I’m listening to an excellent series from the Teaching Company (btw, if I have not recommended their products on here before, and I can’t recall having done so, then please start spending “thirty minutes a day in the best classrooms in the world”, as their marketing pieces has it; they are free in most libraries, and most well worth the money if your library doesn’t carry them) by Robert Greenburg, on “How to listen to and Understand Great Music”. He does a good job of not just explaining but dramatizing things.
To the point here, we are now up to the Baroque Age. Baroque is a Portuguese word for an irregular pearl, one with various bumps and what would normally be called imperfections. It was intended at the time as a pejorative, and only recovered, presumably, as an acceptable description after everyone had forgotten what it meant.
The characteristics of this style were ornamentation–busyness–and order. On Baroque buildings, you have huge amounts of filigree, lots of little pieces doing curly-cues, and spirals, going here and there. Yet, looked at as a whole–Versailles is a good example–everything was balanced and ordered. What is on the bottom is on the top, and what is on one side is on the other.
Nature, in this understanding, obeyed rational, knowable laws, and thus the manifold complexity of nature answered, ultimately, to squares and triangles (I will note that the Writer in Tarkovsky’s Stalker early on expressed his terror that this might be the case).
Within this line of thought, parts of Nature could be sees as flawed. As Greenburg puts it “there is a general belief that through thought humankind could order and dominate their world”. As he puts it, this passion for order extended to a “negative view of God’s own Nature.”
Here are some very illuminating quotes he offers in support of this thesis:
Malebranche: “The visible world would be more perfect if the seas and lands made more regular features, if the rains were more regular; if, in a word, if we had fewer monstrosities and less disorder.”
French Catholic Missionary, describing Niagara Falls: “Falling from a horrible precipice, foaming and boiling, after the most hideous manner imaginable, and making an outrageous noise, a dismal roaring, really more terrible than thunder.”
English traveller of the 17th Century, describing the Alps: “Hideous, uncouth, monstrous excrescences of Nature.”
This is all very interesting. Here is what I will submit: to the “Baroque”–the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment–is opposed not Romanticism, but the “uncarved block” of Lao Tzu. I have discussed this in a number of places, but this is a critical point.
The Chinese word/phrase normally translated as “Uncarved Block”–“P’u”– is composed of two characters, in my understanding. The first–and I quote here from “The Tao of Pooh”, which I am assuming got this right–“the ‘radical’ oor root-meaning one is that for tree or wood; the second, the ‘phonetic’ or sound-giving one, is the character for dense growth or thicket. So from ‘tree in a thicket’ or ‘wood not cut’ comes the meaning of ‘things in their natural state'”.
In Baroque ornamentation, what we have represented is the complexity of nature. A lawn of grass is endlessly complex, looked at under a fine degree of detail, but encased within carefully maintained borders, and planted in patterns of varying complexity, as in Baroque gardens, it can be made orderly on a perceptible scale.
Yet this “order” requires constant maintenance. The King must pay people to keep the weeds from the walkways, and artisans to repair architectural dtails damaged in storms. Forests require no maintenance. They endure.
In our own nation, attempting to tame wildfires actually made things worse, by tampering with the natural process of periodically clearing the floors for new growth.
As we have learned with Chaos Theory, simply because systems–such as uncut forests–appear disorderly, does not mean they are. All sorts of algorithyms can be applied to water flow, rainfall, tectonic action, resulting in clear statistical patterns.
Herein lies the foundational difference between Socialism and Liberalism: our foundational myths. One can, I think, usefully contrast the classical French Garden with the English Garden, which was consciously intended to appear completely spontaneous and natural. One can contrast French autocratic tendencies, with British Liberalism that survived in vestiges until after the Second World War.
One can contrast the “fatal conceit” that human society can be construed as an Alp or Niagara Falls, or rainfall, and tamed; with the vision (does that semi-colon improperly tame the English language? I honestly don’t know) that spontaneous order is natural, and enforced order unnatural, using excessive energy to achieve nonsensical goals.
Do you flow downhill, or pump water uphill, and call that order?
At its root, it has long seemed to me that the doctrine of egalitarianism is an aesthetic doctrine. It is morality as art; virtue as performance. As such, it answers to a process, but not an outcome.
If Versailles becomes overgrown with weeds, we are told–as it must millenia from now, if not sooner–then at least it existed once. Nature was conquered.
But was it? And what is the cost of building a Versailles? What was the cost, then, to the French people? Wars and taxes, was it not? That is my understanding of the history. And in the end, was it not the mass murder and tumult of the French Revolution, followed at length by the mass murder and tumult and naked conformity and dullness of Communism? Do we not still face would-be Versailles builders, who aim to sculpt human societies according to their aesthetics, which find in greatness and grandeur excess? Which would rather contain human life within very, very tight boundaries, then ornament what is left with artificial filigree?
This metaphor is very interesting. If we consider World War 1 as a figurative Niagara Falls, then symbolically it is fitting that from that disorder returned order. Yet Hitler concluded his own peace treaty after conquering France at Versailles as well. Hitler answered to the Niagara Falls vision of reality, an eminently Romantic one.
The Alps are neither great nor hideous: they are what they are. We are what we are. If we are to change, our first task is to determine our starting point, and that is much harder than might seem obvious. To “do nothing”, the Taoist sense, is not to do nothing, but to understand this foundational reality, and take it seriously.