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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31230 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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Why Boston’s “Embrace Statue” has led me to embrace Western chauvinism

Boston Common is a beautiful park in America’s true historic city. It’s a must see when visiting, and features a number of old monuments. There’s the Soldiers and Sailors monument, the Robert Gould Shaw memorial, and a memorial to the Boston Massacre. All of these are in a beautiful timeless design that the common man appreciates, which is appropriate for the common park of Boston. I wouldn’t say these monuments compare to achievements in European cities, but they are nevertheless noble attempts to celebrate the glories of the nation. As in all great art, the form befits the content, and the statues artfully imitate the gravity of their depicted scene.

Boston liberals decided to plop down a new monument, called “Embrace”, in dedication of MLK Jr — a figure mired in controversy over his support and instructions on raping women and the evidence that he plagiarized both his PhD thesis and his famous dream speech. (If that sentence was strange to read, it’s because I’m trying a new writing style where I introduce progressive heroes like they introduce mine). But the reason I disagree with the statue isn’t because MLK is a cheat or a misogynistic rape-enabler. Were the statue beautiful and heroic, and adequately conveyed the perseverance and dedication and cultural significance of MLK, this post wouldn’t be written. But that didn’t happen. Instead the statue looks like shit.

I mean this literally: it looks like a gigantic turd. The real world angles (not the architectural projections) make it look like a man firmly gripping monumental dung [1]. Some go further, and say it looks like a man gripping a monumental dong — that Boston has erected nothing short of an erection [2] [3] [4]. Surely the view of the common people should take primacy for the statues of the Boston Common, and Twitter is filled with normal people laughing hysterically at this statue.

So why erect something so ugly? The root cause here is the conscious betrayal of the Western legacy. What we see in the Boston Common is what we saw in Obama’s official portrait, with many questioning the artist’s choice of a casual background and hiding semen in his work [5]. The Western legacy and its hundreds of years of artistic development, which made a science out of beautiful monuments, is seen as intrinsically white — which is intrinsically bad. And so the novelty of experimental artists is privileged over the traditional and beautiful forms of art. Many of these artists make bad and gaudy work. The public knows this, but they are chosen anyway by the powers that be, who notoriously have an undeveloped sense of beauty.

And so I embrace western chauvinism. The West is the best, not in all the ways, but in important ones. Their statuary history is surely the best. Because the West is the best, we should privilege the traditional modes of art. Accepting this fact would make the public beautiful again.

‘Western’ is a dumb category. Instead we should refer to Christian or post Christian cultures- and, obviously, Christian cultures are aesthetically superior to post Christian cultures because they don’t make embracing ugly art an elite cultural shibboleth, but post Christian cultures are distinctive in being post christian and not post Islamic or post pagan. Christianity’s marriage laws, social attitudes, taboos, and attitudes towards worship leave fingerprints stamped all over these people, even if they’re post Christian and not Christian. ‘Western’ is a meaningless category. The fact that the civilization values prominent, representational art of important people at all is something that sets a post Christian society apart from a post Islamic society.

Instead what you’re arguing for is the superiority of a Christian society over a post Christian society, and I won’t disagree with you there. As a Christian conservative myself I have obvious reasons for this preference that go beyond artistic preferences, but ‘I like art to be beautiful’ is a reasonable preference.

I would disagree - Western is a perfectly apt description, or at least there's not much better. I disagree with the term of just 'Christian' because it ignores or downplays the pre-Christian Greco-Roman intellectual tradition the West inherited. The history of the West intellectually and philosophically has been attempts to attempts to synthesize Greek rationality with Jerusalemite faith. Many influential figures made this their explicit goal, such as Thomas Aquinas. These two broad schools of thought sharpened each other and I think lead to the remarkable intellectual achievements of the West. I think this is the true legacy of the West, at least intellectually.

Agreed. Modern Westernism has taken all the bad aspects of Christianity and kept them while throwing out the actually civilisationally useful stuff.

As someone from a completely different society in the UK I meet atheists all the time whose brief system is so so Christian it boggles the mind, the only thing is they don't believe in is God/the Bible.

So, what does this mean for pre-Christian societies? It wasn’t Christians who built the Parthenon or all of those gorgeous Greco-Roman statues. You draw a distinction between “post-Christian” and “post-pagan” societies, but, at least in the entirety of Europe, Christian societies are all post-pagan societies. Pagan Europeans made beautiful representational art many centuries before they were converted to Christianity.

Just what I was thinking. The essential features of Western civilization were all there BC or at least pre-Constantine. Mosaics too, as well as statues. Indeed, Christianity brought with it the introduction of iconoclasm as an idea, which caused long and ridiculously bloody (for the tininess of the stakes) factional strife in the Byzantine empire.

We had Roman Law, we had Plato and Aristotle, we had vaguely representative government and the rights of the citizen. That is the essential components IMO.

Linking pre-Christian Greece and Rome(and these were different societies even if they had a few similarities due to being indo-European and Mediterranean) to the modern ‘west’ can only be done through Christianity. The Italian renaissance that revitalized classical art? That was at the behest of Christianity.

To the extent that they’re similar to Christianity, it’s either because of geographic similarities(Christianity being, like Rome and Greece, based out of, well, Rome and Greece) or Christian borrowing.

I have to disagree. Renaissance architecture and statuary, and consequent developments, are influenced by Pagan architecture and rediscovered architectural/theoretical treatises more than anything Christian. Ethiopia, despite being Christian longer than Germany, does not have the same standard of beauty that you find in the West. Western architecture is its own category distinct from Christian non-Western communities in Ethiopia and Lebanon. Even Gothic (medieval) architecture was heavily influenced by Romanesque which was influenced by the developments of the Roman Empire.

“Western” only became befuddling as a category when postmodern academics willed this thought into existence. It pretty much just refers to Europe influenced by Rome and various hegemonic European groups (themselves influenced by Rome) (Goths, Franks, etc). The West, of course, does include Western Christianity. But it’s a perfectly useful term to use. Everyone seems to know exactly what region I’m referring to when I use it, absent edge cases in like the Balkans or Finland.

Gothic architecture was notably also influenced by Islamic architecture.

When you say "Gothic (medieval) architecture", are you implying that Gothic architecture is mediaeval architecture?

"Western" is also extended into pre-Christian Europe. Hence, Plato and Socrates etc. are "Western philosophers", but not Christian philosophers. Greek and Roman art is all "Western", but not all of it is Christian.

Also, the important distinction here is modernist vs. non-modernist. For example, there are plenty of horrendously ugly modernist churches, while pre-modernist churches tended to be gaudy at worst.

Well yeah, but counting those societies as western is dumb- they don’t have any more in common with later Christian and post Christian societies than they do with middle eastern societies.

A category that includes 1950s America and 4th century Rome is already very broad. However, "Western" is a category referring to a set of intellectual, linguistic, and other cultural traditions, typically taken to descend from the cultures of Ancient Greece, Rome, and the Hebrews (up to the 1st century). It's not defined in terms of degree of similarity. A South Pacific Island that had miraculously and independently become Christian, democratic, individualistic, and had a play in in Iambic Pentameter about an existentially tormented prince would still not be "Western", because despite its similarities it would not be part of the same tradition.

Saying that ancient Greeks and Romans weren't Western is a bizarre understanding of "Western". We could redefine words to mean the opposite of their common definition. But then communication would be very difficult and full of misunderstanding.

I took a year long Western Civ class in high school. It was almost all ancient Greece and Roman.

There's heterodox opinions and then there's just failure to use terms in a sensible manner.

Well yes, the category ‘western’ includes ancient Athens as well as 21st century America- that’s why the category is dumb. Not completely absent of meaning, but not defining something that needs to be defined.

To be fair, hydroacetylene's contention is that "Western" is a bad category and that we should replace most of its uses with "Christian".

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