Food For Thought

PHILOSOPHY How art can make us better - and why it doesn’t always

Glorious food. At a low point among the many inevitable lows of the Recession-weary liberal arts type, I heard the argument repeated that art makes people better. And people, it goes without saying, need all the help we can get. It's a nice idea. It's an especially nice idea for those of us who've spent an inordinate portion of our lives absorbing or creating art. The problem is that, from the looks of things, it's not all that convincing. And that's why we get so many think pieces in esteemed publications trying to work it all out. People love to read and comment on those articles, and editors must love to assign them, but they never seem to add up to much. Like God, the idea is too pretty and too necessary to not at least try to believe it. And also like God, the idea seems shockingly easy to debunk. If art really does make us better, all it ever takes is for someone to point out that English majors aren't all that angelic. Or if they want to get as heavy as they are obvious, they can talk about how cultured the Nazis were. Goebbels spent D-Day playing Beethoven on the piano. How good could art possibly make us? This usually brings about that peculiar blend of smugness and outrage that's the default tenor of internet message boards and arguments with libertarians. John Milton liked to compare art to food. It's one of the ways he formulated to discuss the ups and downs of free speech in his famous Areopagitica - a major source document for the American founding fathers. A polemicist who had himself been jailed for his regicidal writings, Milton nonetheless isn't your garden variety radical. He wasn't even an advocate of free speech as any of us would understand it. He believed that the body politic - and not elites like publishers or governments - should absorb the art directly. Then, if it disagreed with them, it was perfectly natural and fitting to turn the heat up to 451. That's not how we think anymore, and we can forgive ourselves for a little self-congratulation if we find our views more advanced than the author of Paradise Lost. Free speech is what we do best. No country on earth, or in history, has better defended its freedom of expression. I'm no fan of American exceptionalism, but when it comes to the first amendment, America really is No.1. But here's what John Milton understood and we don't: the experience of art isn't static - it's engaged. It must be confronted, felt, its ideas addressed. Otherwise they didn't quite happen - to the artist or the audience. Works of art may not deserve to be banned, but they do deserve to be judged.  If art is like food for the mind, then English majors aren't athletes; they're foodies. Not many books were published in Milton's day, at least by contemporary standards. The printing press was barely two centuries old; a vast majority of a dramatically smaller populace was illiterate. Printing and distribution were expensive and rarefied; most of them were the Bible. Non-religious works tended to be reprintings of classical texts. And if you weren't competing with Aristotle, you were competing with Shakespeare. All this to say that writing doesn't occupy anywhere near the same kind of position in the culture anymore. Anyone can do it for free, right through to distribution. Anyone does. Most of it isn't very good. It's overwhelming to everyone involved, from the most passionate and dedicated reader to the most glassy-eyed, indifferent Amazon shopper. Books don't matter enough to be banned - that's been true for a long time now. The slightly more recent development, exacerbated by ubiquity, is that books don't matter enough to be judged. This is so entrenched in our minds that we're not clear on how books do what they're supposed to do. We don't know which ones to choose. A blanket of marketing is settled over the whole landscape. Some are on every corner, usually the ones that are worst for you; some are relegated to specialty stores, and cost more; most never make it to a place where you can find them. Which is exactly how we experience our food. Walking through a grocery store has almost everything in common with walking through a bookstore. A vast middle section pushes quick-fix solutions: frozen food and self-help. A side counter contains ready-made sustenance that's adequate in a pinch but worse than it could be: take-out and magazines. Another side has the Good Stuff, stamped and branded and, impossibly, also worse than it could be: produce and classics. Cookbooks and how-to's in the toiletries aisle. Overpraised literahry fiction on the top shelves - seriously, who pays $12.99 for pasta sauce? And the back is full of dairy, processed meats, and celebrity memoirs. Cutesy analogies aside, the truth is that nutrition for the body is just about as complicated and frustrating as nutrition for the soul. Figuring it all out requires a simple idea and a lot of hard work - both suspicious-sounding to the many overeducated, overworked Americans who are struggling to make sense of the art that seems to both raise them up and leave them adrift. It's hardly even a metaphor to suggest that your mind needs sustenance to survive and grow. To Milton, as to many pre-moderns, the literal and the metaphorical were not so cleanly distinguished. For a lifelong reader whose blindness failed to stop him from writing great poetry, it really felt like eating a book. What that means is that the book, once read, is inside of you. Your body does its best to dissemble it, absorb what's valuable, and excrete what isn't. It's not a matter of simply opening and closing your mouth. And if that's an intimate way of expressing it, it's because art - if it's going to be valuable, if it's truly going to make us better - is a deeply intimate experience. Music shakes the air, which in turn shakes your ear drum, which funnels the vibrations through to your mind and body. It's quite literally moving you - physically. A picture of a naked woman has a pointed physiological effect (ahem). A book can convince you to keep living, or to stop, or worse. The men who shot John Lennon, Rebecca Schaeffer, and Ronald Reagan were all carrying copies of The Catcher in the Rye when they were arrested. Full circle from the watery English majors and Goebbels on D-Day: art doesn't necessarily make us better. Sometimes it seems to make us kill people. There doesn't seem to be any real link between being into art and being a good person. Get an engineering degree. Avengers assemble. Here it is: if art is like food for the mind, then English majors aren't athletes; they're foodies. There is a pretty fucking considerable difference. Food doesn't build muscle, any more than reading Aristotle builds morals. You have to do that. But it'd be pretty damn hard to do it without it. The experience of art doesn't end with the experience of art. It does if our bodies have nothing to absorb from it, and simply expel it as quickly as it enters. (Along these lines, blockbusters can approximate drinking Coke Zero, or eating delicious-smelling grass.) But if there's anything in it of value, our bodies extract it and give us a chance to make something out of it. A chance is all we get, though. It's very simple why art doesn't make us all better people. It's the same reason why food doesn't make us all fit people. Pointing out the fat kids and how much they eat doesn't take away from the fact that hard work can change good food into lean muscle - the kind that holds up your spine. Appreciating art is no guarantee of strong morals, just as appreciating food is no guarantee of strong muscles. Making art or food doesn't get you there on its own, either. That's its own cult. If you want to be better, it's up to you. Body or soul - eat right and exercise and no substitutions. That's why it means something.

{non-fiction}