Posted on 02/20/2008 1:48:41 PM PST by forkinsocket
THERE’S SOMETHING QUAINT about the earliest paintings in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. In these religious paintings, you know who is important because of their relative size. The big people are the important ones. The little ones are less important. That seems like a nice simple way to organise the world.
Or rather, there’s almost no sense of the world as a real place in these early paintings. That’s partly because the background is gold leaf. At most the figures exist in some very sketchy religious architecture, or they’re assigned little frames, like fragments of a comic strip. They don’t actually have a right to exist in the world, outside of a religious narrative. There’s very little expression on their faces. The narrative has drained them even of their interior life. They’re not even entitled to a psychology. The pictures show a world that is totally defined by ideology (or rather religion, in this case, as a version of ideology). Nothing beyond the ideology is even visible.
Then, in the pictures painted around 1300, things begin to change. People start to have expressions. They inhabit a world that is more recognisably physical; there are landscapes, and there’s less of the implausibility of having important individuals painted as giants. These are still religious pictures, but the universe is no longer completely ecclesiastical.
A century or so later things start to get out of control. Some pictures seem frankly whimsical; Botticelli paints pagan nymphs cavorting about. The ideological monolith of the earlier pictures has been shattered and competing values and ideologies can be visually represented.
When you get to Leonardo da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi, the painter seems to be so aware of complexity that he can’t even finish the painting. Leonardo is struggling to represent an important religious event in real space. He’s painting the secular powers (represented by the Magi) paying homage to religious power. However, he can’t represent the event with the cut-and-dried simplicity of earlier painters. He has a busy canvas packed with many narrative elements that he can’t quite knit together. Even for a universal genius like Leonardo, the universe has become too complex a place to package neatly. Uncertainty rules.
IT’S THIS RECOGNITION of complexity and uncertainty that has been the key to the success of the West. An inductive, pragmatic mindset underpinned the economic expansion that led the West out of the long stagnation of the Middle Ages. It underpinned the development of science and technology (after a millennium where technology had essentially stagnated at Roman levels).
The West has sometimes backslid from this engagement with uncertainty. Europe made two great contributions to social and political thought last century: communism and fascism. These movements were both backward even by Renaissance standards. Ethically they were backward: nobody has ever conducted genocide in the name of humanism, and both movements used mass murder as a prime political tool.
Essentially, however, they were backward because they were ideologically driven, bent on remaking the world in an ideological image (a world based on class supremacy for one, race supremacy for the other). Both failed because there is something fundamentally dumb about trying to impose an ideology on the world. Sticking to an ideological line has economically undermined every communist regime. Hitler’s generals were often too frightened to report facts that undermined his grand vision; that was a key military weakness. Both movements represented a step back to a world painted with comic-strip simplicity and starkness.
The Anglo world was never really sucked into either movement. It persisted in muddling along with the more pragmatic, inductive and essentially sophisticated view that has been dominant in the West since the Renaissance. Pragmatism and the willingness to let evidence trump treasured beliefs have been at the core of Western progress in every field of endeavour.
RECENTLY, Osama bin Laden called George W. Bush stupid. Well, Bush has run the world’s largest and arguably most successful economy through challenging times. Like Ronald Reagan, he’s used tactics that have proven most of the economic intelligentsia wrong. Regard-less of what you think of Bush’s skills as an orator, that takes intelligence. Bin Laden, on the other hand: his greatest achievement has been to finance novel ways for people to blow themselves up in crowded places.
More importantly, bin Laden comes from a position of profound intellectual weakness. He’s an ideologue. He and his fellow terrorists have no means of dealing with the world in a way that is anything but dogmatic. There has been no Renaissance in their particular universe; they can’t even draw on any figurative art tradition where these issues are played out. They’ve never learnt to live with complexity and uncertainty.
Facts needn’t exist; reality can be covered by a layer of gold leaf. That’s why fundamentalists like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can confidently question the Holocaust and assert that there are no homosexuals in Iran.
The Muslim fundamentalists are not really at war with the West. They are at war with inductive reality and with the challenge of any other competing worldview. Their response to uncertainty and doubt is rage.
It’s been argued that Islamic terrorism grew out of the frustration that Middle Eastern nations have been unable to build developed economies that can compete on equal terms with the West. Unfortunately, that frustration is likely to continue. The West’s economic success relies on a sophisticated set of attitudes that is essentially anti-dogmatic. Until the Islamic nations develop some version of this pragmatic and enlightened approach, the frustration will continue. However, this evolution is not inevitable.
Psychologists have suggested that individuals go through a series of stages when coming to terms with harsh and intractable realities, such as their own death. The phases may be: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Perhaps cultures or subcultures can go through similar phases. Of course, cultures are not limited or pre-defined in the way individuals are. A culture is not limited by a biological life span, for example. Cultures also have much greater resources than individuals, so they are free to create their own reality in a way that individuals are not. A culture has vast resources to expend on effectively denying the obvious.
Soviet communism, for example, was pretty much a disaster from the beginning. And its intellectual flaws were clearly delineated by people such as Karl Popper in the 1930s. However, the Soviet Union had the resources to binge for another fifty years on denial and anger, holding back reality with propaganda and the occasional mass murder. It was only in the 1980s, when it had exhausted its resources, that the Soviet Union moved quickly through the phases of bargaining and national depression to the acceptance that the previous fifty years had been founded on a lie.
Islamic extremism, as a subculture, might also have the resources to stay indefinitely locked at the stages of denial and anger. It could act as a brake, effectively stopping large parts of the Islamic world from developing its own Renaissance capability and engaging with the modern world in a rational way.
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