Cultural Noise

     I'm a mathematician by hobby, and that means that I'll often lie awake in the morning pestered by numbers, especially when they don't seem to add up.  Here is something I've been puzzling about for years.  Back in the Renaissance, the population of Europe was a small fraction of what it is now, and that's not even counting the "European" cultures in the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and elsewhere.  Now the Renaissance saw perhaps the greatest flowering of artistic genius in the history of the world -- and I am not somebody who despises the art of the Middle Ages, as the Renaissance artists themselves did (hence "Gothic," initially an insult, meaning "fit for barbarians").  So why do we not enjoy ten times that flowering right now?  If Renaissance Italy produced a single Michelangelo, why do we not produce ten?  Not to mention ten Raphaels, ten Leonardos, ten Titians, ten Mantegnas, ten Caravaggios (!), and literally thousands of those fine second and third rank artists that every little village could boast?

     One answer is that the geniuses of our day are doing other things, like inventing computer programs such as the one I'm using now to write this.  That will cut down severely the "pool" of possible artists, but still -- if it cuts down the pool by a factor of 20, we could still expect, if not a Michelangelo and a Raphael, at least one or the other.  But we don't have either one.  Maybe that's because, even in the arts, the artists are pursuing something else, such as film?  Possibly; but as much as I like John Ford and Howard Hawkes, I'm leery of granting them the status of Titian, not to mention Shakespeare, Cervantes, Spenser, Tasso, or the other giants in literature of that age.

     Another possibility is that the cultural requirements to produce a Michelangelo are now lacking.  That is, at any one time there are probably many men walking around who could be a Michelangelo, but who will never be one, because the opportunity isn't there -- and by that I mean much more than that the fellow is a poor farmer boy, a "mute inglorious Milton."  I mean that to be a Michelangelo, you have to stand upon the gigantic shoulders of a culture that will grant you a sublime vision of all the created world and all of human history, governed by the Providential hand of God.  Without a vision like that, you do not get the very greatest art; and no such vision can be produced privately.  The Taj Mahal does not spring from private inspiration.  Tolkien could only write The Lord of the Rings because he enjoyed such a vision, provided him by his faith and by his being steeped in the heroic literature of the middle ages.

     I still suspect that that's not a sufficient explanation.  There must be a thousand factors less grand than that.  Michelangelo had the advantage of the old apprentice system, surviving in the Renaissance studios, where boys of various ages would be supervised by the master and his immediate successors and would be taught how to mix colors, how to paint a bit of an angel in an inconspicuous place, how to draw up a cartoon, how to nail together the scaffolding, and so forth.  (As an aside: I know that the studios were all male; that they produced Michelangelo, not to mention the hundreds of others, any one of whom, if he were alive now, might well be among the greatest living artists alive in the world, is their own justification.)  That sort of place no longer exists; it's been replaced by the school, that retarder of genius.

     Still hardly enough.  I'm also wondering to what extent the very ease with which our works are made public produces so much cultural noise as to block the work of thought.  The medieval theologians read one another's works and commented upon them, but the communication was necessarily slow, and that meant that only a few people, practically speaking, could comment, and they would comment only after much deliberation.  In other words, you had to have quite a few theologians writing and teaching and thinking all through Europe to produce a Thomas Aquinas; but if you had more, or if they were able to communicate with one another instantly, or if they were all encouraged to publish right away, you never would have produced a Thomas Aquinas.  The waves would have interfered with one another.  Most of the time the mind would be distracted or diverted by noise, by the relatively insignificant, by responding to something that should have been settled for good a long time before, so that the argument could move on.  If something like this cultural static is true, then that would explain the numbers -- rather, it would imply that, after a certain point, even in pretty decent cultural conditions, the more artists, philosophers, theologians, and writers of literature you have, the less likely it will be that any of them can fight their way above the static and rise to the level of Michelangelo, Plato, Thomas, or Milton.  (The hard sciences proceed in a different manner; I won't venture to say how much or how little this phenomenon applies to physics or biology.)

     The spur for these puzzlings, this weekend: snooping through the ubiquitous Glory and Praise hymnal, a work which verifies the rule that no matter how bad you think things are, they're really much worse.  It's not just that the songs are, most of them, unsingable by a congregation (for reasons that I can enumerate in another posting), and plagued with banal lyrics or awful poetry, cloying sentiments, ditzy theology, and bad grammar.  It's that none of the many editors seemed even to notice the fact.  They think they are in the middle of a Renaissance.  How is this possible, unless the whole idea of greatness or even pretty-darn-good-ness in art has suffered a complete collapse, under the burden of noise, noise, noise?

     Back in the nineteenth century there was a staggeringly bad poet named William McGonagall, who gave up the plough to regale his audiences with pious works on temperance and straight living.  Google on his name (my "link" function is not working today, for some reason), but don't drink while you're doing it, unless you like to aspirate your beer.  The poetry in Glory and Praise -- unless it is a direct citation of Scripture -- is better than McGonagall, but not by a whole lot, and is not nearly as good as the lyrics of the sometimes too-sweet American, Fanny Crosby, who wrote one hymn I do like a great deal ("Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross").  The difference is that everybody in Victorian England at least knew that their fellow was a well-intended and ignorant plowman.  But they didn't have quite the level of noise we suffer now.