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As a junior in college in 1968 (A.D.), I succumbed to a popular rage and bought a book by Ortega y Gasset. It was Ortega’s fate to have Bobby Kennedy think that his middle initial was Y, for which Kennedy was mocked by the same people who, though of the opinion that Robert McNamara was the chief engineer of a war of genocide in Southeast Asia, said at Cambridge dinner parties that, because he read Yeats, he was “really a good guy.” [1] Though The Dehumanization of Art was perfectly positioned to be the darling of the intellectuals—it was a university press paperback, it was by an author of a foreign name that Bobby Kennedy couldn’t pronounce, it was cheap, and it was short—I bought it because I assumed it would be a defense of art and an attack upon dehumanization. Why else would anyone have written a book called The Dehumanization of Art? But I was shocked to discover that it was a spirited endorsement of the principles that I had expected it to condemn. In fact, it was in some ways the Gettysburg Address of Modernism: as an erudite and magnanimous capitulation of the old to the young, it seemed to the generation of 1968 to have been both wise and noble. Though first published in Spain in 1925, it had in the Sixties an air of being bravely at the forefront of changes to which only foolish reactionaries might object. Strangely enough, it has that air even today, when everything in it has been leaden orthodoxy for nearly a hundred years. In art as in politics, entrenched institutions with an affinity for survival give off the scent of revolution even as they sustain a suffocating order. Like the oxymoronic Institutionalized Revolutionary Party, which for most of this century has rigged every election and tightened every cap on every tube of toothpaste in Mexico, the conscious adherents of modernism (most are unconscious) like to think that they are revolutionaries. Expressed by Ortega seven decades ago, their program is “to dehumanize art … to avoid living forms … to consider art as play and nothing else … to be essentially ironical … to regard art as a thing of no transcending consequence.” This is pretty much how things stand today, except that in emptying the nest of morality the theorists made room for the political cuckoos to lay their intractable eggs, and the great exception to the rule of no transcending consequence is that art may be the abject slave of the political craze (and I mean craze) of the moment. I myself was almost a convert to the idea of dehumanization, not because it appealed to me intellectually but rather because I had had a very lonely upbringing and was infatuated with nature. To the playwright William Alfred, who was my tutor in English, I proposed the idea of a novel, set in the Galápagos, absent either humans or anthropomorphized animals. It would be about lava, steam, waves, wind, the sky, colors, temperatures, scents, tides, rocks: much like the Yiddish theater. He told me that I couldn’t get away with it, and despite my citation of Melville’s “Encantadas” (which, not coincidentally, takes place in the Galápagos), he ran through his vast store of knowledge and laid down the law: literature, he said, has to be about people. Backed up against a wall, I offered to throw in a tortoise, but he was implacable, and for very good reason. Art that imitates the rigor of science forgoes an infinite wealth of variables that pure nature, in its constancy and nobility, does not present, for if man is more limited in his capacities he is more interesting in his unpredictability. Art that accepts human limitations is empowered and enriched by the very discipline that the modernists ignore. For example, the Hofburg and the Astrodome each are of immense volume, but the Hofburg is apportioned to human scale. Whereas the Astrodome makes its single point in a minute, you can wander for years in the Hofburg. This is because we are of a certain size. Certain proportions are right for us, while others are not. Modernism has forgotten this, forgotten that we cannot survive at certain temperatures, that we disintegrate at certain speeds, that we cannot fit in some spaces or fill others, that our understanding is tethered to our mortality, that part of what we call art is the tempering of ideas and notions by the facts of our existence and the existence of our limitations. Because an 800-page novel about quarks and leptons would be even deadlier than that all-time champion of somnolence, The Cambridge History of Iran, it is relatively easier to impeach the practice of dehumanization in literature than in the fine arts or in music, where art and design run so closely together. But though the modern convention makes little or no distinction between art and design, there is a vast difference between them. As the principles of modernism, like a lawn chemical, are fatal to one and not the other, there is now a lot more design than art. Taking a cue from Congress (which knows in its bones that politics is nomenclature), we call the design floating around all over the place art. To wit, as the lawyers say, within every great painting you can find startling abstractions—wave-like flows, juxtapositions of color, expressive patterns and the shattering of patterns, stirring contrasts, hypnotic forms, etc. But within even the most magnificent abstractions you cannot find great paintings. In every Raphael there are a hundred million de Koonings. In de Kooning there is not a single Raphael. You can break a $10,000 Federal Reserve Certificate into a million pennies, but you cannot, from a penny, make a $10,000 bill. I have just spoken an immense heresy in this age of relativism: that some things can be better than others, that ways exist to assess value, that in life there is somehow an absolute standard. Though the entire cultural apparatus may deny the existence of an absolute standard, though the universities, the philosophers, the newspapers, and eventually, perhaps, every single human being on earth may deny that it exists … it does, nonetheless, exist. The closest we may have come to approaching it within the framework of reason is in our understanding of the unalterable speed of light, which (as the prime meridian is to longitude or the meter stick in Paris is to the meter) is the fundamental starting point for all the workings in proportion that make both art and design. Think of painting as variations in the wave-lengths of light (color) and the spacing between forms, or of music as variations and combinations of vibrations-per-second and the spacing between them. My point is not that these things are of value in themselves but that there is an order to things and that they are the markers and tools of that order. Modernism is by necessity obsessed with form, much like a craftsman obsessed with his tools and materials. In my climbing days we used to call people like that “equipment weenies.” These days you can see it in fly-fishing, where not a few people go out once a year with $5,000-worth of equipment to catch (maybe) $5-worth of fish. What should have been the story of the man, the stream, and the fish becomes instead a romance between the man and his tools. In this century the same thing happened in art. Just as they who would deny the existence of the soul will perforce worship the body, those who do not immediately know the difference between art and design are those who would confuse and equate a sailfish levitated above windblown waves with a reconstruction of its stiff and motionless skeleton in a natural history museum. Because the doctrine of reason, despite its obvious inapplicability to the most important and vexing questions, excludes that which is outside of it, the derivative pattern in the arts has been a war-like campaign of rejection and extermination. It will be autonomically assumed in certain quarters that I am rejecting all of what is mistakenly called modern art. Quite to the contrary, I love much of it. Unlike my wife, I think one of the great splendors of life is to have as the centerpiece of an otherwise impeccably classical room a breathtaking abstract painting. Has there ever been a great painter who fails to see the power in pure color and pure form? I think not. But has there ever been a great painter who surrenders to it entirely? I say no, that this is design—which is fine, which is not art, which is why we have a word for each one. About this the dictionary is clear: design is “the combination of details which go to make up a work of art.” [2] Ortega’s dehumanization, which you may also read as devitalization, would turn all art into design, and, to a large extent, it has. The heart of his theory is that we view reality by means of concepts, and that we should jettison realities. What he recommended, and what, after seventy years, we’ve got, is music without sound, singing without voice, paintings without paint, literature without words, and cooking without food. In the old days when there were insane asylums this was what went on in them. Now the locus has shifted to the universities, the world of the “arts,” and the claptrap government bureaucracies that exist so that arts turkeys may give arts turkeys to arts turkeys. Whether you write the checks or cash them you know almost instinctively that in Ortega’s world money chases novelty. To cite Ortega, one is “much more likely to fail if he insists on composing another Wagnerian opera, another naturalistic novel,” because, “In art repetition is nothing.” By that logic, all of Wagner’s operas but his first would be failures of repetition, as would Mozart’s piano concerti after number one, Beethoven’s symphonies after the first, and so on. The discovery of Beethoven’s tenth would, of course, be a yawn. A singer with the voice of Caruso would have to go back to making pepperoni in Civitavecchia. And someone who could paint like Michelangelo would just have to eat his heart out at the Whitney watching videotapes of cross-dressing chimpanzees (that is, if the Whitney were in a conservative period). Modernism is obsessed with originality. As Ortega says, “The poet aggrandizes the world by adding to reality … the contents of his imagination.” Until very recently the task of the artist was to work with what was given, to pay homage to God and nature, the presumption being that though he would never achieve perfection he could approach it through the various disciplines that make use of what is already in the universe, of which there is plenty. At his boldest, the artist would, in the language of Broadway, do another take on what God had already created. Never would he presume actually to create, not only because it would be unpardonable vanity but because it would be ridiculous. Artists have now been laboring for generations under the mistaken assumption that they are aggrandizing reality when in fact they merely have been distorting it. Operating on the presumption that one can be a god leads very quickly to sterility, and though an entire cultural apparatus may be primed to say it isn’t so, what is sterile is sterile, and eventually you know. In presuming to create a new universe while on a two-month sabbatical at the American Academy in Rome (while at the same time going to the beach, starting a new love affair, searching for the perfect restaurant, sitting in the bar all afternoon, and sleeping fourteen hours a day), the artist not only sets himself a task at which he is bound to fail, but he relinquishes the potent common language that artists have used for thousands of years, the language that reaches across barriers of class, nationality, or belief, the language of natural and human constants: the imperturbable conditions of light, the replicable and exact ladders of pitch, the universal existence of love and sorrow and courage and death and sacrifice, the impulse to succor and protect children, the certainty and surprise of color, the beauty of form, both human and natural. In forswearing these, the artist forswears the world. Have I made myself clear? Not yet. Keep in mind that the presumption that the artist can create is the twin of the proposition that nothing matters, that the universe operates without consequence or meaning. Briefly stated and without evangelical impulse, if God does not exist and neither does His order, then we are all free to do as we wish, to make our own order, and the one that prevails will simply be the one that can marshall the greatest power. This, the rule of force, is the legacy of nihilism, which is the gift of the belief that the universe is devoid of purpose. Modernism is rooted in these ideas, its developments are channeled and limited by them, and it is no coincidence that modernism has been and is yet the handmaiden of this century’s matchless forces of destruction and alienation. Ortega was a civilized man, a learned man, an art critic. But listen to his contempt for those who have not learned the system of the new art, in which each artist must describe the idiosyncratic rules of what he believes is the new reality he has just manufactured. The new art … divides the public into the two classes of those who understand it and those who do not. … One group possesses an organ of comprehension denied to the other.… They are two different variations of the human species.… The new art addresses itself … to a specially gifted minority [and] … compels the average citizen to realize that he is just this … a creature incapable of receiving the sacrament of art, blind and deaf to pure beauty.… Like horses and mules that lack understanding … the masses kick and do not understand. After “the purification of art,” when human content has grown so thin that it is negligible … we then have an art which can be comprehended only by people possessed by the peculiar gift of artistic sensibility—an art for artists and not for the masses, for “quality” and not for hoi polloi. If you refuse to sign on, you’re in trouble. Why? Because “In art … we have to accept the imperative imposed by the time. Obedience to the order of the day is the most hopeful choice open to the individual.” Ortega praises the modern artist for “brazenly … deforming reality, shattering it … dehumanizing it.” The violence of his figures of speech—“blown up … burned … locked up”—escalates. The weapon of poetry turns against natural things and wounds or murders them.… The young artist cares less for the startling … than for the human aspect which he destroys.… For the modern artist, aesthetic pleasure derives from a triumph over human matter. That is why he has to drive home the victory by presenting in each case a strangled victim. That this was one of the signal banners of the Lost Generation and then the generation of 1968 is not surprising. But Ortega was a man of the nineteenth century. He was still able to contrast the new age that he praised with the old order against which he bore a pathological grudge. “It may be said,” he writes, “that the new art has so far [1925] produced nothing worthwhile, and I am inclined to think the same … [but] who knows what may come of this budding style? There is no turning back.” By 1925 the principles of modernism were set in stone. Nothing would be produced subsequently that would have startled Ortega given what he had already seen. The great harvest of modernism was yet to come, but it would come in a different form, in a form suggested by Ortega’s “strangled victim.” What is most astonishing is that Ortega was on to the whole enterprise. Listen to his betrayal of its purposes: “It is not an exaggeration,” he says, “to assert that modern paintings and sculpture betray a real loathing of living forms or forms of living beings.… Dehumanization … is inspired by … an aversion against the traditional interpretation of realities.… To assail all previous art, what else can it mean than to turn against Art itself?” He was not just aware, he was prescient. In the midst of this extraordinary volte face, he sees ahead with the same clarity, though not with the felicity, of the Henry James essay “Beyond the Rim.” For he recognizes that “hatred of art is unlikely to develop as an isolated phenomenon; it goes hand in hand with hatred of science, hatred of State, hatred in sum, of civilization as a whole.” And then, after this startling admission, Ortega does something extraordinary, something comparable in my view to il gran rifiuto of Pope Celestine V, but far darker and of much greater consequence. After stumbling upon the conclusion that the argument he has been endorsing will in fact destroy art, destroy civilization, he simply says: “This is the moment prudently to lay down one’s pen and let a flock of questions take off on their winged course.” But this was absolutely not the moment to put down the pen. It was not the moment when “obedience to the order of the day” was the most hopeful choice for the individual. For not only was the “flock of questions” not asked by those who should have asked and answered them, but when Ortega put down his pen up jumped Franco, and Mussolini, and Hitler, and Stalin. And the fruit of the dehumanization that Ortega correctly perceived and incorrectly championed was a century of a hundred million dead in war, holocaust, and purge, and the general degradation of art and life in which the living and imperfect form of man has been forced into the iron maiden of rationalism, there to suffer, wilt, and die. The abstract play of ideas did, after all, have consequences. It was consequential for the paratroopers who were machine-gunned as they floated to earth, for the cities that were ground to rubble, for the millions of mothers and children who were murdered in the camps, and for whole families that perished in seas of fire, because those whose first responsibility it had been to check nihilism and dehumanization had instead embraced them. With the rise of science, the industrial state, and super-efficient social organization, aspects of culture that had been evolving for millennia according to distinct humanistic principles were pressed to abandon those principles in favor of various rationalistic systems; from modernism to Marxism. That which was humane proved also to have been surprisingly defenseless, and was rather quickly overpowered. Modernism is the movement that arose in art to collaborate with the conqueror, and most of today’s artists and theorists, the thinking and unthinking acolytes of Ortega and his precursors, are the collaborators. The difference between Ortega and so many that followed is that he knew. Why did he capitulate so readily? He did so (among other reasons) because he had been convinced that history had run itself out, and that the final discovery was that we have been born from nothingness into nothingness and will exit into nowhere. If that is true then he was right and there are no possible alternatives to the system to which he bent his knee. But, without entering the realm of theology, it is logically apparent in the language of reason and science (the language in which he makes his argument and in which we read the course of modern times) that no one has answered the fundamental questions upon which his argument depends absolutely on the answer of “nihil.” The careless adherents of modernism did not understand the glories—and therefore the limitations—of science. Science is not predictive, it is descriptive: of nature. It has yet to supply a single answer to a single eschatological question, and has never been pressed to do so except in the hands of those who do not understand it. The alternative course that Ortega and his generation mistakenly thought could not be taken, because they naïvely credited so much to the powers of reason, is that, without the illusion of a dead end, art would continue to take new paths, as it has, always, and that none of them would lead to nowhere. Not long ago, art and civilization took a horribly wrong and mistaken turn. My proof of this is not merely the contrast between this and other ages of art but the unparalleled devastation of this century—by war, by mass bondage, by the neglect of what is humane. In arrogating to ourselves powers that we did not have or that we could not handle, we have been the cause of untold suffering and destruction. Though it cannot be undone, it can be left behind. In the long sweep of history a hundred years or two hundred years is not too open an oxbow to be closed, not too big a wound to be healed, not too wide a chapter to end. Nor would a return to where we left off be a sterile revisiting of old ground: it would be, rather, like a blind man regaining his sight. Imagine, for example, the richness that might come of a generation of painters, steeled by the hard truths of recent history, who taught themselves once again to paint the human form and to render light in its infinite and consequential beauty. Imagine if American painters were to begin where Homer, Eakins, Sargent, and The Eight left off. Imagine if writers stopped going to writers’ school, and if composers actually composed music. The modernists will tell you that this is impossible, that God is dead, that art is dead, that the fields are run out. But the fields are not run out. And they never will be. When I was in the army, many years ago, I was an infantryman, and in the course of what I saw, and did, and came to understand, I was broken. Sometime after I had returned to the United States and my life had resumed, I rounded a corner in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and saw a painting I had known all my life but which I had not until that moment been able to understand. This was Winslow Homer’s masterfully restrained portrait of a veteran returning to his fields. The generation touched by fire in the Civil War understood the great import of this painting, they knew why the veteran had his back turned to the painter, why he was alone, why he worked in utter quiet, why the light was so clear, the scene so tranquil. After years of war and destruction, they understood, and after having passed this painting for the first time as a man, so did I. As if there had never been a Gettysburg, an Antietam, or a Chancellorsville, the light struck the soil and the wheat grew. The world was the same. The essential rules had not changed. Devastation had not triumphed. The veteran could return to his fields, and the answer to his tentativeness was that, as if by a miracle, they were now even richer than he had remembered them.
Notes
From The New Criterion Vol. 13, No. 1, September 1994
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