The ballroom dance that I should most like to have mastered is the tango. For me this dance conjures a mental picture, no doubt highly romanticized, of torrid nights on the docks of Buenos Aires, where once upon a time tough and intelligent men, immigrants and sons of immigrants, worked hard, and lived and died passionately. The tango conveys at once their joy and their despair, with the implication that those opposite passions are in dialectical relationship, and thus that human existence is inherently imperfectible. There is no reason why popular music should be merely brutal and stupid.

My favorite tango is “Cambalache” (“Bazaar”), composed in 1935, a deep growl of disgust at the modern world:

Que el mundo fue and sera una porqueria
Ya lo se …
Pero que el siglo veinte
Es un despliegue
De maldad insolente
Ya no hay quien lo niegue …

That the world always was and always will be a pile of filth
I already knew …
But that the twentieth century
Is a display
Of insolent wickedness
No one will deny …

The reason for this is the complete moral relativism of the times:

Hoy resulta que es lo mismo
ser derecho que traidor!
Ignorante, sabio, chorro,
generoso o estafador!
Todo es igual! Nada es mejor!
Lo mismo un burro que un gran profesor …

So it turns out that nowadays it’s the same
Whether you’re an honest man or a traitor!
Ignoramus, sage, thief,
Donor or swindler!
Everything is equal! Nothing is better!
A donkey or a great professor—it’s all the same!

Oddly enough, this is more or less the doctrine of John Carey, who, as the back flap of the cover of his book What Good Are The Arts? informs us, “has been at various points in his life a soldier, a television critic, a beekeeper, a bartender and a professor of literature at Oxford.”[1] This is a bit like saying that Marie Antoinette was at various points in her life a baby, a young girl, a shepherdess, and a Queen of France.

Professor Carey is learned in literature and very clever, and he writes well. He is certainly not the kind of writer to hide his meaning under a cloud of verbiage. He is witty, and one often laughs even when one disagrees strongly with him. These are no mean qualities in a writer. Nevertheless, his book is a work of what might be called the higher destruction: the giving of good reasons to hoi polloi for not exerting themselves unduly, since where culture is concerned there is no better or worse. Todo es igual! Nada es mejor!

One could speculate as to why a professor of literature at Oxford, the kind of person who might once have been expected to be a ferocious defender of high culture against its enemies, should now expend so much intelligence and energy on attacking and undermining the very notion of artistic value and cultural standards. Of course, there is no doubt that aesthetes and the professionally cultivated are apt to talk etiolated nonsense; it is an occupational hazard, as it were, rather like alcoholism among workers in the building trade. I remember in my childhood that my father would tune in to a program on the wireless called “The Critics,” for the sole purpose of mocking the polysyllabic gibberish and dogmatic ex cathedra assertions, trotted out with glib self-confidence and an utter oblivion of the need for evidence or argument. For the critics, the provenance of their judgments was guarantee enough of their validity and truth—as evidently, in their opinion, it ought to have been for the listeners. It was a lesson that I have never (I hope) entirely forgotten.

But one might doubt whether irritation at the propensity of aesthetes to talk nonsense could account entirely for Professor Carey’s animus against the notion of better and worse. After all, the fact that many people have talked nonsense does not mean that all have done so or must do so in the future. In any case, creatures of our mental disposition and powers seem to be stuck with the need to make judgments, whether we like it or not; I am no anthropologist, but I doubt very much whether there has ever been found a people, living above the most primitive level, that does not make aesthetic and cultural judgments. Aesthetic judgment is thus no more escapable than is moral judgment, and to argue that there is nothing to be said morally in favor of one course of action compared with another, because there is no indubitable or ultimate metaphysical justification for any code of morality, is itself to take a moral position. Amoralism is a moral code; likewise, aesthetic relativism is an aesthetic.

I suspect (though, of course, I cannot prove) that Professor Carey is motivated principally by political considerations, in the broadest sense of the term. Having made and enjoyed a very successful career as an elitist, he finds himself in a world in which elitism has become a dirty word (he himself uses it to stand in for everything that is politically retrograde, disreputable, and anti-democratic); this book which, for its first two-thirds, argues vigorously for the equality of all cultural artifacts, may be interpreted as an act of repentance, a long mea culpa, though no doubt with a good pension. Although virtue is, as he himself points out, in the same case as beauty, he wants to display his virtue, which is to say his democratic sentiment, by arguing that Shakespeare is not demonstrably superior to daytime (or indeed any other) TV.

Moreover, he shares a strange impulse that is now common among modern teachers of the humanities: He appears, from what he writes, to want to ensure that no one who follows him is as well educated as he. While, pace the beekeeping and the bartending, he has devoted his life to the study of what was once, without irony, called the best that has been thought and said, his philosophical objections to the very possibility of there being a better and a worse, a higher and a lower, would ensure, if it were taken seriously, that no one would or could follow in his path. He is thus not so much a corrupter of youth as a preserver of its callowness.

His first move is to demonstrate that a work of art cannot be defined and therefore cannot reliably be distinguished from any other human product. This being the case, works of art cannot be of any special psychological, moral, cultural, or aesthetic significance. He is, precisely as one would expect in the circumstances, strong on Duchamp’s urinal, and even makes a meal, metaphorically speaking, of Piero Manzoni’s tins of his own excrement, one of which was bought and exhibited by the Tate Gallery in London. A work of art, he concludes, is anything that anyone decides for himself is a work of art. When it comes to the definition of art, we are all Humpty Dumpty.

He fails to recognize that art is hardly the only word for a human activity whose definition is contestable. The word “science” is not in any better position. What do mathematical physics, paleontology, and ethology (to say nothing of economics and social anthropology) have in common that distinguishes them indubitably as science from all other human activities? At the very least, the answer is debatable. Philosophers still argue about what distinguishes science from non-science. Yet the word “science” is not completely meaningless. As for sport, we would most of us agree that baseball counts as one, but do professional wrestling, jogging, competitive ballroom dancing, mountaineering, and chess likewise count as sports? It is an elementary mistake to demand too much precision of a word and then conclude that, because all definitions of it are fuzzy, it has no meaning at all. Words are wise men’s counters, but they are the money of fools.

Professor Carey carries on his work of destruction with arguments that would no doubt impress adolescents in their parent-shocking phase, but are crude, lacking in proper nuance, and often based upon ignorance, willful or otherwise.

For example, Carey tells us that “meanings are not things [sic] inherent in objects,” that therefore by implication the interpreter is as creative and important as the creator, and also no creation can be deemed superior to any other. Likewise, “literary theorists effectively disposed of intentionalism [i.e., that an author’s intended meaning was discoverable from a text] as an evaluative procedure in the mid-20th century.”

Now it is, of course, true that works of art bear any number of interpretations, none of them definitive, but they surely do not bear any interpretation whatsoever. I challenge anyone to look at Velásquez’s magnificent portraits of achondroplastic dwarves in the Prado, and genuinely to believe that they represent a visual argument justifying the maltreatment, mockery, or disdain of such dwarves, or that they are meant as examples of human life that is so unworthy of life that it would have been better they had never been born, or had been strangled at birth. As for Carey’s assertion that intentionalism has been totally and irrevocably disposed of, I interpret him to mean that he is a firm believer in intentionalism. This is not only a creative act on my part, but a charitable and realistic one as well, since I am loath to believe that a professor of literature at Oxford could, in all seriousness, write anything as stupid and self-contradictory as this. He is just being a naughty boy—though his pranks, and those of the many others who play them, might have serious consequences.

There is internal evidence that he doesn’t really believe a word of what he writes. He reminds me of a spoiled cousin of mine who, during his childhood, was given a penny by adults (who marvelled at his precocity) if he would utter a very rude word that was then not as current in everyday usage as it is now. For example, Professor Carey tells us that it is impossible to rank works of art and literature according to the depths of emotion and reflection that they stir, because “we have no means of knowing the inner experiences of other people, and therefore no means of judging the kind of pleasure they get from whatever happens to give them pleasure.” (Note the “happens”—training and effort isn’t at all involved, a strange position for a professor of literature.)

To prove his point, he quotes that well-known egalitarian and uncompromising advocate of the demotic, Virginia Woolf, to the effect that “We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others.” This, he says, would be a good reply to the philosopher Arthur C. Danto, who is of different opinion, “supposing [he] knew his Virginia Woolf and could call the quotation to mind.” Actually, if this is a good reply to Danto, it is a good reply whether or not Danto can call it to mind; its quality as refutation does not depend in the slightest upon his memory. What we see here, in fact, is the kind of superior smirk of self-satisfaction and self-conceit that often lies beneath a mask of democratic broad-mindedness and flattery of the demotic.

Much about human life is mysterious to us, and (I think) is destined to remain mysterious to us. That is one of the reasons why artistic endeavor is so important to us: It is an attempt, never wholly successful, to explain the ways of man to man himself. It is because man is by his very nature a self-reflexive being, of varying degrees of intellectual sophistication, that a purely material or sensory existence is not satisfactory to him.

But this does not entail so radical an agnosticism about the contents of other people’s minds and experiences as Professor Carey pretends to. He ignores the possibility that we may reflect upon the levels of intensity of our own responses to art, and accord different values to them. And while there are no doubt people who suffer from severe autism or Asperger’s syndrome, who display no knowledge whatever of other people’s minds, I doubt Professor Carey would care to be numbered among them. In fact, I know that he does not number himself among them, for later in his book, having repeated several times the impossibility of knowing what other people are feeling, he feels it incumbent upon himself to attack President Bush’s policy in Iraq. What he says is this: “You cannot overthrow another nation’s regime and not incur the undying hatred of the defeated.”

Suddenly we go from radical ignorance of what goes on in the mind of even a single other person to complete knowledge of what goes on in the minds of millions of people. You do not have to be a supporter of George Bush to appreciate that there is more than a slight contradiction here.

Nor here only, but in many other places. Discussing Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “Jabberwocky,” for example, Carey says that we “can see that Carroll has taken a step closer than Shakespeare to the maelstrom of unvoiceable, indistinct feelings we all have inside us.” This goes beyond even his extensive knowledge of Iraqi psychology. In a single leap, in effect, he has gone from total ignorance to utter omniscience.

Actually, he is sometimes much nearer to the former than the latter. He appears to know less in some regards than I did by the time I was fourteen. I say this not because I knew so much, but because he knows so little. For example, he argues that the concept of an artist, as a distinct métier, was an invention of the eighteenth century. When does he think Vasari wrote his Lives of the Artists? The nineteenth century?

Carey is eager to prove that a concern for the arts not only fails to improve people morally but also impairs their humanity. Exhibit A in his argument, only too predictably, is Adolf Hitler, who, as we know, was a man with many artistic interests (not least among them, the driving of artists into exile). But the British government of the time, according to him, was scarcely any better. In 1939, the pictures in the National Gallery in London were moved to slate mines in Wales, to prevent their destruction by bombing. “Civilian populations,” says Carey, “could not, of course, be provided with comparable protection and were killed in large numbers.”

The professor continues, “For [the Trustees] the artworks were not expendable, nor merely a means to an end. They were precious and sacred, and more worth preserving, when it came to the crunch, than human life… . Of course, preserving artworks for posterity can be made to appear simply prudent and responsible. But the prioritising of art over people that it implies is identical with, though less obviously horrifying than, the example of concentration camp commandants who enjoyed string quartets played by Jewish prisoner before executing them.”

That anyone above the age of sixteen would put forward such an argument is to me astonishing. It speaks of an utterly infantile rage, or perhaps the anger of the spoiled brat. Carey does not make at all clear how sending a comparatively small volume of inanimate objects to a mine in Wales could seriously have impaired efforts to protect the civilian population of tens of millions, nor does he tell us how that population would have been served by exposing those objects to easily avoidable destruction. He does not even see that it is necessary for him to do so. He ignores the obvious difference in the difficulty of protecting a few objects and the lives of millions of civilians concentrated in cities, and seems unaware that children were in fact moved from cities to the countryside for their own protection. Perhaps he thinks that the entire population should have been sent down slate mines. And the mere fact that someone has been compared to a Nazi is not sufficient to make that person morally equivalent to a Nazi.

As for the Trustees’ opinion that the paintings in the National Gallery were peculiarly precious, this hardly seems extraordinary to me, much less reprehensible. It would indeed be odd if the trustees of such an institution did not consider that the works entrusted to their care were precious and peculiarly deserving of preservation, but rather were expendable items of no intrinsic worth to be disposed of at the first difficulty, like paper tissues.

Carey’s book is polemical, though it started out as a series of academic lectures, but even polemicists have some duty to acknowledge complexity where it exists. Carey quotes Hegel’s opinion that non-western art is inferior to western art, and implies that this is typical of western aestheticians for, as he puts it immediately afterwards, with heavy irony, “Schopenhauer … made further additions to the West’s notions of high art” (i.e., the West accepted Hegel’s view). This is to ignore a long western tradition of serious appreciation and study of the arts of different cultures. Lord Curzon, who was by no means a marginal figure, made a speech to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1900, in which he said:

If there be any one who says to me that there is no duty devolving upon a Christian Government to preserve the monuments of pagan art or the sanctuaries of an alien faith, I cannot pause to argue with such a man. Art and beauty, and the reverence that is owing to all that has evoked human genius or has inspired human faith, are independent of creeds, and, in so far as they touch the sphere of religion, are embraced by the common religion of all mankind. Viewed from this standpoint, the rock temple of the Brahmans stands on precisely the same footing as the Buddhist Vihara, and the Mohammedan Musjid as the Christian Cathedral… . To us the relics of Hindu and Mohammedan, of Buddhist, Brahmin, and Jain are, from the antiquarian, the historical, and the artistic point of view, equally interesting and equally sacred. One does not excite a more vivid and the other a weaker emotion. Each represents the glories or the faith of a branch of the human family. Each fills a chapter in Indian history.

It is surely an irony of history that an imperialist of a century ago should exhibit infinitely more sensitivity, enlightenment, open-mindedness, and genuine cultivation than a contemporary professor of literature at Oxford.

Carey is nothing if not a believer in modern pieties. In attempting to prove that all cultures are equal, but that contemporary popular culture is the most equal of all, Carey writes:

The characteristics of popular or mass art that seem most objectionable to its high-art critics—violence, sensationalism, escapism, an obsession with romantic love—minister to human needs inherited from our remote ancestors over hundreds of thousands of years.

What is being said here? That anything that panders to our instincts is good? That such pandering is inevitable? That changes in popular taste, either for the better or worse, have never happened and never could happen? That it is no use to expect the masses to enjoy anything but the vulgar and trivial? (Carey has already taken Schopenhauer to task for having said exactly that.) That all is best in this the best of all possible worlds? When postmodernism meets sociobiology, there is no plumbing the shallows that result.

It is not surprising that Carey displays a rhetorical sympathy for the poor: Call no man good unless his heart goes out to at least two billion people. We live in an age not of religious, but of secular humbug. “Do we regard civilization,” Carey asks, “as a machine for producing painted canvas, symphony orchestras and ballet dancers, or do we expect it to ensure that the earth’s resources are evenly distributed, and that people do not perish in ignorance and want?” Grub first, then culture—if at all, that is.

Interestingly, professors of literature are not included among Carey’s list of selfish beneficiaries of the false and elitist conception of civilization: It was perhaps as well for his career, and not entirely coincidental, that he discovered the question at the end of it—when he had already used up more than what he would no doubt call his fair share of the world’s resources—rather than at the beginning of it. As to the dichotomy between two types of civilization, that which produces ballet dancers, and that which produces sanitary engineers to bring potable water to the peasants of the Central African Republic, it puts me in mind of the leading question: Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Either you have or you haven’t—which is it?

Carey then gives us a résumé of the lamentable state of the world (a world that has never known civilization in his Gradgrindian sense of the word). The statistics he offers are determined by his conclusion rather than the other way round; he omits to mention, for example, that the populations of most countries in Latin America, and many in Asia, now have life expectancies above, and infant mortalities below, that of the England into which he was born. That his interest in the details of the lives of the billions of people with whom he so incontinently (and superficially) compassionates is less than obsessive is demonstrated by the following blast against the power of literature:

To believe that, from reading books, you know what it really feels like to starve, to be in continual pain, to watch your children die—in short, to subsist in the Third World—is not refinement of sensibility but a trivialization of others’ sufferings.

When Professor Carey observes Mankind with his extensive view, from China to Peru, he sees nothing but starvation, chronic pain, and the death of children. It is remarkable, in the circumstances, that the population of the world is increasing. Once again, we go in a single leap from the most radical skepticism to preternatural omniscience.

About two-thirds of the way through the book, Carey suddenly changes his tune, without appearing to notice that he has done so. He describes the effect of exposure to literature upon British prisoners, for example the production of a Shakespeare play in prison. Of course, before he gets to this point he indulges in some of his usual high-minded cant:

Two-thirds of the prisoners in British prisons are illiterate or innumerate, or both, to a degree that makes them virtually unemployable in the outside world. Excluded, on release, from jobs, incomes and possessions, they have no alternative but to re-offend.

It is not true that two-thirds of British prisoners are illiterate or innumerate, at least more so than their non-offending, gainfully-employed social peers. It is not true that they are never able to find jobs, and it is not true that they have no choice but to re-offend. If it were, they would never stop re-offending, but in fact they do, though not soon enough.

We are not vouchsafed the reason why literaure (and other arts) should have such have a transformative effect on prisoners, but not on others. Perhaps we need to rob a bank or attack old ladies in the street before a Shakespeare sonnet can have any real meaning for us. When Carey concludes in the first part of his book that the study of literature is not morally improving, I suspect that he is speaking autobiographically.

In the last part of the book, Carey proves himself to be a sensitive, and of course extremely knowledgeable, reader of literature. In fact, he believes in the canon because it makes it less likely that you will waste your reading time. A single word is sufficient to prove that he does not really believe what he wrote in the first two-thirds of his book: He calls Auden’s poem “Lullaby” “great.” By this he does not mean that his response to it, or his interpretation of it, is great or interesting or unusual. He means that the poem has an intrinsic quality not to be found (or looked for) in, say, poems in Hallmark greetings cards. The poem has, and was intended to have, layers of meaning and suggestion about some of the profoundest aspects of human existence. Auden could scarcely have achieved this effect by accident, at random, without intending it, but “Literary theorists effectively disposed of intentionalism …”

Towards the very end of the book, Carey returns to the top of his form in providing an answer to the question asked by his title.

There is evidence that active participation in artwork can engender redemptive self-respect in those who feel excluded from society.

In other words, the arts are, or should be, occupational therapy for the emotionally crippled. And the great advantage of this view is that it demonstrates just how deeply Carey feels for the disadvantaged. But it is not all that many steps removed from the view of that chief engineer of souls, Zhdanov. Surely a few positive heroes, just like themselves, could help those who “feel excluded from society” to gain a little “redemptive self-respect”?

Carey’s book, slight as it is, illustrates with great clarity the moral pathology that has gripped university humanities departments. The search for truth has been replaced by the exhibitionist desire for effect. It may be, of course, that this is not very important; university departments of the humanities, after all, are not generally regarded as the motors of history. And yet an intellectual elite—one that preens itself on the expression of a highly abstract benevolence, so that in it is willing to assert what it does not in the least believe—will before long exert a disastrous effect upon society.

Notes
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  1. What Good Are The Arts?, by John Carey; Oxford University Press, 304 pages, $26. Go back to the text.

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