Caveman Part 3 (Draft)

Part 3
Individual Narratives

You should take a trip to Italy. If you’re really clever, you should take a trip to Italy around the year 1565, but you can go in the present, too.
Once you get past the food, take a look at the art. You can’t miss it, because it’s everywhere. It contains the sum total of the Christian Faith. It contains the main beliefs, and it contains the legends. When Mary is assumed into heaven, for instance – assumption is when God calls up your earthly remains; Enoch and Elijah were also assumed – she dangles a cord behind her, while the apostle Thomas is seen in the distance running down a hill, not wanting to miss the event of Mary’s dormition (the sleep unto death). Try to find any of that in the Bible! But you’ll find it regularly in of the paintings of the Assumption. Art takes on not only a unique language, that is, a Narration, such as skill in painting, but a vocabulary, i.e., dots of meaning, symbols that are meaningful only if, well, you know what they mean.
Walk around Italy and stare at 800 Marion Assumptions, and 700 times you’ll see a cord and poor Tommy running down a hill in the distance, and you won’t have a clue to what it means. If you did take the trip in 1565, however, you would know about the cord and about Thomas without having to read the explanations in the guide books.
That’s just one example of the arcana inherent in this art. It is of its time, and often it is hard for us to read the complete Narrative without a little help. That may be why an appreciation of Fine Arts is so rare: It isn’t easy. I don’t want to suggest that all good things are hard, but not all easy things are good, and sometimes you have to work a little to appreciate something.
Sort of like reading all of the backstory of Caveman to get to the good stuff about postmodernism. If, indeed, postmodernism is good stuff.
Bear with me.

You’ll see some great things on this Italy trip. You’ll see the Creation, if you visit the Sistine Chapel. You’ll see the horns on Moses’ head more often than not; that’s how you can tell it’s Moses (and you can look it up for yourself why Moses is displayed as having horns; I don’t want to have to explain everything in one essay). You’ll see a lot of Annunciations, and if you’re like me, you’ll become a great fan of angel wings. Are they a rainbow? Feathers? Light? Lots of different approaches, depending on the artist.
In your travels you will see every Bible story you can imagine, as well as some that you’ve never heard of; apocrypha, like the tales of the Assumption, gets its paintings too. You’ll also see paintings of rich people, which will remind you that all this art is brought to you courtesy of the Medicis and their brethren. You can’t devote your life to art without money behind you, and artists get money as either patronage or commissions, either from nobles or churches.
All the art is, in other words, still about plutocrats and God and heroes.

While you’re still in Italy, visit the churches. Splendid, eh? That’s where the public money went, of course. If it’s 1565, listen to the music. You’ll be sort of bored, because they really haven’t invented music yet. Or more to the point, they haven’t invented complex instrumentation and harmonies and rhythms. Lots of single line melodies with a steady beat line underneath it. It’s really mostly folk music, although before long public money will start supporting musicians too, with either patronage or commissions, and we’ll start getting something you can sink your teeth into.

It’s a wonderful world, isn’t it? This return to the classical state of mind that is the Renaissance led to invigorated art, invigorated science (think of all of Leonardo’s drawings), invigorated culture. It is a state of order, with clear social hierarchies, with rigorous class systems, everything in its place, every person in their place. Not much has changed, in a way, since Plato, insofar as individual life is concerned. The kings and queens and clerics rule, the people follow, and in the end, we will go to heaven.

That is the Age of Faith.

Goodbye, Age of Faith.

The Age of Reason

The Age of Reason differs from the Age of Faith, as we have said, with the shift from dependence on faith to dependence on rationality. You could begin throwing around words like ontology and epistemology now, the study of existence and the study of knowledge, respectively. But we won’t. Read the original texts yourself if you want to start manipulating big words. Caveman is, deliberately, a Small Word analysis of things. It’s a synthesis, a connection of the dots the way one narrator sees them.

Let me tell you a story.

I do not know what marks the turning point between Faith and Reason, and there probably is no one fulcrum. Cultural movements don’t necessarily hinge on just one occurrence. There are certainly some big things one can point to, however. The revival of interest in the classical age included a revival of interest in the classical writers, who were primarily secular, using reason to figure out existence. The Humanism movement during the Renaissance studied the role of Man absent the realm of the spiritual. The invention of movable type means that books became more readily available, which meant more people became literate and wrote more books, a progressive cycle of intellectual development. Exposure to other cultures through active international trade and exploration caused the mind to wonder about things. And Faith, or at least the Catholic Church, certainly took a body blow when Martin Luther nailed those 95 theses to the church door.

Regardless of pinpointed causes, the end of classicism and the beginning of the Enlightenment marks the use of logic to figure out the universe. We will use our brains, rather than following our spiritual texts. There is something inherent to this that may not be immediately clear, but if someone tells me what to do, I am a cog in a wheel not of my own creation. But if I use my own brain to figure out what to do, I am suddenly, inherently, an individual. I can’t think with someone else’s brain! I can follow someone else’s predetermined plan for my life, but at the moment I attempt to determine my own plan, I have crossed a chasm separating humanity as a whole versus humanity as individuals.
This is true even of religiong. One aspect of the Protestant Reformation is the claim that the Church is filtering dogma in a bad way, and that the Individual ought to read the Bible and figure things out on an individual basis. Even at the primary level of religion, we are beginning to get a large dose of individuality.

Going into the Age of Reason, the Individual is a fairly meaningless construct. The Age of Reason will spend its energy in the construction of the Individual. And by the time we reach the Modern Age, the Individual will be king. And god. And hero.
And all the art that is about kings and gods and heroes will be about the Individual.

The Age of the Individual is dawning.

Thought

We’re going to cover the period from the Late Renaissance to roughly the turn of the 20th Century in a very short take. Lots happens in this 400 year period, but we’re going to select some key dots to connect, because our story is focusing on Individualism. If we spend too much time here, we’ll never get to Modernism. (This may or may not be a good thing.)

We’ve already mentioned the Protestant Reformation, which certainly shook the position of the single monolithic Church as the arbiter of Faith, if not necessarily the position of Faith in the culture overall. Faith was still important. What Reformation thinkers did was give thought to the role of the individual in the interpretations of scripture. Faith in the scripture itself was not in question.

But new philosophy was also happening at the same time, philosophy that approached existence rationally, through the use of human reason. Again, as we’ve said, the moment you apply reason to solving the problems of the universe, you are by definition applying a tool of Individuality. We only have our own reason to go by.
The chief tool of the rational philosopher, aside from his brain, is logic. If logic is not the enemy of Faith, it is certainly its opposite.

The philosophy of the 17th and 18th Centuries, while often accepting the existence of God, stands aside from God’s existence. Descartes and the Scholastics believed that all of existence could be figured out through reason alone (Metaphysics). John Locke and his gang disagreed, saying that the world is revealed to us through our senses (Empiricism).
I guess you can pick for yourself which makes more sense. Neither side exactly managed to pin down existence so well that we didn’t have to ever think about it again. In terms of the birth of Individualism, correctness doesn’t matter. Using pure mind or using our experience of the world, we are doing it on our own.
Still, this sort of thing, metaphysics versus empiricism, is what gives philosophy a bad name. I mean, really, guys. This is just mental gymnastics on the part of the philosopher. And for us, reading their work, it’s the mental gymnastics of watching some other mental gymnast. In the end, it’s all just gymnastics. Nothing has actually happened, except the burning of some mental muscles.

Subsidiary to ontological discussions of metaphysics and empiricism (now there’s a phrase I can’t believe I wrote), is the study of the individual per se. If the Individual is the source of reason and experience, some thought should be given to the Individual’s place in the scheme of life as it is lived. An ethicist like John Stuart Mill concluded in his work that Individual Liberty is the highest value in a society, the ethically most important thing, the most right/moral thing.
According to Mill, the Individual has Rights. That’s a new idea, although I don’t know if Mill actually invented it. Probably Plato wouldn’t have agreed with it.
Along these Individualistic lines, Manny Kant, that jaunty German man about town, concluded that the goal of the Individual’s existence is happiness. This is not the happiness (if any) that results from watching a Rob Schneider film, but the Right to an existence pleasing to the Individual on an individual basis. You know, the pursuit of happiness, in your own way. (The present Dalai Lama says exactly the same thing.)
J.S. and Manny did, of course, have a different feel about ethics. In the Age of Faith, God told you what to do, one way or the other, and there were no questions asked. But J.S. and Manny tried to figure out for themselves what made doing a certain thing right or wrong. J.S. embraced (but did not invent) Utilitarianism, which measures a calculus of pleasure and pain resulting from actions. (Utilitarianism gets a bad name in debate from people who know nothing about it aside from the catchy “The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number,” an oversimplification.) Manny came up with a Deontological approach, measuring the act itself. The difference is simple: do we weigh the results of an action, or do we evaluate the action itself? Taking either line exclusively will take you to an ethical dead end, but studying each line will make you think more clearly about the difference between right and wrong.

Right and wrong? In the Age of Faith, God told us what was right and wrong. In the Age of Reason, we’ve got to figure it out for ourselves.

Possibly the most important thought to come down the pike from these rationalists is the concept of Government deriving its power from the governed (Locke), and not God. This idea directly changed the world. Historically, despots of every stripe liked to say that, when all was said and done, they were ruling not because they were the meanest bastards in the valley, but because God had blessed them or their lineage. The idea that government is a product of the people governed rather than something imposed upon the people by the might of the most powerful, is an idea that ended the world of monarchs and began the world of the self-ruled.
You can’t have self-rule without a self.

Art

We will now enter the Age of Romanticism. That does not mean an age of romantic love, but an age celebrating the individual, emotion, nature, revolution! In the prevalent Thought of the time, the Individual has moved to a place of prominence. Again we look at the arts, because the arts reflect the times. At some points, artists even lead the times.

This period too has a flowering of Narration. The Narratives get really good, because the Narrators learn better the skills of Narration. They have access to more and better narration tools, and perhaps they are also inspired by the inherent Individuality of the times. They don’t have to stick to kings and gods and heroes anymore!

Let’s start with music. In the Middle Ages we had Gregorian chants, one line of melody droning up and down the scale. When we were roaming around Italy in 1565, we had some minstrel playing some simplistic stringed instrument and singing along in one simple line of melody. Organs had been around for hundreds of years, but by the time you get to Bach, you have a nice range of other keyboard instruments like harpsichords. With Bach we think of one of the first great bursts of musical Individualism, as Johnny worked his way through every theoretical construct imaginable. He explored music as music: he would write a series of works in every key, say, or a series exploring two voices or three voices in different progressive combinations. At this point, music is still a little rigid rhythmically, but we have developed complex harmonies and instrumental voices. What is missing from the Baroque of Bach is that Romanticism that would develop after his death in 1750. By the time we get to the great 19th Century masters, beginning with Beethoven, the age of Romanticism, the allowance of the Individual to express Individuality, is at its peak.
The listener’s reaction to music differs, too. The reaction to an emotionally moving piece like Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique symphony is radically different from the intellectual reaction to a piece like a Brandenburg Conerto. They are both musical, but one appeals to our brain, and another to our heart (if you’ll allow me a Romantic way of expressing things).
The music of the Romantics tells us much about the composers. Bach’s music doesn’t tell us much about Bach at all (except that he was good at his job).
Oh, yeah. Bach worked for a church, and a lot of his stuff is, I guess, about kings and gods and heroes.
The Romantics’ work is about whatever they wanted it to be about.

The Narrative of Literature may be the easiest to parse in the terms we’ve set regarding Narrative because, well, literature is narratives.
Duh.
We don’t have to go into much detail at all here. We now enter the age of the creation of the normal hero. The Individual. The authors express themselves individually, and they write about individuals.
“I celebrate myself,” says Walt Whitman.
Compare Achilles, star of the Iliad, to Huck Finn or Elizabeth Bennett. The demigod versus the American kid and the young middle class Englishwoman. The concept of hero has changed dramatically (in all literal senses of those words). The hero is no longer a king or a god; the hero is no longer special in terms of being separate from humanity. The hero now represents humanity. The hero is humanity. The hero is one single Individual, and our times have decided that one single individual is worthy of being a hero.
Name one kid in classical literature. You can’t.
Modern literature is filled with kids.
And working schlubs. And housewives. And people just like us.
Literature has gotten good, too. It’s fun to read. The skill set of the Narrator has brought to writing an immediacy never seen before. You are there, in your mind. It is happening to you.
Talk about catharsis! Talk about vicarious!
Yeah, the stories do have beginnings and middles and endings, with climaxes and anticlimaxes. Writers haven’t fallen that far from the Aristotelian tree. Yet.

Then there’s Fine Art. Just like literature has gotten good, so too has painting. Remember how sculpture got good when sculptors discovered anatomy? The same thing has happened to painting. What painters discovered was light.
In our Romantic Age, the subjects or art have changed, but a little more slowly than in literature. Where once upon a time every painting seemed to be a Madonna and Child, we’ve now got genre painting (scenes of everyday life), landscapes, portraits of normal people, lots of pretty stuff for the sake of pretty stuff. But for some reason, we haven’t completely shed the old yet. We still have plenty of Madonnas and Greek myths and the like. Kings and gods and heroes. There is a conservatism and traditionalism in the arts of painting and sculpture that lasted well into the 19th century, with all sorts of kings and gods and heroes still deemed the proper subject of art. This may be a continuing reflection of the operation of patronage and commission. Jane Austen became a good writer never leaving her room, and at little expense, whereas your average painter required a great amount of schooling in the craft of painting, and somebody had to pay for that one way or the other. And the people who buy paintings are the rich, whereas the people who buy books are merely the literate.
Nevertheless, while the content may be more classical, the art itself developed into the sublime. As early as Rembrandt, who died in 1669, painting has made incredible strides even from the time of Michelangelo, who died about a hundred years earlier. The realism, the understanding of light, the use of the paint, the use of brushes, all has changed.
It is with the Impressionists in the later half of the 19th Century that Romantic Individualism finally explodes in painting. The celebration of the individual artist to do what he pleases, to connect on an emotional level with his viewers, this is what Impressionism does. The need to paint the “correct” subjects, the willful ignorance of which caused the Impressionists to be scorned by the art establishment of the time, came to an end. Correctness was completely overthrown by the Impressionists, whose popularity endures through today. And the use of the tools, the use of color, the understanding of light (which is the definition of what the eye sees), the Narration, reaches what some consider its pinnacle.

We are now in an age that has been marked by revolution, in America and in Europe, revolutions resulting from the empowerment of the individual, rightly or wrongly, and the overthrow of the installed power structures. These revolutions have created the new western world of today’s modern nations.
What does all this mean in terms of Narrative, which is our theme?
Narrative has gone from the big to the small.
Narrative is accessible to everyone.
Narrative is about everyone.
We are now in the world of the Individual. Most of the greatest works of art being created in all areas are individualistic. Narrative is, you might say, at its peak, as it is informed by individualistic movements
The greatest stories of all time, in literature, art and music, are 19th century-ish.

All of which is prologue to this essay. I’ve said it before. I don’t think you can understand the Modern, until you understand how we got to it.
And we’ve finally gotten to it.