One of the most persistent (and personally unconvincing) remarks I have heard from many artists when asked about what they do or are trying to do is that “art mirrors life.” Whatever this might mean to artists, many of them expound that art is just an expression and a sentiment towards what is going on around us.

I asked a very well-known and awarded artist once what he felt about the problem of intellectual property rights especially as it touched upon the medium and process of his work (film), and again, he simply said that he only wishes to express his creativity.

A very similar explanation is given by quite a number of people, not necessarily artists, when they are confronted about what they are doing (or not doing). For example, recently, I have a friend who refused to translate a document because he knew it would be used to allow people in the rural areas to submit to tests of new drugs. For the solicitors of the translation, it is just a job and the task is simply to find another translator.

Another friend of mine is currently in correspondence with someone in America who seemed to routinely explain away each sign of cruelty in society as either unstoppable or inconsequential, thus this person explains: “the world is not perfect, it is important to understand it, and we cannot do anything about it.”

When a colleague asked a Dutch woman about how the Dutch, who have often refused to cooperate with each other, might be able to deal with the problem of water which needed cooperation, she explained it away: “Everybody should express themselves and have a right to an opinion. I think that we should listen to minorities such as women, but I don’t know anything about the problem of water, that is for the government to work on.”

Milton Mayer, in “They Thought They Were Free: the Germans 1933-45? eloquently described these mostly imperceptible compromises, and their consequences:

“What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believe that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. . . . (Mayer: 1955, 166) To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it–please try to believe me–unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted’ . . . .(168) Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. . . .” (169)

“Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.” (171) - From Milton Mayer, Quaker Hedgehog, A Review and Profile, by H. Larry Ingle, 2003.

The “gradual habitation of the people”, one time I likened to a frog in a pot of water with temperature rising little by little, until, unknown to the frog, it had already been cooked. ;)

In relevance to current times, Ingle explains:

“So Mayer’s answer to the age of Bush-Ashcroft amounts only to an reiteration of his central insight: principiis obsta, resist the beginnings, lest institutions like the state overwhelm you. George Fox, the founder of Quakers in the seventeenth century, did not use these exact terms, but he certainly knew how to denounce and disengage from the apostasy he saw all around him, the one he believed stretched back sixteen centuries.” - From Milton Mayer, Quaker Hedgehog, A Review and Profile, by H. Larry Ingle, 2003.

As we now admittedly live in very confusing and confused times, relevant also is Mayer’s note on this habituation of the people “to believe that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand.” Such complications, when taken into the private visions of the intellectual elite, and the elites, like those of the Bead Game “are engaged in exchanging their esoterica with one another in the game.” … “The world outside the community is convulsed by riots, wars and revolutions, but the players of the Bead Game have lost all contact.” (V. Papanek, 1970, on Hermann Hesse’s “Magister Ludi”)

But the world, as Papanek then saw, has now been reversed. The intellectual elites of the Bead Game have now evolved into a much much larger community of “doers”, no longer a small community of thinkers with their own esoteric private visions, but a global community of sheltered people:

“You have lived sheltered lives,” he (Milton Mayer) explained, “but you have had no one to shelter you from your parents or teachers. Your parents have done what they could to adjust you to the deplorable society to which they, as their advanced age testifies, have successfully adjusted themselves.”

In time, he warned, “You won’t even know that you are corrupt. You will be no worse than your neighbors, and you will be sure to have some that you won’t be as bad as.” He remembered that his own “education prepared me to say no to my enemies. It did not prepare me to say no to my friends, still less to myself, to my own limitless need for a little more status, a little more security, and a little more of the immediate pleasure that status and security provide.” - From Milton Mayer, Quaker Hedgehog, A Review and Profile, by H. Larry Ingle, 2003.

In our current society of adjusted citizens, there is little difference between the ‘artist-intellectual’ of the cultural cold war era who has the babbling eloquence to describe a flat surface as “disinterested painting … aware of nothing but art, absolutely no anti-art” and the ‘artist-doer’ of the current age who has the same babbling eloquence to say “art is simple, life is simple, art is just self-expression, a visual tool for communication, mirroring life.”

While the artist-intellectual was seen as a snob who assumes superiority for his own thoughts outside relevant human experience, the artist-doer is a noble slob who is just expressing himself through a purely visual statement without responsibility for ‘complicated things.’

In “What Shall the Responsible Intellectual Do?” (1963), Chomsky made clear that the intellectual is not to engage in esoteric games by himself, and “that I am by no means taking any sort of self-righteous attitude to all of this. I meant it quite sincerely in the article, when I referred to the page of history on which we find our proper place, those of us who stood by in silence and apathy as this catastrophe developed and who continue, today, to look away and to restrict our protest.”

The spirit of resistance, though marginalized, still lives in those who in their judgment and conscience take responsibility for what they do or refuse to do. For certain, I consider it important not to succumb to the overwhelming helplessness of a society of victims, of people who seem wholly convinced that matters have become too complicated for either informed action or responsibility.

While with a few friends we take heart in the thought that at best we could still plant our vegetable gardens, we take responsibility in that which we do or refuse to do, to take note and criticism of the apostasy around us, not simply to mirror it or echo the propaganda of media, the church and our useless politicians.

In all this, principiis obsta, our obligation to resist the beginnings.