some thoughts having finished Richard Taruskin's Cursed Questions, more on my own dissent from art-religion and the binaries of the Cold War era

One of the fun parts about blogging can be when writers can bounce ideas off each other and, whether they necessarily always agree, spark interesting discussions.  There was a time between about 2011 to 2015 that this blog was mostly known as a stopping point for people who wanted to read about the former Mars Hill Church in Seattle.  During those years I would occasionally get some angry comments to the effect that "all" I ever wrote about was Mars Hill stuff or about Pastor Mark (Driscoll). 

That was never the case but for people locked into a brand loyalty that could have seemed to be the case.  I didn't have any problem writing about Pixar movies I liked (and I admit I like quite a few, having wanted to be an animator when I was a boy and having never lost my respect for the craft and skill it takes to make even what I would now consider badly made cartoons).  I also occasionally wrote about music and now, of course, music is often what I write about.

Perhaps it's because of my time at Mars Hill Church and witnessing more second-hand than first-hand what seemed dangerously cultish about it, in other words having seen the various ways that what would be called actually religious religion can do significant harm, I have basically zero sympathy for what in academic circles and arts circles is considered the better, nobler and truer religion a la Richard Wagner, namely Art.  There's a couple of reasons for my acquired skepticism about art-as-religion being an ennobling thing.  First, I admit to being the sort of Calvinist Presbyterian who takes seriously the idea of the Fall and original sin and that the first warnings we must heed from those doctrinal traditions is what it means about "me" before any of us get around to "you". That leads rather quickly to what has been one of Richard Taruskin's key arguments against the art-of-religion in connection to the Holocaust. In actual religious traditions there are plenty of warnings that you can have the right dogmas and still be evil.  Didn't James warn in his epistle that you may say you believe in God but even the demons can make that profession.  As Richard Taruskin has noted many a time about George Steiner, Steiner was perplexed by the reality that the humanities did not humanize. 

The way I've put the topic in the past has not necessarily been to do with the Holocaust but with a different situation, the revelations of Weinstein's conduct in the #metoo era, which from within the streets of Hollywood itself confronts us with what could be a Donatist controversy for advocates of art-as-sanctifying sacrament. The post was very unsubtly named

"the post-Weinstein #MeToo era as a Donatist controversy for Western art religion"


Taruskin, for his part, has written many articles arguing against the idea of art-as-religion or we might be able to call high art traditions as sanctifying sacraments.  I considered seminary at one point decades ago so it's fairly easy for me to switch back and forth between art jargon and theological jargon.  So all of that may be by way of introduction to anyone who is reading this who has not read what either I or Taruskin have written in our very different scenes and platforms about the idea that loving the high arts or fine arts of the Western traditions makes people better people. 

Bryan Townsend has been reading Taruskin's Cursed Questions, too. He may struggle more with Taruskin's often withering take downs on the notion that loving the right kind of art makes one the right kind of person. 

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/03/there-is-no-hope-for-art.html

I've got my own differences of perspective from Taruskin about, for instance, George Steiner, but it's more a matter of emphasis.  I only heard about Steiner because John Borstlap took In Bluebird's Castle to be a wholesale summary of the death of Western culture because it did not stop the Holocaust and now we have to live with it, whereas Taruskin's take is more that Steiner presumes a justified dominance, for want of a better phrase, of the West as the West that is partly justified because George Steiner feels ambivalent about how Western arts didn't stop the Holocaust.  Many a Western secularist would refer to the commanded slaughter of the Canaanites and trot out the old claim that religion always makes people evil.  Well, in that case, all the more reason to reject any kind of art taking a comparable place to religion.  Last I checked Star Trek fans need to get that memo.

The older I get and the more I mull over what the Native American half of my ancestry ran into dealing with state and federal authorities the more it seems to me that Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, whatever the average blue state white progressive might think of it as embarrassingly low genre goofiness or aspirational utopian sci-fi, the possibility that Star Trek embodies an LBJ era form of American cultural imperialism is generally not up for consideration. 

I wrote the following a while back before I'd finished the book.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/03/richard-taruskins-new-book-cursed.html

I've also exchanged thoughts with Bryan and others at his blog.

I've put my cards on the table that I am, at nicest, skeptical to the point of unbelief about art as religion.  If religion doesn't ensure that people are better people there's no reason for me to believe that either art or politics will ensure people are better people, either.   I have read a bit too much about Soviet history to regard Marxism as exempt from atrocity because Anglo-American leftists want to no true Scotsman Stalin or Beria out of being "real" Marxists.  On the other hand, perhaps thanks (?) to having half my ancestry being Native American I don't really have a huge incentive to presume the best about American continental expansion and yet (in case you didn't catch that I mentioned being a Calvinist!) I also don't think that blue state white guilt about the way Native Americans were treated (badly) exempts Native American cultures from being found wanting for what in some regions (the Pacific Northwest) was the pervasiveness of a callous and inhumane approach to slavery in the generally nomadic PNW tribes that even white racists from Missouri found somewhat galling.

Or as some authors in the Bible warned us, there is none that is righteous, not even one.

One of the key arguments Taruskin has made over the course of his career is to keep highlighting that loving the arts does not make us good neighbors.  Art as religion is no better at making us better people than religion generally is.  What low church Protestants might say the problem often is is a form of sacralism and a conflation of church and state, some post-Gelasian  doctrine of the two swords being invoked to make the church and the state of one accord and that this error, for those Christians who regard it as a terrible error (hint) it's possible for the magisterial Reformers to see the problem in post-Constantinian Christendom and yet magically not see their own bids at replicating Christendom and the sacralized states on their own Protestant terms. 

So, I guess that's my way of saying as a Christian that what I appreciate about Taruskin's polemics against Western art-as-religion for its long history of abuses or failure to rein in the lesser impulses of humans resonates with me because, well, my own years of chronicling what I came to regard as the graft and abuse of religious leaders in the former Mars Hill might, as the saying goes, overlap on a Venn diagram. 

It's somewhat paradoxical that I only got around to reading George Steiner and Theodor Adorno because of John Borstlap.  Borstlap has proposed that the Holocaust may have happened because people failed to live up to the best ideals of Enlightenment and the West.  Well, okay, but if that's the formulation it's what Americans call the informal fallacy of no true Scotsman, a temptation that we need to resist whatever team we're on. 

So I don't happen to agree with the idea that art can make us better people.

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/04/art-as-religion.html
....
But art and music have very special potential benefits that most other activities do not. There is a long and rich history to explore with all sorts of aesthetic and social implications. There is the challenge of performance which rewards not only the artist, but the audience as well. There is the challenge of understanding music from the point of view of the listener and the analyst. Writing about music is another multifarious challenge.

As religions go, you could do a lot worse than choose art and music.

Woody Allen once said that Mozart was proof for the existence of God. I lean more to Bach myself. Here is the Magnificat in D major with Concentus Musicus Vienna and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt:

One of the things I've discovered in my musical life is saying I think Mozart is kind of boring and lame but that I love, love, love the music of Haydn turns out to not be an orthodox view within classical music.  It's a bit more of an accepted orthodoxy to say that Beethoven had some great musical moments but could be a bloviating self-important blowhard.  I still love Beethoven's Op. 111, mind you, I just hate his choral music.  I'd take choral music by Poulenc and Rachmaninoff over Beethoven any time any where. 

What came up recently at Bryan's blog is that Richard Taruskin came by to articulate what I've found and liked in his work:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/04/all-kinds-of-brows.html

Richard Taruskin said...

Hello Mr Townsend, and thanks at long last for reading me so seriously and commenting so seriously on what I've written. You are of course right: I love classical music and high art as much as anyone (even as much as you, I'll bet). My question is whether I am entitled by my love for it to regard myself as a morally superior person. I of course say no, and the piece on which you are commenting is my lengthy justification for my refusal to pat classical music lovers on the back. It's the sober academic version of that Musical Mystique piece from the New Republic a dozen years ago, about which people got rather exercised. But neither piece was an attack on the music or anyone's love for it.
All good wishes, Richard Taruskin

April 7, 2020 at 3:24 PM

That's it in a paragraph.  There's a world of difference between loving classical music and saying that one's love of classical music, or a specific subset thereof, is proof positive of being a more enlightened and noble soul.  

What my own experience has been, and I could only simply guess that Taruskin has had to deal with a more vitriolic intra-scholastic variation, is that making an argument that love of the fine arts does not make you a better person can often be met with the charge of being a cultural relativist or an aesthetic relativist.  I don't identify as being in either of those camps.  But neither do I regard Theodor Adorno as being anything other that catastrophically wrong in his assessment of American popular music and popular song but that's a topic I want to get to at some other point in the future.  

But by way of a detour, I want to share something a friend from the Mars Hill days once told me he'd heard from a former staffer.  There was a staffer who, so it was told me, said that Mars Hill leadership found Wenatchee The Hatchet a bit of a puzzle for a time because week after week wildly incriminating leaks of sensitive information about elder resignations might come up on this blog and various critical blog posts would show up taking issue with, say, Mark Driscoll's handling of biblical texts.  Then all of a sudden there'd be thousands of words about The Powerpuff Girls (the glorious original 1990s cartoon, not the reboot). As much as I love the string quartets of Haydn and his Piano Trios I have no problem turning around and watching Samurai Jack or Batman: the animated series or The Powerpuff Girls or The Venture Bros or even Princess Unikitty.  One of the arguments that is a side effect, if you will, of Taruskin's arguments about how the fine arts don't make us finer people is implicit, that the axiomatic lowbrow arts don't make those people who love pulpier stuff worse people.  If Mark Driscoll at one time declared his favorite movie was Braveheart I leaned toward another movie that came out about the same time, Toy Story.  Whatever you may think about animation as a medium you're not going to convince me that Braveheart had the less cartoony take on masculinity and conflict than Toy Story.  Even Gibson at one point expressed regret about how simplistic his account of William Wallace was.  Had Gibson ever learned of the antics of William Wallace II would he have felt he'd set a good example?  Rather moot, I suppose.

Being the Generation X member that I am (as these things go) I came of age as the Cold War was ending and one of the things that struck me about the Cold War from my childhood years was hearing the manic dread that we were all likely to die in an atomic holocaust set off by either Reagan or ... mostly just Reagan.  That didn't happen.  I also noticed, being ex-Pentecostal that I am, that every variation of the futurist dispensationalist timeline for being Rapture Ready failed.  I began to discover as I came across postmillenialists that it was far too easy to just assume that the only worst of it tendencies in American Christianity were from the Rapture Ready sort--the old postmillenialist triumphalism played a role in how a bunch of white Americans decided it was okay to disenfranchise Native Americans in the way that they did and my skepticism of both the presumptive leadership of American mainlines and the relatively recent vintage of the Religious Right that has merely co-opted the cultural mandate entitlement that was at one point wielded by the mainlines is about equal.

Perhaps affirming Christianity while rejecting the spectrum of Christendoms is as impossible to accept among advocates of Christendom as attacks on a more secular or panentheistic/pantheist art religion could be seen as an attack on there being anything good about Western art in general or classical music in particular.  I've only rarely been charged with operating from a position of aesthetic or cultural relativism mainly by people who don't know me in person.  I've beaten this drum at this blog in the past but I do worry that in the age of POTUS 45 one of the mistaken responses artists and arts communities have embraced is to treat any and all forms of populist motivation in the most pejorative way possible.  That someone who got elected fit into what Jacques Ellul mapped out as the methodology of the populist agitator doesn't mean that every populist impulse is necessarily bad.  Even Charles Rosen granted that Haydn managed to create genuinely popular music in his late symphonies that didn't sacrifice learned technique.  I.e. if in the history of classical music there was someone like Haydn who managed to be technically accomplished populist it seems dubious to presume that no such balance between "high" and "low" can ever happen again.  

It's less likely to happen now that musicology, for instance, has balkanized in the last forty years into turf wars between pop music historians and classical music historians.  I still don't get why we can't have the Haydn string quartets right alongside Stevie Wonder's Innervisions.  Rather than waste any time on Brian Ferneyhough's guitar music that uses extended techniques can't I just keep listening to the more brilliant blues of Tampa Red, Charley Patton, Blind Willie Johnson, Lonnie Johnson and Robert Johnson?  It's not that I don't enjoy avant garde guitar music.  I have actually had fun listening to guitar music by Maurice Ohana and Alvaro Company recently, I just think George Walker had a point when he advised music students to study Stravinsky and Hindemith because, though he had issues with them, new music students would be better off picking up where Stravinsky and Hindemith left off than by going the Elliot Carter route.

Finally, I've made this point as a hobbyist guitarist and composer in the past but when I see the skepticism on the part of musicologists with more of a pop music  than a classical background I can be sympathetic to that skepticism.  Why?  To keep things on the theme of art-religion, the problem I have with art-religion is that like more than less of the Western religions the canon is closed and there's no need for new divine revelation, what some music educators refer to as the problem not being the musical canons themselves but the ossification that comes with canonism, which brings us back to, yep, the Western Matthew Arnold style art religion that Taruskin has set his sights against for decades.  

It's sort of hard to believe I zipped through all of Cursed Questions in just a couple of weeks but it's a great read.  I'm happy to see that whatever we may differ on that Taruskin and I both have a very positive experience with the work of Leonard B. Meyer.