Conservative Aesthetics?

Recently Matthew Milliner posted a challenging essay on conservatives and the arts that is well worth a read.  In it, he compares America to the Greek city of Mistra, the last stronghold of eastern Christendom within which many artists and poets were creating lasting masterpieces which “some called the ‘final flowering’ of Byzantine art” up until its overthrow by the Ottomans in 1460.  Milliner uses the image of creating art with invaders at the gates to show not only that art was important to our conservative forefathers, but also that art is important even in the midst of “culture wars”.

Milliner bemoans the fact that conservatives have largely abandoned the creation of culture in favor of waging those oft-discussed wars.  Yet, he warns, it is the ones who create culture who may be the victors:

“Like some sort of artistic arms race, the side of our undeniable political gulf that first develops a winning strategy for the future cultivation of culture may very well win. Conservatism has the principles, dispositions, roots and resources to emerge as a powerful sponsor of the arts, but in comparison to the Left, it often seems to lack the will.”

Why have conservatives lacked the will?  Milliner cites two reasons, one given by John Witherspoon and one given by John Adams.  Witherspoon, Milliner explains, regarded his 18th century liberal Presbyterian opponents’ love of poetry as an attempt to “replace” the traditional doctrine of the church.  When we see, in our own time, poetry and art become a sort of “scripture” for the left, and Scripture itself treated by the left as no more than “fine art”, we may tend to side with Witherspoon on the side of theology, apologetics, and traditional politics as the proper conservative pursuits.

Yet John Adams, himself a conservative political champion, saw his duty as not to fight the arts, but to prepare the way for them.  “I must study politics and war,” Adams famously argued, “in order to give [my grandchildren] a right to study painting, poetry, and music…” Here art is something to plan for and protect, not to combat.  Whereas Witherspoon was not willing to embrace art because he saw it as an enemy, Adams did not embrace art because he saw it as a later development in American culture, something that could not take place until the political turmoil of his time had settled into peace.  And, Milliner concludes, since we are in a time of relative peace, it is in our time that we can and should create culture.

This idea of culture creation among conservatives has seen a resurgence of late with Christian arts journals and conferences, especially Image Journal and its attendant Glen Workshop  enjoying national prominence and books like Andy Crouch’s popular Culture Making (www.culture-making.com) calling Christians to create culture in any way they can, from dish-washing to sculpture.  While it is hard for me to see a problem with such “creative calls,” I fear that Christians, so used as they are to fads within their subculture, will see “culture-making” as just that: a fad.  In the late 90s Christians watched Veggie Tales.  In the late 2009 they “create culture,” and maybe by 2015 they will have taken up roller-blading.

I don’t mean to be pessimistic, because I think that Milliner is absolutely right, and that this call to care about and create culture is a much greater than a fad.  Fads take place within culture, not the other way around.  The problem with Christian fad-mongering and the problem with liberal take-over of the aesthetic realms are the same.  This problem lies in the difference between the art that replaces traditional doctrine and values and the art that doctrine and values plan for and protect.  The former type of art is predicated on the assumption that aesthetic theory and artistic creation occupy the same cultural space as theology and religious practice, and that because of this, one must make way for the other; there is no room for both.

What the second theory of art understands is that in traditional culture, there is a place for art, a place for religion, a place for theology, a place for athletics, etc.  John Adams may be right that in some times one cultural practice or artifact must take preeminence and defend the others.  The problem, then, with both the Christian fad-mongering and the liberal art-over-religion theory is that their views of culture are both too narrow.  Culture cannot be a fad just as it cannot be reduced to only one of its myriad artifacts or practices.  Christians who seek to create, and not just “engage” culture would do well to remember that culture, like the church, is a body.  The toe shall not say to the eye “I have no need of you”.

- Timothy Bartel