"Beginning in the 1970’s, the mission of modernism was extended by the set of styles and philosophies called postmodernism. It was more Marxist and far more paranoid.
Once
we recognise what modernism and postmodernism have done to the elite arts and humanities, the reason for their decline and fall become all too obvious. The movements are based on a false theory of human psychology, the Blank Slate.They fail to apply their most vaunted ability – stripping away pretence – to themselves. And they take all the fun out of art!
Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was rejected long ago. Young children prefer calendar landscapes to pictures of deserts and forests, and babies as young as 3 months old gaze longer at a pretty face than at a plain one.
These artists and critics fail to acknowledge another feature of human nature that drives the arts: the hunger for status.
The problem for artists is not that popular culture is so bad but that it is so good.
As for sneering at the bourgeoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle class – personal responsibility, devotion to family and neighbourhood, avoidance of macho violence, respect for liberal democracy – are good things, not bad things. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie. Given the history of the 20th century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to join mass utopian uprisings can hardly be held against them.
A revolt has begun, coming together in a new philosophy of the arts, one that is consilient with the species and respectful of the minds and senses of human beings.
A growing number of mavericks are looking to evolutionary psychology and cognitive science in an effort to re-establish human nature at the centre of any understanding of the arts.
I will conclude with the overtures of three fine novelists.
Iris Murdoch. A.S. Byatt. John Updike.
The economy is in better shape today than it was ”
Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate p401-419
Magnificent and timely! The Daily Telegraph
"The whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for life is simply the transference from society to organic nature of Hobbes’ theory of Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes (the war of each against all—ed.), and of the bourgeois economic theory of competition, as well as the Malthusian theory of population. When once this feat has been accomplished (the unconditional justification for which, especially as regards the Malthusian theory, is still very questionable), it is very easy to transfer these theories back again from natural history to the history of society, and altogether too naïve to maintain that thereby these assertions have been proved as eternal natural laws of society."
Percy Engels - Dialectics of Nature, Moscow, 1954
Darwinian Man, though well-behaved,
At best is only a monkey shaved!
W.S Gilbert
