways to be, in a sense, unfaithful while still professing faith. That's an argument that art needs an ideology to struggle under and, to some degree, against, not that artists should be good ideologues.

I do agree that liberalism can degenerate into something ideological and winds up being bad for art when it does. Formal rejection of censorship is no guarantee against informally -- or even formally -- embracing precisely that, and even internalizing it in ways that are extremely destructive.

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metaphysiocrat's avatar

Sorry for any lack of clarity in my comment - I only meant to say that a thoroughgoing ideological scrupulousness is quite compatible with struggling through in this sense. Censorship in the above example was meant merely to illustrate how ideological constraints on such artists might be more external than internal, even when artist and censor have the same ideological commitments.

(I can construct plenty of stories where censorship is good for art - perhaps as a source of formal constraints, or as way of displacing the most obvious ways of appealing to audiences (consider censorship against the crudest fun of sex and violence), or as simply something to rebel against - but would endorse the traditional liberal distaste and distrust of censorship as the right general attitude.)

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David Riceman's avatar

Where does medieval and early-modern Christian art and music fit in this scheme?

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Noah Millman's avatar

I'm not sure I understand the question. Are you asking whether I think Gothic cathedrals aren't great art because they were devotional in purpose? Where did I suggest that, if you believe in things, you can't make great art?

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David Riceman's avatar

You implicitly assume that the urge to create art is internally generated. I'm suggesting that some ideologies can heighten a person's desire to make art. In fact, that ideology can be good for art.

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Noah Millman's avatar

Well, as I said explicitly in the piece, I don't consider Christianity to be an ideology. You seem to be implicitly assuming that all belief systems are ideological in character, which I explicitly reject.

Meanwhile, I do think that the urge to create art is internally generated. I don't see any contradiction in saying that while also saying that those internal impulses are shaped very strongly by one's culture and beliefs.

But also, I explicitly talk about how, for essentially all artists you've heard of or whose work has endured (very much including medieval artists), an essential motivation to create art is financial. Both the medieval church and the medieval nobility were great patrons of art. And the nature of the medieval economy being what it was, art -- particularly if you include architecture, clothing, etc. -- was most of what surplus wealth could be spent on; it's not like you could buy a Lear jet with your money. You can't ignore that fact when you think about the place of art in the Middle Ages.

Anyway -- I'm really not sure in what way you are contesting anything I wrote.

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David Riceman's avatar

I think your claim "the urge to create art is internally generated" is where we disagree. The cliche of boy meets girl and suddenly starts writing poetry is an example, and i think Bach's music is another. Quite a lot of art, good and bad, is generated from external stimuli, and I think ideology, even narrowly defined, has simulated some of both.

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David Riceman's avatar

I meant stimulated.

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