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Art, Totalitarianism and Western Culture |
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Written by Michael D. O'Brien
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Adapted from an article published in the Summer, 1991, issue of Communio, a journal of theology and culture.
As power extends its grasp into wider and wider rings of human life it becomes more hostile to everything outside of itself. As it becomes near absolute it grows increasingly negative, because by its very nature it must oppose what cannot be extinguished in men's beings. Totalitarian power does not rest content with obedience and a passive populace. It must seek at some point to destroy the inner impulse to creativity which depends for its well-being on freedom from manipulation. It must find and erase all resistance, all spiritual autonomy, all dignity in its subjects.
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Cankultur at the end of an age |
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The difficulty a serious Christian writer faces in this country, when speaking of the cultural revolution (or coup d’état?) that displaces the spontaneous flowering of authentic culture, is that there are no gulags or torture chambers we can point to as evidence that anything remotely like suppression afflicts us. The tragedy, the high drama of the writer’s struggle under overt totalitarianism, is in such stark contrast to the minor trials of the Western writer, that most people consider our situation benign, and our complaints grossly exaggerated. In my opinion, it is precisely our situation that may in the long run prove more deadly to the preservation of “the national heart, the national memory.”
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Subsidiarity is the principle which states that freedoms and their inherent responsibilities are best managed by the smallest competent authority at the level most appropriate to the nature of the persons involved. For example, the family, not the state, is the “first teacher” of the family’s children. Governments may assist the family if parents are unable to exercise their subsidiarity, but the state should do so only as a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or personal level. In other words, the government and its administrative organs, such as a department of Education, must serve the family, and not the other way around.
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Mediated Media—Anton Casta |
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Man is also media to himself insofar as he represents his actualized personhood imperfectly. On a Christian level, we can comment further — man as the tabernacle of the Holy Spirit, "represents" or "mediates" his charge, his divine potential, imperfectly. Christians can speak of man as image (living art), or word (living literature), or as man as media — in terms of dialogue within the universal call to evangelization and the renewed call to engage in that dialogue in the "new" media. For Pope John Paul II , the term "new" here denotes the application of the unchanging Gospel message into the world of new media.
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Pope Benedict XVI to Artists |
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The world in which we live runs the risk of being altered beyond recognition because of unwise human actions which, instead of cultivating its beauty, unscrupulously exploit its resources for the advantage of a few and not infrequently disfigure the marvels of nature. What is capable of restoring enthusiasm and confidence, what can encourage the human spirit to rediscover its path, to raise its eyes to the horizon, to dream of a life worthy of its vocation—if not beauty?
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