Of Music, Freedom, and Historical Darkness: Miracles of the West
Western civilization has given us a great many musical and cultural miracles, and we should strive to celebrate, maintain and ultimately expand their reach.
Recently in our home, I witnessed a manner of miracle. It was a spiritual miracle, but also a miracle of civilization. As authentic miracles go, to acknowledge it as such risks facing intense backlash from those elements in our society who see themselves as the vanguard of enlightenment, tolerance, and rationality. Yet lest we lose everything handed down to us, such things must be discussed openly and honestly: we owe our ancestors — and our great-grandchildren — nothing less.
Our little miracle consisted of a house-guest of ours — a Ukrainian refugee — practicing on our home piano. She is an exceedingly polite person, and so often plays with the practice damper down, so as not to “disturb” anyone. And yet that morning, as the notes of a simple piece echoed richly through the complex mechanism of this instrument, every simple harmonic change, every balanced chord, every note of sweetness struck me as a shining wonder. That this individual from across the world could travel to our home, speaking the same musical language that we do (even if it has different cultural balance), read the same notation, and make our family instrument sound sweetly: well, that is a miracle of civilization. That the notation she read exists at all, that a coherent harmonic and melodic relationship, under-girded by fixed rhythmic patterns clearly represented, could be rationalized and reproduced in that notation: that is miracle. That the upright piano she played was so finely balanced so as produce so sweet a sound — that is a miracle as well.
All of it — the finely developed instrument, the music notation and theory necessary to speak a coherent and reproducible musical language, the tradition of composition, and the schools which pass this knowledge down — are a stunning miracle of civilization. Therefore I have decided, with this article, to firmly out myself as an intense admirer of the civilization capable of producing such paths to transcendent joy.
Yes, I speak of the very same civilization which, in our guest’s part of the world, is now tearing itself bloodily apart. It’s not like western civilization (even through and across its far borders) has not had its share of extreme darkness. It’s not like Hitler, who adored classical music and architecture, didn’t try to murder half of Europe in the name of Lebensraum and some half-baked neo-pagan racial ideologies, only have to his temporary ally Stalin turn around and murder ten times as many people in the name of the metaphorical socialist omelette. It’s not like in the centuries before this, we have not had everything from chattel slavery to the Hundreds Years War to the Elizabethan persecutions to Jim Crow to sully our cultural name. It’s absolutely not a clean slate, but rather one of equal parts glory and gore.
Dostoevsky famously said that “Beauty will save the world,” and yet this does not often seem to be the case: few civilizations have had higher aesthetic cultures than Russia and Germany, and both have committed terrible crimes while continuing (each in their own intense way) to attempt to dominate, and subsequently ruin, their respective spheres of geopolitical and cultural influence. Dostoevsky’s hope seems naive, at least if we think that by beauty he meant “pleasing things” or even “deep aesthetic striving.” That kind of beauty can save some sensitive souls, perhaps, but it’s not universal: murderers of the 20th century listened to Brahms after a hard day in the killing fields, bouncing their cultured and oblivious children on their knees. But Dostoevsky was no dolt, and even though he didn’t live through the bloodiest century in human history (that of the “enlightened” and “rational” 20th), I still don’t think that his notion of beauty was merely pleasing and therefore self-limiting. But more on that in a bit.
Returning to our house-guest at the piano: Whatever the flaws of the culture this moment represented, all of it remains a miracle, because it represents the end result of a civilization which, through highs and lows, almost unceasingly pursued the development, understanding, codification, expression, and education of beauty for a thousand years.
Yes: it took about 1,000 years to learn how to compose that simple piece, write it down, and have it sound so splendidly. Not only that, but this is a meta-cultural achievement which is unmatched in any other civilization, contemporary or historical. Others have tried, yes, but only the west got there somehow. And it’s that “somehow” which deserves discussion, because so many are now trying to mindlessly accuse it and tear it down.
Every sensible person can acknowledge that there are higher and lower cultures and cultural achievements, just as they can acknowledge the difference between an amateur and a professional athlete. Yet to posit the achievements of western civilization today may get one accused of various forms of racism and cultural supremacy. Yet are not certain cultural achievements inevitably more highly developed than others? We can easily debate which of two unrelated regional oral traditions - such as Georgian Polyphony or West-Indian Classical Music - is more deeply developed. Yet we can also clearly argue that these traditions, astounding as they are, do not reach the levels of western classicism. The fashionably self-oppressed social critic, awash in contemporary neo-Marxism and the iconoclastic Kendis of his time (not to mention a far amount of racial guilt) - might object that to even think of culture in such a hierarchical way is to reveal a particular form of cultural supremacy, to which I must surprisingly agree. I do think that the aforementioned piano is an unmatched cultural achievement, one which is part of an unparalleled developed musical tradition. This tradition is precious to me not because I just happen to subjectively enjoy it, but more so because I recognize that it has uniquely developed in the context of world history to allow for the greatest artistic reach yet possible, a system where human genius can flourish, other nations and cultures bring their unique contributions without condition, and ultimately the doorstep of heaven can be reached, transcending human intellect into a spiritual arrival point through so many diverse expressions unified in the highest forms of musical striving. It is singularly great because, despite having developed in the west, it has long since taken flight and transcended the porous cultural boundaries which encapsulated it. I have no wish to downplay this civilizational miracle, to humble it, to cut it down to size, or to play silly game of cultural equivocation with it, and I certainly cannot apologize for it. It is truly a great thing, a thing without peer, and it is the height of madness — and epistemic arrogance — to cut down the end result of over 1,000 years of human striving towards b(B)eauty. Even the fact that it can be criticized and accused as it has been in recent years is the end result of its own unmatched cultural achievement, as to criticize it requires its own language and conceptions. The critics are like fish in water, spitting that same water at the other fish who rather enjoy the stream.
Ultimately, the criticisms of the culture theory critics, the relativistic usurpers from Derrida to Kendi, fall well short of applicable coherence. From the outset, one cannot avoid that hierarchy is baked into reality: they are forced to acknowledge the difference between a beginning dancer and a professional ballerina, or athletes of different levels, or the difference between average and fine brandy sipped while discussing their ideas in elevated (read: culturally developed) language. Just imagine a professional sports league being based on equity as opposed to achievement: it’d be unbearable to watch.
Secondly, these cultural critics have a rather schizophrenic and short-sighted relationship with what they criticize, because they generally adore the pop music and arts based in the western system. One wonders, despite their bloviating, how much West African Drumming or Hindu classical music they listen to. Or perhaps they get pumped for their political rallies with some Zulu or Pygmie chanting? My guessing is that from the counter-culture of the 60’s — whose music was entirely based on Bach’s harmonic system — to those moderns who love things like Kendrick Lamar’s last two albums (still lots of Bach in there, by the way), they don’t even realize how not counter-cultural they are being. Keep going: you can listen to various forms of Middle Eastern pop, and you’ll have ethnic forms of singing placed within firmly western rhythmic and harmonic bounds. Sometimes it works wonderfully, other times it sounds forced and canned, but it proves a point, as the opposite relationship would scarcely be possible. Almost all the musical world, for better or worse, bends the knee towards Equal Temperament and the western harmonic system. Bach lives on in every note, and it is not because of his racial or cultural label.
Such conversations in our time almost inevitably turn towards the late, great, and unjustly maligned Sir Roger Scruton, whose writings on culture and aesthetics may be unmatched in our time. In his final speech — A Thing Called Civilization — Scruton speaks precisely to the transcendent nature of what is perhaps improperly labeled “Western Civ”:
”Now, I myself have obviously got into an awful lot of trouble through defending Western civilization. It seems a strange feature of our times that the more you’re disposed to defend it, the more you are regarded as some kind of narrow-minded bigot. But the people who make that accusation are the real ones with the narrow mind. They’re people who do not see exactly how large and comprehensive our civilization has been and still is.
We were brought up on, for example, the Hebrew Bible, an ancient document which perpetuates the civilization of the pre-classical Middle East. It gives us a sense of what people are like in tribal communities when wandering through deserts and so on.
We learned and studied the great epics of Rome and Greece, which taught us different languages—dead languages, but languages which showed the world in a different light from our own languages today.
We were brought up on the literature of the Middle Ages, much of it influenced by Arabian literature, of course. Indeed, we all were put to bed with bedtime stories from the Arabian Nights.
The further you look into it, the more comprehensive and universal do you see the inheritance of our civilization to be. And that is something that we tend to forget today. It isn’t a narrow bequest. It is something which actually is open to all kinds of innovation, which accepts the whole of human being as its subject matter.
Certainly that is the way I have looked at it. I’ve always rejoiced in being a teacher of the humanities, because I recognize that humanities is what it’s about. It’s about being human and all the many ways in which that way of being is diversified and comprehensive in the world in which we are today.”
Scruton’s analysis here brings up a simple and salient point: those of us who consciously revere and work within the western system — let alone consider aspects of its achievements to be without historical peer — do not do so because we are racist, ethnocentric, or any kind of recent “phobic” or “ist” label that you can fashionably pelt us with. We do this not only because of the objective strength of our position, but because western aesthetics and thought are not purely western: they merge from east to west, and provide systems of thought and analysis capable of understanding and accepting ideas from beyond its purposefully scant borders. To revere the thinking and creations of western civilization is, quite literally, decidedly tolerant and non-self-limiting. Furthermore, to seek and expand the reach of this culture is not some thinly-veiled attempt at cultural fascism, but rather almost always the act of one who has discovered what is most worth loving, and — having been deeply enriched by it — desires to share these riches with everyone who will listen. It is magnanimity and cultural generosity, love and selflessness, pure and simple.
I have to be honest, however, and tell you that lately I have come to intuit and sympathize with much of the pain and confusion behind the contemporary leftist attempt to dismantle the west. For my part, it has come with the war with Russia: our aforementioned Ukrainian house-guest and I have had a number of conversations about what has happened in her home country, and her friends and neighbors that have died on the eastern front. It must be admitted that many on the political right, before the war began, were beginning to see in Putin and his re-emerging Russia a potential non-woke, and (dare I say it?) Christian alternative to the clearly demoralized and troubled west, while some even painted him as a Constantine-type figure riding a wave of re-emerging Russian culture. The presupposition was perhaps that Russia had come out of its dark and smoldering Soviet era, and finally having learned its geopolitical and morals lessons, was attempting to rebuild upon the foundations of what made her truly great: her art, philosophy, folk culture, music, and religious traditions. And yet as more and more stories of searing brutality being committed by the ordinary citizens - now citizen-soldiers - of Russia emerge from the east, along with seeming images of a majority of Russians ideologically paralyzed into supporting a historical travesty - we see that Putin was still the small-souled thug and snake we were warned he was, and that his image of the Russian alternative was a mere convenient mirage. If we put hope in him before, then we were the desperate useful idiots of Soviet lore, taken of our own free will.
I now understand why, for instance, they don’t want to play Wagner in Israel, or why some Germans today still flinch at the aesthetics Hitler supported: there is simply too much historical baggage to deal with at this time, and blood still cries up from the soil it has soaked. I even admit to wincing when I quoted Dostoevsky, because I am forced to admit that throughout most of the time that Russia reached her cultural heights, it was also a military and geopolitical force for ill, including the repeated geopolitical (and often real) rape and enslavement and terrorizing of my own ethnic homeland, Poland. What is happening in Ukraine today is not an aberration, but rather a continuation of a centuries-long pattern. And so the thoughtful person asks: are Russia’s cultural achievements part of her alternative legacy, or irredeemably intertwined with her constant crimes?
It would almost be too easy to write off Russia as a whole, including (and especially including) her cultural achievements. Certainly, to topple her cultural monuments might represent a particularly satisfying form of revenge. My people have suffered terribly because of her political adventures, and my house-guest’s people are now in mortal danger as a result.
And yet all of this brings brings us to the question of what beauty actually is. If beauty is merely a matter of subjective opinion — which is what some people posit when they quote Aquinas’s definition that beauty is “that which, when seen, pleases" — then it’s not worth very much at all, at least not any more than any other subjective musing. You can safely topple and burn it, then, as most of those whose work and culture you’d be offending are already dead. Indeed, even many traditionalists stop at this definition from Aquinas, taking it as permission to be aesthetically subjective. Yet Aquinas later reminds us that beauty also has “integrity, proportion, and clarity.” To merely contemplate these three words - a task well beyond an article like this, which is already getting too long — invites one on the path of the transcendent aspect of beauty.
I can’t take you on the long journey I have had in discerning and contemplating the meaning of beauty in my own life in a single post, but I can take you straight to the conclusion (and hope to finish the book which outlines the journey sometime before I die, or maybe next year…). I have come to understand that beauty, like “tradition”, can be a “small b” or “large B”, just as Catholics will differentiate between small “t” (and vital, but unbinding) tradition, and large “T” (and therefore binding) tradition. So by “small b” beauty, we can mean the things which we deeply enjoy, are moved by, and are subjectively claiming to have aesthetic value. And yet we can speak of a large “B” Beauty as well, and this is Beauty in the objective sense: the self-revelation of God’s nature, whereby we can come to know Him on a level beyond words, and a standard by whose light we (and our works) can be judged. When we speak of somebody having a beautiful marriage or a beautiful life, it’s the large “B” we are reaching for. If Dostoevsky was speaking of a small “b” beauty, then his quote is silly. If he meant something akin to a “large B” Beauty, then he could not possibly be more right. Not only that, but we can expand on his saying and claim that ultimately, nothing else - no political program or elevated human effort - can save us. Only Beauty can.
Now returning to those modern iconoclasts who hate the west, they can be challenged with several simple retorts. Yes, there is a history of bloodshed and many crimes linked with western civilization and its counterparts: it is far from heaven on earth, even if it created some heavenly beautiful things along the way. And yet, can they point to an old civilization which has not committed equal or worse crimes? Can they show a better place, or a better path? And if we are to damn our ancestors (cultural and otherwise) for owning slaves, can we also not congratulate them for being part of the first culture to reject the practice, and even legislate the result by fighting a war in which over half a million men died? Can we praise them for working so hard to lift up the poor that their economic systems helped grind down, for rebuilding the concept of university, and for building the types of hospitals, charitable centers, and social policies — also explicitly Christian in nature — that our pagan ancestors could not even have conceived of? Indeed, most of the things presented to us as reasons to hate and dismantle the west are in reality things which the west has already effectively grappled with and largely overcome. It’s track record, seen in this light, is — once again — unmatched. It also hides a pernicious form of revenge-oriented xenophobia and racism, couched in the desire to correct errors of the past by toppling what monuments from such times remain.
Furthermore in our consideration of — and flinching, often back-peddling reaction to— the perspectives of those tearing down western civilization, we often miss the opportunity for an additional simple riposte: that their own version, still in its cultural infancy, has thus-far proven to be an abject disaster. The culture they are attempting to build on the bleached bones of Christendom has so far shown itself to be a miserable, mental-illness inducing, materialistic, shallow, and spiritually sick place. If you visit the cities where the supposed most enlightened of the scions of the new civilization live (I say visit, because you probably couldn’t afford to live there), I doubt you’ll be very impressed with anything beyond the sight of modern barbarians living in the ruins of a superior civilization. And then ask yourself: Where would you feel safer taking a walk at midnight? Through the streets of enlightened downtown San Francisco, or some backwards place like majority Muslim Aman, Jordan? Look at the women and children in both places: where are they, generally speaking, happier?
Returning to culture, I have come to suspect that the devil’s game is that — at the moment where the banality and non-sustainability of the leftist experiment has been fully exposed — we are being prevented from a course-correction by an ideological conditioning against the finer points of our own cultural heritage.
I’d like to posit that the devil is also in the details here. Given the vast democratizing effects of digital technology, we are at a time where the heights of our civilization’s achievements — and the real intellectual and spiritual benefits they can bring — can be most easily accessed by the widest group of people. What was once the necessary (due to economic realities) province of elites can now be heard — and taught — with great effect from Bangladesh to Guatamela to Harlem — across all economic barriers. Anyone who would like to hear a beautiful ancient work by Hildegard — or a beautiful modern work from Arvo Part — may play it for free on youtube. Anyone wishing to teach how these works are written and performed can easily access the materials to do so, and use this same technology to find capable teachers. And in my own sub-field - music technology - the ability to compose and hear wonderful performers has now been digitized and made available to every creator in the world. The real benefits of something like so-called “classical music” are now available to all. Simultaneously, the limits and spiritual ravages of popular culture, from popular music and entertainment to the great harm being done to all of us via social media, have never been more apparent. Antidotes are needed, and are now readily available. Therefore can it be a coincidence that at this time of dawning realization of disease and available cure, that the cure itself would be so viciously attacked as deplorable, and its proponents so viciously smeared as cultural fascists and racial supremacists?
The paradox of available riches amongst chosen poverty haunts our society, and may accelerate its rapid undoing if not faced head-on. Christ commanded us to feed his sheep, and he did not mean just canned goods and shelters, but also spiritual sustenance, of which b(B)eauty is a vital part. He also commanded us to put out into the deep, and this should certainly be understood culturally as well.
And so I will resist the temptation to write off all of the Russians, despite their often keeping bad company. And to illuminate Dostoevsky, I will add a quote from Solzhenitsyn, who so clearly understood the accomplishments and pitfalls of both east and west:
"One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world”. What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes – but whom has it saved?
There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what distorted, will not immediately become obvious.
Then a contradictory speech, article, program, a differently constructed philosophy rallies in opposition – and all just as elegant and smooth, and once again it works. Which is why such things are both trusted and mistrusted.
In vain to reiterate what does not reach the heart.
But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force – they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.
So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through – then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three?
In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world”, was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all HE was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.”
(Solzhenitzyn, Nobel Lecture, 1970.)
Beauty is opposed, precisely because it is ultimately not of this world, and because it is a tool for great individual and societal good. We should expect the opposition, not flinch from it. We should challenge its absurdities, and move forward with our eyes on the everlasting hills from which “integrity, proportion, and clarity” shine forth.
One here is my attempt to express the beauty of the first days of Creation.
https://anngauger.substack.com/p/not-everything-is-a-mess
Amen. Beauty will save the world because it touches the heart, bypassing the intellect, and points toward the source of Beauty, The Most Beautiful One, who made a world full of Beauty.
I have articles on this subject I wrote several years ago. I will repost them on my substack if you care to read them.