How consuming culture makes us better people | Opinion

Recently, while browsing the store at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I came across a backpack with the inscription: “You are no longer the same after experiencing art.” It's a nice feeling, I thought, but is it true? Or to be more specific: Does consuming art, music, literature and the rest of what we call culture make you a better person?

Centuries ago, Aristotle thought so, but today many people seem to doubt it. Since the early 2000s, fewer and fewer people say they visit museums and art galleries, go to see plays, or attend classical music, opera, or ballet concerts. College students are fleeing the humanities in favor of computer science, apparently having decided that a career advantage is more important than the state of their souls.

And yet, I am not convinced. cI confess that I still cling to the old faith that culture is much more important than some pre-professional training in algorithms and software systems. I am convinced that consuming culture provides your mind with knowledge and emotional wisdom; helps you have a richer view of your own experiences; It helps you understand the depths of what's going on in the people around you.

I would argue that we have become so sad, lonely, angry and mean as a society in part because many people have not been taught or do not bother to enter sympathetically into the minds of their fellow human beings.. We are excessively politicized and at the same time increasingly demoralized, unspiritualized and uncultured. The alternative is to rediscover the humanist code. It's based on the idea that unless you immerse yourself in the humanities, you may never confront the most important question: How should I live my life?

Essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson argued that we consume culture to expand our hearts and minds. We begin with the tiny circle of our own experience, but gradually we acquire broader ways of seeing the world. The humanistic mind expands into ever-widening circles of consciousness.

I went to college at a time when many people believed that great books, poems, paintings, and pieces of music held the keys to the kingdom. If you studied them in depth, they would improve your taste, your judgments, and your behavior.

Our professors at the University of Chicago had sharpened their minds and renewed their hearts by learning from books and arguing against them. We were greeted with great conversation, traditions of dispute going back to Aeschylus, Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw and Clifford Odets. They presented visions of excellence, people who had seen further and deeper, like Augustine, Sylvia Plath and Richard Wright.

We were introduced to the moral ecologies that have been built over the centuries and that have become sets of values ​​by which we can choose to live: Stoicism, Buddhism, Romanticism, Rationalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Feminism.

We could all improve by familiarizing ourselves with leading philosophy, literature, history, and art. And this journey towards wisdom was a lifelong affair. The hard sciences help us understand the natural world. Social sciences help us measure behavioral patterns among populations. But the liberal arts help us delve into the subjective experience of specific people: how that individual felt; how he longed and suffered. We have the opportunity to move with them, to experience the world, a little, as they experience it.

We know from studies by psychologists Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley that reading literature is associated with a greater capacity for empathy. Reading deeply, immersing yourself in novels with complex characters, getting into stories that explore the complexity of this character's motivations or that character's wounds, is training in understanding human variety. It empowers us to see the people in our lives with greater precision and generosity, to better understand their intentions, fears and needs, the hidden realm of their unconscious impulses. The result is emotional knowledge.

The novelist Frederick Buechner observed that not all of the faces Rembrandt painted were notable. But even the simplest face “is seen in such a remarkable way that it forces you to see it in a remarkable way.” He encourages us not to take others for granted, but to respect the depth of each human soul.

Experiences with great works of art deepen us in ways that are difficult to describe. Having visited Chartres Cathedral or having finished “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoevsky has nothing to do with acquiring new information, but with feeling in some way elevated, enlarged, altered. In the novel “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge”, by Rainer Maria Rilke, the protagonist realizes that as he ages he is able to perceive life at a deeper level: “I am learning to see. I don't know why, but everything penetrates deeper into me and doesn't stop at the place where until now it always ended.”

Perception is a creative act. You take what you have experienced throughout your life, the models you have stored in your head, and you apply them to help you interpret all the ambiguous data that your senses take in, to help you discern what really matters.

Artists are constructing a complex and coherent representation of the world. The universe is a silent and colorless place. It's just waves and particles. But by using our imagination, we build colors and sounds, tastes and stories, joy and sadness. Paintings, poems, novels and music help multiply and perfect the models we use to perceive and construct reality. By paying attention to the great perceivers, the Louis Armstrongs, the Jorge Luis Borges, and the Jane Austen, we can more subtly understand what is happening around us and better express what we see and feel.

When you go to the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid you not only see Picasso's “Guernica”; You will eternally see war through the lens of that painting. You feel the mother's cry, the horse's roar, the chaotic jumble of death and agony, and it becomes less possible to romanticize war. We don't just see paintings; We see according to them.

Philosopher Roger Scruton argued that this type of education gives us the ability to experience emotions that may never happen to us directly. He wrote: “The viewer of Rembrandt's 'The Night Watch' learns about the pride of corporations and the benign sadness of civic life; Listening to Mozart's “Jupiter” symphony is presented with the open floodgates of human joy and creativity; Proust's reader is led through the enchanted world of childhood and made to understand the mysterious prophecy of our later sorrows that those days of joy contain.

Your way of perceiving the world becomes your way of being in the world. If your eyes have been trained to see as Leo Tolstoy saw, if your heart can feel as deeply as a KD Lang song, if you understand people with as much complexity as Shakespeare did, then you will have improved the way you live your life. .

Attention is a moral act. The key to becoming a better person, Iris Murdoch wrote, is being able to give “fair and loving attention” to others. It is abandoning the selfish way of seeing the world and seeing things as they really are.
We can, Murdoch argued, grow up watching. Culture gives us an education in how to pay attention.

The best of the arts are moral without moralizing. Dostoevsky's “Crime and Punishment” is an inquiry into the knowledge of good and evil, told through the eyes of the sufferer, with all the compassion and pain that involves.

One of my heroes is Samuel Johnson, the essayist, playwright, poet, dictionary compiler and one of the greatest critics of all time. As a young man he was kind of a mess—lazy, envious, and unreliable. As the decades passed, he read, wrote and felt his way to greatness.

He wrote about the great works of the Western tradition, and particularly about his own sins, as if he were trying to beat them out of them through the scourge of self-examination. His awareness of human depravity led him to humility, self-control, and redemption. At the end of his life he was generously generous, a man who had the ability to see the world with absolute honesty and sympathetic insight. Johnson socialized with artists and statesmen, but invited society's outcasts to live with him so he could feed and house them. One night he found a woman, probably a prostitute, sick on the street. He lifted her onto her back and carried her home to join the others.

When he died, his eulogist observed that he had left a chasm that nothing could fill. He embodied that old humanist ideal. He had become a cultured person, a wonderful man.

By: DAVID BROOKS