Ethics, Art, and Politics: Three Vectors

First of all, I apologize to First Sea Lord for not commenting on this post right away. I try to avoid politics since my side always loses...even when we win.

In any case, involvement in politics is not really voluntary, even for artists who are pointedly apolitical. To get involved in politics, all you really have to do is piss off someone powerful, as Chen Guang did. I think it's important to note that the actual cause is immaterial - what makes it political is that someone powerful got angry. Google was not run out of China because of their courageous defense of democratic principles, they were thrown out because they made someone angry. That's how modern power works - be as right as you want, but don't embarrass anyone. In the bad old days they'd kill you for writing a critical economics paper. Today they realize that no one reads economics papers...so as long as you don't go on tv and make them look bad, knock yourself out.

I wanted to mention two other things in this connection.

The most concentrated meditation on this I've encountered is the Manuel Puig novel, Kiss of the Spider Woman, also a decent motion picture (WARNING: contains acting by William Hurt).

Although society views Molina's (social) and Arregui's (political) offenses as different in character, the book underscores the commonality of their experience. Molina's final hours raise the question of whether he did it for love or patria. But is there really a difference?

Studies of the military suggest that soldiers are not motivated primarily by patriotism or bloodlust. They're motivated by a desire to get the war over with, and by a strong sense of dedication...to one another. In the end I think that amounts to patriotism, but it's not the kind we're sold at the political conventions.

What we're fighting for...in the end, we're fighting for each other. (link)

The other thing I wanted to mention was the minority view of the late Zen teacher Robert Aitken, who felt strongly that Buddhism without values was "a hobby", and that political engagement was absolutely necessary. Here are some remarks he made in 2006, when he had just turned 89:

There is only one thing that works in the face of the iron faces, and that is decency. By being decent, I don’t mean being nice. I mean Mahayana responsibility. It isn’t nice to block the doorway. Decent Mahayana conduct means behaving appropriately. It is surely appropriate in these days of justifying torture and white phosphorous as weapons, to hold up an inexorable mirror to the fiends who are raising hell in our name—and then following through with an essential agenda that is not necessarily legal, like smuggling medicine to Iraqi people—the program of Voices in the Wilderness until the situation became too dangerous—or setting up a half-way house for recently released prisoners, like the Olympia Zen Center, or feeding the poor, five days a week, week in and week out for years and years, like Catholic Worker houses across the country. The essential agenda is not a hobby, after all.

And "the essential agenda" is what art is all about. Art is about saying things that need to be said. The better it is, the more dangerous it is, for both the practitioner and the powerful.

The reason I think Aitken's insight is relevant is that art constructed in the service of a preexisting agenda is invariably crap. It might be campy or entertaining crap, but it is crap nonetheless. Real art precedes policy. It takes note of actual conditions, it confronts difficult questions, it blurts out uncomfortable facts like a 5-year old behind a fat lady on the escalator.

Art then, isn't politics, but an unstable precursor or catalyst. For the powerful, that makes it a threat, something to be managed or contained. But that's their problem.