Postmodern Nihilistic Aesthetics
Writing by abuhatem on Friday, 15 of August , 2008 at 9:30 am
In antiquity there was always a line drawn between what was considered uplifting, virtuous, chivalrous, honored, or sacred art and what was considered vane, profane, mundane, and sinful. One of the chief problems with modernity is that this line has been thrown out for the leftist relativist Cultural Marxist idea that everything is art and that all art is good. The forced subjective-view of beauty was something C.S. Lewis decried in his Abolition of Man, but even more so is something which cuts at the heart at the differences between modernity and antiquity.
Art affects human beings. This is a common sensical axiom only denied by the most dogmatic of armchair epistemologists. Art, like other stimuli, has automatic stimulatory effects on the human psyche. This was recognized completely obvious by most ancient civilizations and thus art and beauty have been used in places as diverse as Medieval Christian Europe, the Islamic world, and ancient China to heal, uplift, spiritually encourage, and bring happiness to others.
I cannot speak for Christian aesthetics, because I simply do not know enough about it, but Islamic aesthetics was a spiritual science and philosophical field of much study particularly in Andalusian Spain in the 11th-14th centuries. The purpose of Islamic aesthetics was to create art - music, poetry, calligraphy etc. - which spiritually uplifted the aesthete. The heart’s attachment to beauty and its spiritual affects on the heart were told of by the Prophet Muhammad in his famous hadith that “God is beautiful, and he loves beauty.”
Thus one finds the strongest tradition of Islamic song not in stirring up fear of God, nor remembrance of the afterlife (although such were of course themes of many odes) but love of God and deep longing and love for his Beloved Prophet. It was seen that song and poetry - when spiritual, beautiful, and loving - could stir up the heart and elicit positive attributes in the aesthete.
Yet with the realization that beauty could be used for good purposes, there was also the strong affirmation of the reality that false-beauty, and glittering vice, could corrupt and poision the soul.
Classical Muslim philosophers and theologians when discussing sama’ or poetic musical auditions told of the following effects of art, from the great Imam Ibn ‘Ajibah’s work al-Futuhat al-Ilahiyah or the Divine Openings:
And it is said, sama’ is like rain – if it falls upon dry earth it causes plants to sprout, thus is the purified heart – its beneficial treasures become manifest during sama’…
Dhul Nun was asked about sama’ and he said: “It is an overflowing of the truth which can make hearts take fright and run to God, and so whoever listens to it in truth attains realization, and whoever listens to it because of his self (nafs) will become a heretic.”…
It is also said that the people of sama’ are three: repentant, truthful, or steadfast, and that those who listen to sama’ are three: ones who hear by their Lord, ones who hear by their heart, and ones who hear by their self (nafs).
In fact, Muslim fear over the affect of viceful art sometimes went so far by some religious scholars and philosophers that the vast majority of muslical instruments were banned except for simplistic drums or tamborines because they were seen as distractions. However, others such as the great Hujjat al-Islam or “Proof of Islam,” Islam’s greatest scholar Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, allowed musical instruments except for those which were connected to drunkenness. The great Syrian Imam ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nablusi writes one of the best and most succinct statements on Islamic aesthetics in his great work Idah al-Alat wherein he states that the most correct opinion on the matter is that all musical instruments, song, and poetry is permitted by Islamic scripture except that which directly or indirectly intices towards vice or is in the company of vice. Al-Nablusi writes of both the great benefits and harms of music depending upon its aesthetic nature.
The base assumption of this entire discussion is that the heart is moved by music, art, poetry, the whole 9-yards. And the heart is moved in both good and bad ways. The modern world does not seem to understand this in their politically correct enforcement of relatavism even in the world of aesthetics.
Take an example: Michael Eric Dyson. In the newest issue of the public policy magazine City Journal, we are given two opinions on rap music in the black community: one by Juan Williams (who I don’t usually like) and the other by Princeton leftist Michael Eric Dyson. Dyson defends rap as a beautiful resistent almost neo-Aristotelien catharsis against the shakles of Anglo-European white oppression while Williams sees it as the absolute bastardization of the entire black race.
Dyson’s opinion:
Cosby is at his most wrong, though, Dyson says, in his hatred of rap, which expresses the authentically black “gangsta” belief that “the lifestyle and ideology of the outlaw, the rebel and the bandit challenge the corrupt norms of the state, the government, and the rule of law in society.” So too with hip-hop fashion, with its “hats on backward, pants down around the crack” that Cosby deplored in his speech. “Fashion in black urban circles rises to performance art,” Dyson tells us. “The more daring their fashions, the less cooperative they are with bourgeois elegance, and the more they undermine bland conformism, the more likely black youth are to understand their bodies as battlefields of fierce moral contest.” Do their pants hang low? “This may be understood as sympathy dress,” an “overidentification” with relatives “who may have been caught up in a bloody urban drama. . . . It is a way of reclaiming the body of a loved one from its demobilized confinement and granting it, vicariously, the freedom to walk on the streets from which it has been removed.” And in truth, “many black youth who wear baggy pants may feel that they are already in prison, at least one of perception, built by the white mainstream and by their dismissive, demeaning elders.” Thus does the idle sophistry of armchair elites come to ratify cultural patterns once recognized as fatal to the poor.
And now Juan Williams:
But most of all, he hears rap. Pumped out from CDs, videos, and television (especially Black Entertainment Television), which black kids watch even more excessively than white kids, “nihilistic glorifications of ‘thug life’ ” and celebrations of gangbangers, drug dealers, and pimps “as black heroes” constantly wash over him, says Williams. “Black rappers, dressed for every video in convict style, posturing with menacing faces, hands flashing gang signals, their heads wrapped in prison-issue do-rags, pants hanging down in the convict style, and gangland tattoos covering their bodies” do their part “to promote black identity as the criminals’ identity.” Rap, says Williams, markets the idea that “violence, murder, and self-hatred” are “true blackness—authentic black identity.” It is “an open sewer throwing up the idea that black men are most genuine, most in touch with their power, when they are getting vengeance with a gun in hand.”
We know that this message reaches its listeners, says Williams, when we see ghetto kids “dress like rappers . . . and act hard-core, using nigger, cursing, and fighting on the way to school, in school, and after school—assuming they are still in school.” And we know it as well from the crime statistics.
We know that rap’s message about sex also hits home. Its cartoon-simple sentiment, says Williams: “All black women are sexually crazed, lack discrimination about men, and deserve to be treated as mindless bitches—dogs.” In rap, Cosby once said, there is “nothing about I care for you, nothing about may I go for a walk with you . . . just I’m hot, I’m leaking, I’m dripping, come on, and I know you want it too”—or, as the title of one rap song has it, “Face Down, Ass Up, C’mon.” There is something tragic, Williams says, about poor black girls “trying to find a way to feel good about their identity in a culture that gives little reinforcement to black women” being asked to dance to music that describes them as whores and bitches. “Rap’s pumped up message to them is to get naked and shake it before giving it up to do the wild thing,” he says. And many will do just that, bearing another generation of doomed innocents, who, despite the evil done them, grow up to be responsible for their own acts.
Peter Hitchens rightfully points out that the affect of postmodern nihilism goes far further than aesthetics:
The destruction of adult authority, knowledge, morality and order has been the aim of the radical Left for ages, and after four decades of burrowing into our establishment these Marxoid maggots are close to final success. If they just shut the remaining grammar schools and make independent schools so expensive that only plutocrats can afford them, they will have won. Not long now, then.
And they wonder why stabbings are becoming commonplace on the streets.
If what is celebrated as beautiful, and listened to over and over and over again is misogony, profanity, theft, murder, drugs, and the life of convicts, then civilization has a lot to fear. Of course I am not saying such “art” need be censored or fought against by government “wars,” - private organizations would do a much better job of cleaning it up - but simply that nihilism and relativism, in all of their forms, mean the death of traditional values whether in Vermont, London, Beijing, or Damascus…
Category: Political philosophy
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