A Critique of the Now Culture
If you look at art shows, if you can still take any of the movies, or if you read books occasionally, you must know that the main feature of much present‑day art activity is its exclusive obsession with the present and the future. The past no longer exists, and no one is interested in the past. Granted the obvious fact that we are living in a time of rapid change, and that new technologies are constantly converging to transform our life into something inhuman and unimaginable, this obsession with the present and the future is the worst possible antidote to a vertiginous time of change. It is just about the opposite of what we need.
Yet futurism is the current vogue. There is actually a “science of the future,” dedicated to the study of the future, being developed by such people as Daniel Bell, Herman Kahn, and Bertrand de Jouvenel. There are also inspired prophets and messiahs of the coming world, such as Richard Landers, Marshall McLuhan, Bertram Gross, Amitai Ezioni, Arthur C. Clarke (of 2001: A Space Odyssey), and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Saddest of all, there are all sorts of would‑be artistic developments, using computers, new scientific materials, and mechanical processes, working from new, purely sensational notions of art, which try to join the technological prophets of the future with futuristic conceptions of art.
To some of these theorists, literacy, as we have known it, must soon give way to “Videocy,” the new activated state of TV watchers. Just as the “machine” served as the metaphor and model for almost everything human in the nineteenth century, so the electronic age has found its metaphor in the new gimmickry of science. Poetry is the most powerful shaper of human minds, especially when they don’t know it—as in religion, or the metaphors of politics—and in this new metaphor of “electric” communication you have just another gospel of change and immediate “total involvement” in the present.
The typical little “Videot” of twelve, for example, can sing all the advertisements and follow all the cereal shows, but he knows nothing of good music as it was known in the past, and he has not learned to read books for pleasure. He has spent too many precious hours taking it in from the TV tube, or “canal” as the French very aptly call it. There are exceptions, but the majority are not “brighter,” as everyone is so ready to say, but merely deprived of the stabilizing deeper‑rooted experiences of the past.
Modern man, cut off from his past, is like a frantic amnesiac to whom everything is possible but nothing has any meaning. The reason is that meaning, for us, unfortunately, is “a coherent relation to past experience.” Interest in the past, one’s own or the world’s, is like travel, a broadening perspective; but since travel through time, unlike space travel, can’t be made easy by jet or train—except in science fiction—the only way to travel back in time is still via the old‑fashioned book. One who has not travelled does not know the world he is living in. He can still be very much in the present, as a victim or fanatic, but he does not know where he is or where he is going—even if he is a futurist, specializing in the business. That is the price of being too contemporary.
Victor Ferkiss, in his book Technological Man, offers amid much nonsense at least one sound warning: “There are certain patterns of human institutions and personal behaviour that are almost as resistant to change as those of the lower animals and the social insects.” Whether Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz are exactly right, it is worth remembering that we are biological offshoots and all our actions are profoundly related to our biological needs. These do not change. They program everything we invent and do, as they have done for many thousands of years. That is why the knowledge of the past is so important to us: it tells us really what we are.
So many features of the “Now Generation,” caught up in the present tense and present tension, have a very long history behind them; and there is nothing more useful, for anyone caught in an accelerator of this kind, than to “hold on for awhile and study the history of the problem.” Freud did it for the individual, in psychoanalysis; and the “historical approach” brought new light in every other field of knowledge—religion, society, earth history, literature, ideas—before it fell automatically into disfavour as all historical study has.
Before drugs became popular as would‑be transcendental revealers and keys to imaginative experience, Baudelaire was meeting with intellectuals who had taken marijuana, in the form of hashish—“une société où presque tout le monde en avait pris”—in Paris, in the 1860s. Before him De Quincey and Coleridge had taken opium, and praised its literary imaginative effects, as did Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, the Timothy Leary of that time; in fact, among famous opium‑takers we must list George Crabbe, Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe, Théophile Gautier, and the poet Francis Thompson.
But to know the history of this is not merely to confirm an ignorant presupposition. One wants to know the changing view of hallucinatory drugs in human history, the kind of questionable ideas that have always been connected with disturbed psychic experience, and the meaning in each case of this ideology of drugs. It is something indeed that has a history, and a future; but we are just emerging out of the Dark Ages. The historical approach, here as always, is an attempt to understand a thing in its development and in its relation of other things; it’s not a way of picking up momentum for action —unless one is already a fanatic or a convert.
In the same way, the primitivist tendency in modern art, in life, even in politics, needs to be studied historically. There is nothing new about ragged clothing or fantastic clothing—many of the Romantics tried it. In fact, the entire youth movement precipitated by the Beatles and the singing groups may be nothing but the overspill of nineteenth‑century Romanticism on middle‑class youth in the twentieth century. The revival of interest in exotic mysticism, astrology and magic, for example, is all too familiar in nineteenth‑century Romanticism. The pattern runs from William Blake to Rainer Maria Rilke and W. B. Yeats. But as the anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber reminds us, there are three criteria for measuring progress: “the atrophy of magic based on psychopathology; the decline of infantile obsession with the outstanding physiological events of human life; and the persistent tendency of technology and science to grow accumulatively.” Except for the last criterion, we have obviously been moving backward in recent years.
This is nothing to be complacent about: most of the great Romantics died young. Of the real dangers of magic, demonism, and regression to superstition, we’ve had a foretaste, perhaps, in the Tate murders; but we can learn more and faster from anthropology. The Aranda people of Australia, in their puberty ritual called subincision, “slit the boy’s penis open like a boiled frankfurter” and then stanched the blood‑flow with fire. The Aztecs, on the other hand, massacred hundreds of youths in a single day by tearing their hearts out with knives of obsidian; or massacred little children to the rain‑god Tlaloc, believing that if the children died screaming and terrified the god was all the more pleased. All this is potential, still sleeping, in the heart of man. Some tribal societies may be peaceful and happy (pace Ruth Benedict), though I gather that most of them live in fear and perpetual misery. We can leave to Rousseauists the belief in the innocence of spontaneous nature. We know much better from reading the newspaper, not to speak of history and anthropology.
I believe the regression from rationality, which many are toying with, and the would‑be return to tribal man, is the most dangerous game that man can possibly play—much more dangerous than “chicken” racing or the atom bomb. (I had dinner the other day with a fellow‑poet whose liver had been practically destroyed in two concentration camps.) Like the drug movement and the drift towards primitivism, the idea of a natural society, and the passionate rejection of existing society that this involves, has been a central theme in literary and political history for the past two hundred years. Our present phenomenon of radical revolt and utopian idealism is directly derived from this: a new idea appears in history the way a giraffe lengthens its neck, by evolution out of older ideas. But to discover this is not merely to get on the bandwagon of history; it should mean to become involved in a fascinating realistic problem, to try to understand the phenomenon in a true historical perspective.
So every action may produce change, even violent and ignorant action may, but an attempt to get at the root of things, with all one’s mind, can improve action rationally by making one care more for the greatest good—not just some immediate passionate goal, but the total good that contains it, all things considered. I imagine that it is this kind of curiosity and thirst for knowledge, in depth and on the scale of time, that modern man requires. It is the only way, in fact, to save him from being a dupe and a victim of his own history.
Dudek, Louis. "The Present Is All Too Present and The Past All Too Past." McGill Daily, The Supplement, 23 October 1970. Rpt. in In Defence of Art: Critical Essays & Reviews, Ed. Aileen Collins. Kingston: Quarry Press, 1988, pp.13-16.
Copyright the estate of Louis Dudek.
