Charles Murray on the Future of Art

Upon reading Daniel Boorstin’s The Discoverers many years ago, I became fascinated with the ebbs and flows of human achievement, and especially those points in world history that have been associated with a flowering of great accomplishment. The most famous are Athens in the Periclean age and Florence in the Renaissance, but there have been many other less spectacular examples. Sometimes, the surge of great creativity is most obvious in a particular domain—literature in nineteenth-century Russia, for example—but strides made in one field are usually accompanied by strides made in others. Historically speaking, what accounts for the difference in the fertility of the cultural ground?

In the late 1990s, I set out to assemble databases of humanity’s great achievements, applying historiometric methods to identify the significant figures and remarkable achievements. The result was a book I published in 2004, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. In its concluding chapters, I laid out the conditions (italicized in the rest of this essay) that characterize the times and places in which accomplishment has flourished. The question I seek to answer in this essay is: Given what we know about the conditions that led to great accomplishment in the past, what are the prospects for great accomplishment in the arts as we move through the twenty-first century? I begin with the conditions that are empirically indisputable and work my way to ones that are more interpretive.

A major stream of human accomplishment is facilitated by growing national wealth, both through the additional money that can support the arts and sciences and through the indirect spillover effects of economic growth on cultural vitality.

National wealth is an enabling condition. It doesn’t ensure great accomplishment, but it provides the wherewithal for patrons to buy works of art and boxes at the concert hall. Economic growth is also a signal of a civilization’s vitality and confidence, which is likely to be mirrored in the vitality and creativity of its arts. In this regard, the news is good for the United States. We are very rich and we are likely to continue to get richer, assuming current economic policies don’t continue forever. The United States is unlikely to be impeded from great accomplishment by a lack of wealth.

A major stream of human accomplishment is fostered by the existence of cities that serve as centers of human capital and supply audiences and patrons for the arts.

America has several urban centers that provide the critical mass of human capital necessary for great accomplishment.

A major stream of human accomplishment is fostered by political regimes that give de facto freedom of action to their potential artists and scholars.

No problem here either, though it should be noted that the requirements for political freedom are not stringent. Some of the great streams of accomplishment have occurred under absolute monarchies—Louis XIV’s France comes to mind—when the monarch allowed artists to work unmolested. In contemporary America, scientific research in both the hard and soft sciences is constrained on some topics by political correctness and even government restrictions (e.g., stem cell research). But composers, painters, sculptors, and authors still have plenty of freedom of action.

A major stream of human accomplishment is fostered by a culture that encourages the belief that individuals can act efficaciously as individuals, and encourages them to do so.

The creative act in painting, sculpture, musical composition, or writing comes down to a solitary person thinking of something new and pursuing it without knowing for sure what the result will be. Any culture will turn out some audacious, self-willed people in that vein. But the more collectivist, communitarian, or familial a culture is, the fewer such individuals will emerge, and the greater the damping effect on artistic creation will be. Thus, classical China was a highly familial society with stunning achievements in painting and poetry, but there was much less innovation and branching out in those artistic fields than in the West. When Confucianism was the reigning philosophical paradigm, the aesthetic rules set down by revered poets and painters could remain nearly intact for centuries.

Once again, it is hard to find reasons for thinking that America has a problem meeting this criterion. We continue to be a highly individualistic culture. If anything, our most talented have too inflated a sense of their ability to act efficaciously as individuals.

The best single predictor of a stream of accomplishment in the current generation is the presence of great models in the previous generation.

The insight that great accomplishment begets more great accomplishment goes back two thousand years to a Roman, Velleius Paterculus, who first analyzed the clustering of genius in Athens and concluded that “genius is fostered by emulation.” In the modern era, that insight has been confirmed in rigorous quantitative studies, and it is one of those social science findings that shouldn’t surprise anyone. If children who have the potential for creating great art are watching a Leonardo da Vinci set the standard, they are more likely to create art like Michelangelo, Dürer, or Raphael did. This is relevant for thinking about the future of American accomplishment in the arts because, as far as I can see, we do not have any great models in the current generation who will produce greatness in the next generation.

The magnitude and content of a stream of accomplishment in a given domain varies according to the richness and age of the organizing structure.

The problem here is that we are living at a time when the rich organizing structures that gave us five centuries of magnificent accomplishments in the visual arts, music, and literature from 1400–1900 are old and filled up.

By organizing structure, I mean the principles, tools, and craft used to generate the artistic product. As an example, consider the organizing structure of painting as it was revolutionized in the fifteenth century. The new set of principles were those of linear perspective; a major new tool was invented in the form of oil paints; and the techniques that were developed to take advantage of the new principles and tool constituted an elevated level of craft. Together, they formed an organizing structure for creating two-dimensional art that was incredibly rich with possibilities and unleashed a flood of great work. Music saw the development of an equally promising new organizing structure over a longer period, from the late middle ages through the Baroque period, with the creation of polyphony and eventually tonal harmony (principles), new and improved instruments (tools), and the evolution of techniques for taking advantage of the new resources (craft). In literature, the organizing structure that created an eruption of great work starting in the late eighteenth century was overwhelmingly dominated by a new principle: the modern novel.

All of these organizing structures are more than two centuries old. Even the systematic use of abstraction in the visual arts (a new set of principles) has been around for more than a century and a half. In other words, all of the organizing structures for the great artistic works of the West have been largely “filled up,” in a practical sense. It is theoretically true, as Arnold Schoenberg famously said, that plenty of good music remains to be written in C major. But artists want to break new ground, and the more creative power an artist possesses, the less likely it is that he wants to produce another version of a well-established form. What’s the point of writing a great symphony in the classical style (from the ambitious composer’s point of view), when we already have so many of them?

This doesn’t mean that a second renaissance is impossible within these ageing organizing structures, but it would have to be sparked by a renewed passion for the kind of art they permit—a renewed passion for the things that can be conveyed by the “window on the world” of realistic art, tonal harmony harnessed to grand themes, and fictional narratives stuffed full of life. Absent that fundamental change in the satisfactions artists take from their creations, we will need new organizing structures to give their potential full rein.

The richest new organizing structure of the twentieth century was the motion picture. It is also the only organizing structure that does not show signs of being filled up. A plausible case can be made that the film industry is still making products that rank somewhere among the all-time best, and there is reason to hope that even better are yet to come.

What are the prospects for the discovery of completely new organizing structures in the arts? It’s hard to tell. Until a new organizing structure appears, how can one identify the void that it fills? But I will cautiously advance the possibility that we are approaching limits dictated by human evolution.

Consider the dead-end organizing structure that appeared during the twentieth century: the atonality (or contra-tonality) that Arnold Schoenberg thought would rival tonal harmony for the public’s affection. He was wrong. Neuroscientists are identifying the reasons why he was wrong. Music based on tonal harmony is attractive for reasons that go deep into the brain, and atonality creates an instinctive aversion in most persons for equally deep reasons. In his book The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton has a fascinating account of the characteristics of landscape paintings that appeal to humans across cultures and across time, and persuasively links those characteristics to human responses that were hard-wired in the early phases of human evolution. Human traditions of storytelling suggest that humans are hard-wired to prefer certain narrative conventions.

Still, humans are adaptable. Some of Mozart’s and Beethoven’s music was considered painfully dissonant when it was first played, and much of Stravinsky’s work has become a lasting part of the repertoire. Expressionism left “window on the world” realism behind, but humans still responded enthusiastically to the expressionists’ new conventions for capturing reality. Innovations in novelistic narrative using stream of consciousness have gained acceptance.

But humans are adaptable only up to a point. True, some people say they love Arnold Schoenberg’s music, respond in some important way to Andy Warhol’s art, and have read Gravity’s Rainbow all the way through. But they constitute a small minority. Most people are drawn to tonal music, pictorial art, and literature that is centered on storytelling for reasons that go back to the ancient African savanna.

If that proposition is correct, then the prospects for the emergence of important new organizing structures are limited when it comes to content that appeals to a wide audience. Instead, they must depend on possibilities created by new technology. In music, wonderful new instruments could enable new varieties of music that tap into the same inborn needs that C major satisfies. Technology might give visual artists new ways of creating works that appeal to the same instincts that have the made pictorial art so beloved. Electronic video games may evolve into a new organizing structure for storytelling that eventually will produce great cultural products. And who knows what symbiosis between humans and technology will eventually be developed, enabling artists and their technological muses to create jointly works that rise above the bar set by the great masters of the past? At least we can always hope.

A major stream of human accomplishment is fostered by a culture in which the most talented people believe that life has a purpose and that the function of life is to fulfill that purpose.

Imagine two cultures with exactly equal numbers of potentially brilliant artists. One is a culture in which those potentially brilliant artists have a strong sense of “this is what I was put on this earth to do,” and in the other, nihilism reigns. In both cultures, the potentially brilliant artists can come to enjoy the exercise of their capabilities. But the nihilists are at a disadvantage in two respects.

The first disadvantage is in the motivation to take on the intense and unremitting effort that is typically required to do great things. This is one of the most overlooked aspects of great accomplishment. Fame can come easily and overnight, but excellence is almost always accompanied by a crushing workload. Psychologists have put specific dimensions to this aspect of accomplishment. One thread of this literature, inaugurated in the early 1970s by Herbert Simon, argues that expertise in a subject requires a person to assimilate about 50,000 “chunks” of information about the subject over about ten years of experience—simple expertise, not the mastery that is associated with great accomplishment. Once expertise is achieved, it is followed by thousands of hours of practice, study, and labor.

The willingness to engage in such monomaniacal levels of effort in the arts is related to a sense of vocation. By vocation, I have in mind the dictionary definition of “a function or station in life to which one is called by God.” God needn’t be the source. Many achievers see themselves as having a vocation without thinking about where it came from. My point is that the characteristics of nihilism—ennui, anomie, alienation, and other forms of belief that life is futile and purposeless—are at odds with the zest and life-affirming energy needed to produce great art.

The second disadvantage involves the artist’s choice of content. If life is purposeless, no one kind of project is intrinsically more important than any other kind. Take, for example, an extraordinarily talented screenwriter who is an atheist and a cynic. When asked if he has a purpose in life, he says, “Sure, to make as much money as I can,” and he means it. The choice of content in his screenplays is driven by their commercial potential. His screenplays are brilliantly written, but it is a coincidence if they deal with great themes of the human condition. His treatment of those great themes, even when he happens to touch on them, is not driven by a passion to illuminate, but to exploit. If instead he has a strong sense of “This is what I was put on earth to do,” the choice of content will matter, because he has a strong sense that what he does is meaningful. To believe life has a purpose carries with it a predisposition to put one’s talents in the service of the highest expression of one’s vocation.

Thinking ahead to the rest of the twenty-first century, the problem is that the artistic elites have been conspicuously nihilist for the last century, and the rest of the culture has recently been following along. The most direct cause of a belief that one’s life has a purpose—belief in a personal God who wants you to use your gifts to the fullest—has been declining rapidly throughout society, and the plunge has steepened since the early 1990s. The rejection of traditional religion is especially conspicuous among intellectual and artistic elites.

A major stream of accomplishment in any domain requires a well-articulated vision of, and use of, the transcendental goods relevant to that domain.

In the classic Western tradition, the worth of something that exists in our world can be characterized by its embodiment of truth, beauty, or the good. Truth and beauty are familiar concepts, but “the good” is not a term in common use these days, so I should spell out that I am using it in the sense that Aristotle did in the opening sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.” When applied to human beings, the essence of “the good” is not a set of ethical rules that one struggles to follow, but a vision of human flourishing that attracts and draws one onward.

The proposition I argued in Human Accomplishment is that great accomplishment in the arts is anchored in one or more of these three transcendental goods. The arts can rise to the highest rungs of craft without them, but, in the same way that a goldsmith needs gold, a culture that fosters great accomplishment needs a coherent sense of transcendental goods. “Coherent sense” means that the goods are a live presence in the culture, and that great artists compete to approach them. This doesn’t mean that in, say, Renaissance Italy, every artist spent his days thinking about what beauty meant, but that a coherent conception of “beauty” was in the air, and it was taken for granted that art drew from that understanding.

Beauty is not the only transcendental good that the arts require. A coherent sense of the good is also important—perhaps not so much for great music (though I may be wrong about that), but often for great art and almost always for great literature. I do not mean that a great painting has to be beautiful in a saccharine sense or that great novels must be moral fables that could qualify for McGuffey’s Readers. Rather, a painter’s or a novelist’s conception of the meaning of a human life provides the frame within which the artist translates the varieties of human experience into art. The artistic treatment of violence offers an example. In the absence of a conception of the good, the depiction of violence is sensationalism at best—think Sam Peckinpah. When the depiction of violence is taken to extremes, it can have the same soul-corroding effect as pornography. But when it is informed by a conception of the good, the depiction of violence can have great artistic power—think Macbeth. So whereas some great works of art, music, and even literature are not informed by a conception of the good, the translation of this concept to the canvas or the written word is often what separates enduring art from entertainment. Extract its moral vision, and Goya’s The Third of May 1808 becomes a violent cartoon. Extract its moral vision, and Huckleberry Finn becomes Tom Sawyer.

To generalize my argument regarding the importance of the transcendental goods, I believe that when artists do not have coherent ideals of beauty, their work tends to be sterile; when they do not have coherent ideals of the good, their work tends to be vulgar. Without either beauty or the good, their work tends to be shallow. Artistic accomplishment that is sterile, vulgar, and shallow does not endure.

These observations are especially relevant to our era because in the twentieth century, truth, beauty, and the good were outright rejected in the culture. I am referring to the rise of certain nihilistic strains in modernism, which took root in the last half of the nineteenth century, broke into bloom in the years just before World War I, and reached full flower in the 1920s and 1930s. In From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun described the three strategies used by the avant-garde to advance its agenda:

One, to take the past and present and make fun of everything in it by parody, pastiche, ridicule, and desecration, to signify rejection. Two, return to the bare elements of the art and, excluding ideas and ulterior purpose, play variations on those elements simply to show their sensuous power and the pleasure afforded by bare technique. Three, remain serious but find ways to get rid of the past by destroying the very idea of art itself.
Sometimes, the new way of thinking was expressed cynically. “To be able to think freely,” André Gide wrote, “one must be certain that what one writes will be of no consequence.” Sometimes the proponents of the new art used the language of the transcendental goods with an Orwellian redefinition, as in Guillaume Apollinaire’s pronouncement that the modern school of painting “wants to visualize beauty disengaged from whatever charm man has for man.” By the mid-twentieth century, the abstract painter Barnett Newman put it more brutally: He and his colleagues were acting out of “the desire to destroy beauty.”

Postmodernism has followed modernism. In the visual arts, the repudiation of the transcendental goods was taken to new extremes. Some of the specific sensations, such as Mapplethorpe’s sadomasochistic photographs and Serrano’s Piss Christ, have become nationally famous. In some schools of contemporary music, the aspect of truth that is so compelling in Bach—the mathematical inevitability of some of his music—has been transmuted into extremely intricate mathematical puzzles, but puzzles that are devoid of beauty or emotion. In literature, modern novelists linger on the anxieties of the human condition, but seldom draw on a conception of the good as a resource for illuminating that condition.

I take these potshots at modernism and postmodernism aware that exceptions exist. I also happily report that the postmodernists are feeling some pushback. In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker listed some of the movements—the Derriere Guard, Radical Center, Natural Classicism, the New Formalism, the New Narrativism, Stuckism, the Return of Beauty, and No Mo Po Mo—that are trying to fuse innovation in the arts with coherent conceptions of what I call the transcendental goods. Wendy Steiner’s Venus in Exile is a damning indictment of the postmodernists’ rejection of beauty, but she is able to point to many examples of the return of coherent conceptions of beauty in recent years. With those caveats, this generalization about the early twenty-first century still seems justified: The postmodern sensibility still dominates the current generation of visual artists, composers, literary critics, and “serious” novelists, and, to that extent, the renunciation of the transcendental goods remains.

Drawing these strands together, my analysis of the patterns of past streams of accomplishment leads to a mixed prognosis for the future. America, as it enters the second decade of the twenty-first century, has the physical infrastructure for great achievement in the arts: national wealth and vibrant urban centers. Its potential artists have sufficient freedom of action. The American culture still fosters a sense of personal autonomy and efficaciousness.

But it does not have a generation of great models for the next generation to emulate. The organizing structures that produced the oeuvres of great past accomplishment in literature, painting, sculpture, and music are old and filled up. Even the newest organizing structure, surrounding motion pictures, is a hundred years old at this point. The twentieth century saw a steep decline in religious faith among the elite, which presumably is associated with a steep decline in the sense of the “this-is-what-I-was-put-on-earth-to-do” motivation to create great work. The same century saw a rejection of the transcendental goods that I believe are part of the indispensable raw material for great achievement in the arts.

So we have the infrastructure for a major stream of accomplishment, but not the culture for one. On top of that major obstacle are three other potential problems that I must put as questions because my analysis of previous human history can give us no direct answers to them. Can a major stream of artistic accomplishment be produced by a society that is geriatric? By a society that is secular? By an advanced welfare state?

History gives us no direct answers because we are facing unprecedented situations. We have never observed a great civilization with a population as old as the United States will have in the twenty-first century; we have never observed a great civilization that is as secular as we are apparently going to become; and we have had only half a century of experience with advanced welfare states. But we need to think about these questions. The aging of the population is a demographic certainty. The prudent expectation, based on trends over the last fifty years, is that by mid-century the United States will be about as secular as Western and Northern Europe are now, and that the United States will have a welfare state indistinguishable from those of Western and Northern Europe. Neither of the latter two events is as inevitable as the aging of our society, but an alternative future would require a sharp U-turn in existing trends. What happens to the arts if these things come to pass?

The aging of society is about to accelerate, and the effects will probably be nonlinear. In 1900, only 13 percent of the population was over fifty years of age. By 1950, the proportion had grown to 23 percent. By 2000, not a lot had changed, with 27 percent of the population over fifty. But by 2050, current projections show the United States with 40 percent of its population over fifty, and that number could rise even higher with the advances in prolonging life that scientific advances are opening up. By 2100, the over-fifties will presumably constitute well over half of the population.

We cannot know for certain how the aging of the population will play out culturally, but it is hard to think of scenarios in which the arts become more vibrant and creative. It is possible that an aging population will facilitate a renewal of interest in the transcendental goods—people generally get more concerned about the great issues of life as they get older. But one of the constants of human history is that the creation of great art is dominated by the young—the median age of peak accomplishment is forty—and the milieu in which great art is created is surely facilitated by energy, freshness of outlook, optimism, and a sense of open-ended possibilities. We must assume that all of these will be in shorter supply than in the past now that our society is increasingly populated by the old.

The aging of the population is happening not only because of low birth rates, but also because life expectancy is increasing, which leads to another phenomenon without historic precedent: the removal of the constant psychological awareness that one’s own death could happen at any time. The early death of a close friend or family member happens so rarely in the lives of most people that it has become an anomaly—today, we see the deaths of people in their sixties described as “untimely.” Our baseline assumption is that we’re going to live to old age. How is this affecting the human drive to achieve?

In a world where people of all ages die often and unexpectedly, there’s a palpable urgency to getting on with whatever you’re going to do with your life. If you don’t leave your mark now, you may never get the chance. If you live in a world where you’re sure you’re going to live until at least eighty, do you have the same compulsion to leave your mark now? Or do you figure that there’s still plenty of time left, and you’ll get to it pretty soon? To what extent does enjoying life—since you can be sure there’s going to be so much to enjoy—start to take precedence over maniacal efforts to leave a mark?

I raise the issue because it fits so neatly with the problems associated with increased secularism and the increased material security provided by the advanced welfare state. In a world when death can come at any time, there is also a clear and present motivation to think about spiritual matters even when you are young. Who knows when you’re going to meet your Maker? It could easily be tomorrow. If you’re going to live to be at least eighty, it’s a lot easier not to think about the prospect of non-existence. The world before the welfare state didn’t give you the option of just passing the time pleasantly. Your main resources for living a comfortable life—or even for surviving at all—were hard work and family (especially, having children to support you in your old age). In the advanced welfare state, neither of those is necessary. The state will make sure you have a job, and one that doesn’t require you to work too hard, and will support you in your old age.

Put all three conditions together—no urgency to make your mark, no promptings to think about your place in the cosmos, no difficulty in living a comfortable life—and what you seem to get, based on the experience of Western and Northern Europe, is what I have elsewhere called the Europe Syndrome.

The Europe Syndrome starts with a conception of humanity that is devoid of any element of the divine or even specialness. Humans are not intrinsically better or more important than other life forms, including trees. The Europe Syndrome sees human beings as collections of chemicals that are activated and, after a period of time, deactivated. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible. I submit that this way of looking at life is fundamentally incompatible with a stream of major accomplishment in the arts.

The most direct indictment of the Europe Syndrome as an incubator of great accomplishment in the arts is the European record since World War II. What are the productions of visual art, music, or literature that we can be confident will still be part of the culture two centuries from now, in the sense that hundreds of European works from two centuries ago are part of our culture today? We may argue over individual cases, and agree that the number of surviving works since World War II will be greater than zero, but it cannot be denied that the body of great work coming out of post-war Europe is pathetically thin compared to Europe’s magnificent past.

The indirect indictment of the Europe Syndrome consists of the evidence that it is complicit in the loss of the confidence, vitality, and creative energy that provide a nourishing environment for great art. I blame primarily the advanced welfare state. Consider the ironies. The European welfare states brag about their lavish “child-friendly” policies, and yet they have seen plunging birth rates and marriage rates. They brag about their lavish protections of job security and benefits and yet, with just a few exceptions, their populations have seen falling proportions of people who find satisfaction in their work. They brag that they have eliminated the need for private charities, and their societies have become increasingly atomistic and anomic.

The advanced welfare state drains too much of the life from life. When there’s no family, no community, no sense of vocation, and no faith, nothing is left except to pass away the time as pleasantly as possible.

I believe this self-absorption in whiling away life as pleasantly as possible explains why Europe has become a continent that no longer celebrates greatness. When I have spoken in Europe about the unparalleled explosion of European art and science from 1400 to 1900, the reaction of the audiences has invariably been embarrassment. Post-colonial guilt explains some of this reaction—Europeans seem obsessed with seeing the West as a force for evil in the world. But I suggest that another psychological dynamic is at work. When life has become a matter of passing away the time, being reminded of the greatness of your forebears is irritating and threatening.

Is there any way for the American arts to flourish even if we don’t make a political U-turn and stave off the European welfare state? In trying to think about how a renaissance might happen, I cannot put aside the strongest conclusion that I took away from the work that went into Human Accomplishment: Religiosity is indispensable to a major stream of artistic accomplishment.

By “religiosity” I do not mean going to church every Sunday. Even belief in God is not essential. Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism are not religions in the conventional sense of that word—none postulates a God—but they partake of religiosity as I am using the word, in that that they articulate a human place in the cosmos, lay out understandings of the ends toward which human life aims, and set standards for seeking those ends.

A secular version of this framework exists, and forms a central strand in the Western tradition: the Aristotelian conception of human happiness and its intimate link with unceasing effort to realize the best that humans have within them. In practice, we know that the Aristotelian understanding of human flourishing works. A great many secular people working long hours and striving for perfection in all kinds of jobs are motivated by this view of human life, even if they don’t realize it is Aristotelian.

Whether it happens in a theological or Aristotelian sense, I believe that religiosity has to suffuse American high culture once again if there is to be a renaissance of great art. Is that possible? And if it is, is it realistic? Thinking through such questions would take another essay at least as long as this one. But let me close by offering a reason for optimism.

The falling away from religiosity that we have seen over the last century must ultimately be anomalous. From the Enlightenment through Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, religiosity suffered a series of body blows. The verities understood in the old ways could not survive them. Not surprisingly, new expressions of those truths were not immediately forthcoming, and the West has been wandering in the wilderness.

It won’t last forever. Humans are ineluctably drawn to fundamental questions of existence. “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is one such question. “What does it mean to live a good life?” is another. The elites who shape the milieu for America’s high culture have managed to avoid thinking about those fundamental questions for a century now. Sooner or later, they’ll find it too hard.