By DONALD DeMARCO
When I was in graduate school I had two colleagues who, in addition to their primary interest in philosophy, enjoyed the art of painting. One preferred depicting traditional scenes — landscapes, castles, restless waves beating against rugged coastlines. He was branded as “conservative,” though his artistic efforts were good enough to grace the walls of a number of domiciles. The other was modern and prided herself on being inventive. She had urged her fellow artist to join her in being up-to date with artistic trends.
One day, after he had finished another one of his routine but likable images, he randomly wiped his brushes on a canvas which he then hung on the wall as a personal joke. This haphazard work could have been created by a monkey. His friend, however, saw his new effort not as a joke, but as his coming of age as a true artist. Sometimes, a compliment can evoke only laughter. Our self-styled art critic may have been too much caught up in trends not to recognize something that is destined for the garbage heap for what it is.
The point of this anecdote is that in an age in which many people are devoted to progress and to being up-to-date, they often fail to appreciate what is of traditional value and overestimate what happens to be trendy. Art cannot be evaluated by the calendar.
The philosophical approach, on the other hand, is to put chronology aside and view art in terms of its intrinsic merits, its beauty, for example. A painting is not bad simply because it is out of fashion. Nor is it good merely because it is in keeping with the times. Art transcends timelines; it delights generation after generation.
We, that is, all of us, are vulnerable to latching on to what is new. The daily newspaper, news-breaking stories, and the media’s incessant preoccupation with delivering whatever is new, create the impression that what is “new” is a synonym for what is “important.” Those who are not in step with the times are categorized as out-of-date, passé, old-fashioned, old fogies, troglodytes, or hapless souls who are living in the past. Art, however, should unite, not divide.
In her novel, Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor has a street-corner preacher who is inviting everyone to his new church: “This church is up-to-date! When you’re in this church you can know that there’s nothing or nobody ahead of you, nobody knows nothing you don’t know, all the cards are on the table, friends, and that’s a fack!”
Onnie Jay, whose spelling is not quite up-to-date, does not seem to realize that the effort to be constantly up-to-date, in a world of accelerating change, makes it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything from the wisdom of the past. For St. Augustine, God is “never new, never old; He is timeless.” The word of God is not subject to an editorial decision.
In the Broadway musical, Oklahoma, the overrated and myopic notion of being up-to-date is fodder for comedy: “Everything’s up to date in Kansas City. They gone about as fer as they can go. They went an’ built a skyscraper seven stories high. About as high as a buildin’ orta grow.” No one know where progress is going.
Chesterton referred to it as “a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” There are times when we sense that what we naively call “progress” is really “regress.” Progress is most certainly not guaranteed.
“Progress is a nice word,” Robert Kennedy once remarked. “But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.” It is merely being realistic to recognize that progress has both its critics as well as its enemies.
True to his vocation as a philosopher, Jacques Maritain has stated the following: “. . . The system of Einstein has replaced that of Newton, that of Copernicus had replaced that of Ptolemy. The temptation to generalize is enormous, to think that this sort of progress extends by right to the total domain of spiritual activity….Very frequently have we responded that this is to fall into a gross confusion: to confound the art of the philosopher with that of the tailor or that of the dressmaker. In addition, Truth does not recognize a chronological criterion.”
Maritain’s words of wisdom should not be categorized as too old to be noteworthy.
Reference to the dressmaker is apropos. The cinema dates men who are hatted or hatless, sporting broad or narrow ties, wide or narrow lapels. Women’s hairdos, apparel, and makeup change faster than do the seasons. Styles change, but a philosophy attached to a style is doomed to a very short life. In the realm of language, consider how ephemeral are the verbal expressions that were once thoroughly up-to-date: swell, hunky-dory, saddle shoes, pedal pushers, spats, hula hoops, and Holy Moly, as well as “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” “Saints preserve us,” “Heavens to Betsy,” “Gee willikers,” “Living the life of Riley,” and “Jumping Jehoshaphat.”
To many of these verbal expressions, we can say, “Good riddance.” But their replacements offer no indication that our conversations are richer and more meaningful than they were in the past. In fact, there is evidence that with Twitter, email, and text messages, traffic signs, sports stats, and commercial advertising, our vocabulary has decreased, our language has been truncated, and our conversations have become more impoverished.
Consider currently overused expressions such as totally, awesome, no way, whatever, cool, and gross, which are not as meaningful as they are proof of one’s membership in a hip subculture. Verbal expressions change, but the word of God endures.
Let us not think of being conservative as being old hat or that being up-to-date is being progressive. Simply stated, let us think; for this relatively unused human faculty opens doors to vistas of endless enjoyment and edification.
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