Art and Civilisational Collapse

I am haunted by a strange feeling these days. I am sure I am not the only one who has felt it. While enjoying the art of our past I have found myself more and more feeling a sense of unease; fear even. Listening to Beethoven, reading Wuthering Heights, seeing the paintings of Guerin, I feel that I need to somehow protect these things, that they are under attack from an unseen enemy. Equally disconcerting is the afterthought I have: that this fear is perfectly rational. You see, I do not fear destruction of the music, literature or art per se. I fear the destruction of that which it all represents. These things represent the soul of Western civilisation.

Art is the window into a society’s state of mind. Art comes from the subconscious of individuals, and thus art at large reflects the subconscious of our civilisation. And around us we have seen beauty, virtue and elegance dissolve into fear, confusion and nihilism. What does this say of our ideas?

Beethoven’s music reflected the soul of his times: the hero-worship of revolutionary Europe, the sense that there was wonder in life to be unlocked and that the West’s philosophical momentum had the key. Man was glorious. Individualism and freedom were great and worth fighting for. These ideas that had been brewing for so long in the West could now be wholly realised. They had already won the battle of the mind. Whatever struggles there are reflected in Beethoven’s music, there is an uprightness, a confidence, a belief in glory that brings it up from darkness. Beethoven’s music plunges us into the very depths of human despair and up towards sunlight. Beethoven’s darkness knows that there will be light. And this optimism was part of the glory of Western civilisation. It is also reflected in that quote from Victor Hugo: “Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.” A simple, uncompromising smile towards the future. From all the possible ways we might distil the West’s philosophy at least since the Renaissance, it is undeniable that central to it all was an optimistic belief in the greatness of life and the glory of humanity.

Listen to Enjolras in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, urging his fellow rebels to fight the revolution:

In the future, citizens, there will be no darkness or lightnings, no savage ignorance or blood-feuds. Since there will be no Satan there will be no Michael. No man will kill his fellow, the earth will be radiant, mankind will be moved by love. That time will come, citizens, the time of peace, light, and harmony, of joy and life. It will come. And the purpose of our death is to hasten its coming.

Where have we gone since then? How have we gone so wrong? Look at the “art” of our times and see if it gives a single flicker of the immense warmth that radiates from that page in Les Misérables. See if it can bring you the same sense of love for mankind. The irony is that those who preach universal love the loudest these days see human beings as evil or incompetent creatures who are undeserving of love or even pity.

Read those words of Hugo. That was a time when the West believed in itself. What have we got now? We have the mess of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles. We have the vulgarity of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. We have “I Poop You”, an art show in San Francisco some years ago, where paintings were constructed using animal faeces, and one piece consisted of a golden toilet plunger. The aim of the show was, according to the stagers, to “challenge squeamishness and to advocate the power of poop as a means of expression”. And when we don’t have toilet humour as art, we have other things that disturb us.

Of course, not all writers were as good as Hugo. Not all composers were as good as Beethoven. But, generally speaking, our artists were aspiring to be like them. They were following the same artistic principle which had guided Hugo and Beethoven and probably every other artist: beauty. The West believed in beauty. It believed that life and human beings could be beautiful and grand. This optimism was part of its core philosophy. Now it seems the West has grown up and looks back at its optimistic past with a sense of amusement. The laughter is holding back tears.

To clarify the link I am going to make between art and civilisational collapse, I will say that today’s art is both a symptom and a cause of it. It is symptomatic of everything wrong with our mentality. It causes the instilling of despair in the next generation. This generation will turn their eyes to art for inspiration, but find nothing but a self-hating, life-hating desperate plea for death.

Today’s art shows that we in the West no longer believe in our values as capable of achieving happiness or human greatness. Today’s art says these things are impossible. Thus, we will try to achieve neither happiness nor human greatness. And even if we desperately defy this state of affairs and try to achieve them, we have no guide. Without the inner optimism that has carried the West’s philosophy from the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment, to the Romantic era, we are at the mercy of any alien culture that can offer us some sort of reprieve from our hopeless and meaningless existences. And this, incidentally, is the reason Douglas Murray gives in The Strange Death of Europe for why people are converting to Islam. If we believe that the West’s individual freedom leads to a hopeless dead-end of late-night McDonald’s and alcohol binging, why would we bother protecting individual freedom? There is no point in considering the grand, the virtuous—all those things are delusional and frivolous. All those times the West thought it was grand and virtuous it was just oppressive and racist.

Now we see everywhere a short-termism in art, a sign of a civilisation that fears death and senses catastrophe so much it indulges in whatever it can as quickly as possible. See the buildings that we create these days. Do we expect them to last for thousands of years like those of Rome? See the instant gratification of our culture, where the clothing offers but a brief nod to its covering function before exposing as much flesh as possible. The gap between what we see around us and pornography is diminishing. And look again at our standards of dress. Tattoos and nose rings are now as unremarkable as sunscreen. Ugliness has become a way of life. It is fashionable to show your hatred of our civilisation’s elegant past. Don’t tell me it’s just “their version of beautiful”. I don’t deny it. But these aesthetic choices represent certain values. And these are dangerous values.

I began by discussing that feeling of unease. I feel this same civilisational angst, if you will, when I see otherwise beautiful young women with half their head shaven and the other half painted blue. They have piercings all over their face. It makes me wince, of course. But also, it makes me nervous. A society that has adopted nihilism, banality and short-term hedonism as a way of life cannot last for long. A society that has given up dreams of glory and honour cannot last for long. The pseudo-intellectual nihilists who supply our arts want to think the merry-go-round will carry on for ever and ever, that there will be ever new ways to shock and immiserate us, that there will be no bottom to the swamp they drain to furnish our galleries. The problem is there is an end. It ends when you demoralise a people so much they have no more will to go on living, when you demoralise a civilisation so much it has no more will to sustain itself.

This process of artistic decline is not new to history. We have seen it before in ancient Greece. Observe the changes from the Hellenic era to the later Hellenistic era (which led in to the time when Greece finally capitulated to Roman rule). In Greece, changes in art coincided with gradual civilisational decline, as the idealistic and heroic art of the older world turned into more naturalism and the everyday. Observe the same transformation with Western art, from the Romanticism of the nineteenth century to the naturalism of the twentieth, plummeting right down to the empty thud of Storage Wars and The Biggest Loser. Observe also how the grandeur of ancient Rome gave way to the bleakness and monotony of Dark Ages art. Observe also the art of Weimar Germany, which the old regime described as decadent and Adolf Hitler described as degenerate. It is easy to see why. Germany had created Wagner’s operas. Then, as the music of this past gave way to the atonalism of Berg and Schoenberg, Berlin developed a reputation for moral disintegration.

We are witnessing this same transformation in Western art more generally. We have descended so far into nihilism that even when the art of our times tries to achieve beauty and grandeur it fails. It is held down by the inherent despair of our age. A case in point is the film La La Land. It is beautifully shot. And the music is wonderful. There was the intention to recall the old-fashioned musical. Yet notice how the mood and outlook of that era can only be half-achieved now. Everywhere in the film, the aesthetic elements do more to mock happiness and beauty than affirm them. Consider the song “Someone in the Crowd”, a musically upbeat number ending with a chorus: “Someone in the crowd could be the one you need to know, the someone who could lift you up above.” The song is about hope, the chance of finally achieving success. There are fireworks and euphoria. Then bang. The song ends with the shot of a tow-away sign, the last chord still receding. The protagonist’s car has been hauled away. What’s the artistic message here? It is laughing at hope. It is saying, “Dream all you want, your dreams will end with something like this.” There are many similar elements in the film. Midway during even that song the happy music cuts off for a necessary sombre section. The song “A Lovely Night” ends with us expecting a kiss between the main characters, but a ringing cellphone interrupts the romance. And there is of course the bittersweet finale which can be interpreted as hypothesising what a typical Hollywood happy ending would have looked like, before we are taken back to the grim reality of broken love. There are even less obvious elements. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling are talented, but they do not sing professionally. The film’s makers did not want to give us beautifully rendered melody. They wanted to give us grit and rawness. They wanted to give us “real life”.

For the sake of contrast, imagine if “Someone in the Crowd” were instead towards the end of the film. Instead of finishing with the tow-away sign, it concludes with Emma Stone meeting a bigshot producer who offers her a role in an upcoming blockbuster. That is how the 1930s might have done it. That is not how the 2010s do it. The 1930s were arguably still riding on the optimism of the past. By the turn of this century, that optimism had died.

But La La Land was an experiment in stepping outside the formulaic approach to present-day art. What is the formulaic approach? Listen to the music of Adele and Lorde. Both are terrific artists. They achieve what they intend to achieve. But what they intend to achieve is tragedy. Listen to the music of nightclubs. For extended periods harmony and melody vanish and we are left with the primal, monotonous beat of a drum, or there is merely the inhuman noise of electronic humming. Unbelievably narcissistic rap music finds eager listeners among even the wealthiest and luckiest in life. The “highbrow” stuff is even worse though. Popular art tells us that life is an unending ride of drug-induced highs and emotionally crippling break-ups. “Serious” art denies even human feeling, and gives us incomprehensible swirls and patterns or at times (the full measure of our search for hope) a blank canvas.

Western civilisation has reached the end of its cultural and moral self-destruction. However, I am not willing to sit back and let the world of Mozart and Schiller, of Beethoven and Hugo go down without a fight. And whatever powers of intimidation the destroyers of Western civilisation possess, they are lacking a great weapon. That weapon is the art of our past. Those who defend the West know that they are defending something grand, something beautiful and something life-affirming. Armed with the power and fury of Romanticism, we can launch a pro-West artistic revolution to replace the death-and-faeces-worship of our age. Despair and puerility are powerless against the art of beauty and grandeur.

In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean is imprisoned for five years for stealing a loaf of bread for his starving sister and seven children. He is imprisoned for a further fourteen years after numerous escape attempts. After he is released he is shunned by society on account of his criminal past, unable even to get a lodging at an inn. We are told of the mental turmoil he experienced in prison. Over those years he brewed a hatred of the state which had damned him to hell from birth:

Did he seek to look upward beyond that pallid half-light in which he crouched, it was to see, with mingled terror and rage, an endless structure rising above him, a dreadful piling-up of things, laws, prejudices, men and facts, whose shape he could not discern and whose mass appalled him, and which was nothing else than the huge pyramid that we call civilisation.

Imagine if Jean Valjean were Tommy Robinson. Imagine if our stories wrote about the injustice of Cultural Marxism with such eloquence and fire. Eventually Valjean reforms himself, proves himself virtuous, and loves mankind despite all the persecution he has suffered. Imagine if in our art we had heroes that saved the West in spite of itself, who stood up to smearing and prejudice and violence and—doing as Jordan Peterson would have them do—stood up straight with their shoulders back. That would be the power of our art. That is what we are missing. To create that art is the task I have set myself as a fiction writer, and should be the task of thousands more.

I did not want this to be another bleak piece solemnising the death of our culture. This is a battle cry. Listen to our great music. Read our great literature. Take in our great paintings and sculptures. Then know that yours is the side of upwardness, uprightness, flourishing and human greatness.