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Art in a Pill?

The Arts and Their Interpretation

Wilson did not thank God for his own life but he did love to analyze nature. He expressed inspiration through his work but he fled from the higher forms of understanding as a blinded orthodox flees from a forbidden temptation.
Artistic experience is mainly an expression of inspiration, the third state of understanding. Wilson denied the existence of any mental life above the intellect and tried to reduce the higher states of understanding to that level. In his formulation, the mind is a product of gene-culture co-evolution, and mental operation is bimodal with instinct the lower mode and intellect the higher. Wilson demoted inspiration to a highly developed form of intellect.
Wilson wanted to promote consilience between the forms of knowledge called science and art, with science the husband and giver of the name. This lopsided union existed solely in Wilson's religious imagination. He believed that every form of creativity would benefit by being reduced to the level of brain-based intellect. To begin this wacky enterprise he lumped an unwieldy mélange of pursuits—composing and performing music, visual art, all literature, and art criticism and history—into a restricted category of creative art, excluding subjects like history, philosophy and comparative religion. One cannot help but think that for Wilson, art is something learned in school. Wilson denied that the marriage between art and science would diminish art. It never occurred to him that such a marriage could diminish science because in his view science was foundational truth. "Nor is there any reason to believe that the arts will decline as science flourishes." True, but the arts did decline as materialism obscured God's presence.
How can anyone hope to express Creation's heart at the dawn of time? . . . From where then does the ability to create art arise. Not cold logic based on fact. Not God's guidance of Milton's thoughts, as the poet himself believed.
Wilson attended Harvard, the university where he later taught. Harvard was a last bastion in Old America of what was called a classical education As the Romans liked to use Greeks slaves as teachers for their young men, a classical American education stretched back to ancient Greece, but focused on Europeans. Wilson chose Milton's Paradise Lost-Book IV to begin his interpretation of art. But as a materialist he can only approach the superficial beauty and not the heart of the work. Every human heart expresses Creation's heart at all times. An essence of the artistic process is to step out of time. Time does not disconnect hearts. The fascinating question is how could Professor Wilson forget Creation's heart in his own life? In reference to Milton, Wilson made possibly the most bigoted statement in Consilience by categorically denying Milton's experience of God's inspiration of his work.
[Artistic geniuses] were obsessed, they burned from within . . . they also had an intuitive grasp of inborn human nature accurate enough to select commanding images from the mostly inferior thought that streams through the minds of us all . . . . The talent they wielded may have only been incrementally greater, but their creations appeared to others to be qualitatively new. They acquired enough influence and longevity to translate into lasting fame, not by magic, not by divine benefaction, but by a quantitative edge in powers shared in smaller degree with those less gifted.
Wilson mentioned several other European geniuses of the Old Humanity: Shakespeare, Leonardo, Mozart. Prior to the Great Purification, genius was synonymous with divine inspiration. Mozart left a description of divine inspiration in his journal when he wrote that God's grace gave him pieces of music in so finished a form he had only to write them down in the morning. And he thanked his beloved God for this gift. Beethoven wrote, " . . . if order and beauty are reflected in the world, then there is God . . . He who is above,—O, He is, and without Him there is nothing." Fanaticism drove Wilson to deny the experience of so many gifted people. Wilson could not prove the lack of divine benefaction so often described by geniuses, he could only say they were all wrong.
During the Great Purification art became a focus of humanism. Art museums and concert halls served as temples. It is ironic, because much of the art those people worshippid, especially the pre-Silence, European art and music, was explicitly God based. It was as if they could not worship God themselves, but they worshiped other people's worship
.
Wilson did not understand why artists and their interpreters have not made use of a scientific understanding of the brain as the seat of talent. He notes the postmodernist hypothesis, that there is no such thing as human nature, and that
 . . . each person creates his own inner world by acceptance or rejection of endlessly shifting linguistic signs.
Wilson's references to postmodernism remind me of the Tylers' great book of 2008 Who Would Have Thunk?. This hilarious romp explored the vast joke played by the The Awakener: when God became silent humanity became obsessed with words.
It is blissfully free of information on how the mind works. Yet surely there is some reason for the popularity of post-modernism other than a love of chaos.
Let's remind ourselves about postmodernism. It was another school of materialism that denied or ignored God. Wilson was puzzled about the influence of postmodernism. Those happy morons! Appreciating art without neuroscience!
We recall that The Awakener profoundly readjusted relationships between the sexes in wealthier societies at the end of the Old Humanity. Throughout the entire history of the Old Humanity until the very end of the cycle, girls and women had less access to education and occupational choices. Suddenly and dramatically this was reoriented in preparation for the New Humanity. For reasons too subtle for us to understand, Wilson seemed to associate the opening of educational and occupational opportunities for women with the person-based atheism of postmodernism. I do not understand this. Obviously the scientific and technological changes of the Silence and the Great Purification removed the value of brute strength in economic enterprise and reduced the prevalence of hand-to-hand combat in war. These changes enabled women to be more useful to the dominant economies. Their corporate capitalist economic systems needed female wage workers so they developed spiritual fallacies to indoctrinate girls and women to money-mindedness. These changes resulted in chaos, which postmodernists welcomed. Something to think about.
Page 234 Wilson gave us an interesting glimpse into art criticism during the Silence (circa 1926). He wrote of a noted Old American critic named Edmund Wilson (I don't think they were related), who noted that Western literature seems "obliged to vacillate" between the two poles of neoclassicism and romanticism. Neither Edmund nor Edward understood the eternal dynamic of God's Will and God's Wish, law and love. Neoclassicism, orderliness, simplicity, and self-control can be said to represent God's Will. Romanticism, with it's passion, warmth and spirit is the "creative restlessness" which is God's Wish. When Consilience, was published that pendulum had stopped swinging. Reactionary conservatism and spiritual chaos were cheek and jowl all over the world. We still experience these cycles which tend to emphasize God's guidance and then His playfulness. However for us, the New Humanity, the pendulum traverses a much shorter distance during lives and between lives. We do not accept harsh, external authority and have no need of childish, overblown romanticism.
Can the opposed Apollonian and Dionysian impulses, cool reason against passionate abandonment, which drive the mood swings of the arts and criticism, be reconciled?.
He did not know the momentum which kept this pendulum swinging, therefore he identified this oscillation as a problem to be solved, and perhaps even stilled. Artistic creation is an expression of creative restlessness, which The Awakener described as "the main driving power of that spiritual dynamic which ultimately succeeds in restoring to consciousness the original unity of Being."
Page 236 The pendulum between reason and passion, order and chaos is kept in motion by the restless search for unity. It was not a scientific problem to be solved, and especially not for artists and art lovers. But still Wilson seemed to think a brain-based theory of art would offer control over that lack of reconciliation. "If the brain is ever to be charted and an enduring theory of the arts created as a part of that enterprise, it will be by stepwise and consilient contributions from the brain sciences, psychology and evolutionary biology." Reducing art to a brain effect and then solving the "problem" of art was an empty promise of scientolatry.
Wilson then went on to apply his meager theory of gene-culture co-evolution to explain art. Again the core knowledge of this long ago abandoned theory is very skeletal and can be summarized as a short list of obvious conclusions: human nature became variegated through evolution (true), this variegation is inherited (undoubted), culture expresses universals or near-universals (so?), the arts are focused toward themes but otherwise free (obviously). Only a religionist would be driven to submit the magic of art to such commonplace and trust that art had something to gain.
Page 238 "Gene-culture evolution is, I believe, the underlying process by which the brain evolved and the arts originated." Wilson was mistaken on both the material and spiritual levels. He did not know the process and he did not know the source, or rather he denied the existence of the source. The underlying process of the development of all effects of human consciousness including art is the evolution of forms followed by the process of reincarnation. The far greater capacity of the human brain to create art compared to the animal forms resulted from evolution. Cultural universals and the transformation of artistic metaphor over time are sanskaric effects.
More importantly, scientific materialism rigidly turned its gaze away from the problem of why all this art, this restlessness, why all this intense creativity? Why are people so driven to create visual depictions of their world even though they serve no direct biological purpose? Why do people contort and exhaust their bodies into dance which wastes energy? Why do so many people find music as necessary as food? Because love, independent of the brain, impels creative restlessness and constitutes the sole significance of creation.

Art in a Pill?

Page 238 While biology has an important role to play in scholarly interpretation, the creative arts themselves can never be locked in by this or any other discipline of science. The reason is that the exclusive role of the arts is the transmission of details of human experience by artifice to intensify aesthetic and emotional response.
Art transmits details to intensify brain states? Drugs do that better than art. If Wilson's desecrative summation of art as evoking brain states were true, then it is theoretically possible that such responses could be reduced to their biochemical substrate and put in a pill.
Art in a pill? Wilson's charactization of art as a biological phenomenon is similar to The Awakener's challenge to the youth of Old America during the 1960s. "God in a Pill?" A delusion of those times was the notion that drugs provided access to God consciousness. The purpose of art is principally spiritual, not emotional. Emotion as an end in itself tends to isolate. Art as an end in itself is meditation that tends to move consciousness outside of itself.
Wilson believed the primary purpose of art was to evoke emotional responses. True art never has been primarily an epigenetic social control mechanism. Art arises when consciousness turns inward, when the creative soul loses interest in gratifying itself through the reactions of others. This is why artists work in solitude. Art is the process of finding truth, beauty, and knowledge within and fashioning those revelations into externally perceptible form.
By intuition alone, and a sensibility that does not submit easily to formulas, artists and writers know how to evoke emotional and aesthetic response.
Page 142 This is a very limited understanding of the power of art, a process of manipulation and control rather than truth seeking. This error comes from sociobiology. Ants have a very dim perception of divine inspiration and therefore they don't make much art. But they are intensely social. Human beings have creation's most fulfilled experience of divine inspiration, therefore we make art all over the place and all the time. But Wilson saw human beings as being ant-like. He saw art as it would be if ants had enormous brains. In a sense, art is the least social and most individualistic human process. Every path to God is completely unique but not completely social. God realization is the sole province of the individual. The inspiration of art is the intimation of that Goal in individual consciousness.
Some artistic expression is oriented to some degree around the response of the audience, but much artistic expression occurs in the absence of any audience. There are countless examples of artists, perhaps especially poets, leaving human society altogether in order to create their art. Solitude is the helpmate of art. And that is true solitude, spiritual solitude, which can be found even among others. Countless examples of decorative and literary masterpieces have been discovered among the private possessions, especially of women, of the Old Humanity. This art was created with little or no hope of impacting the brain states of others. You recall that in many societies of the Old Humanity women were discouraged from publically displaying their creativity. These creations were not made primarily in order to evoke responses in others, but to express the artist's intuition of beauty and truth.
The most significant artistic literature of the Old Humanity was provided by the Avatars, Perfect Masters, and great saints such as Hafiz, Rumi, Mira, Francis, Catherine, and Theresa. To suggest that these people were driven by the motivation to evoke an aesthetic response is ridiculous. But Wilson denied any special status to those who are Truth personified. Just below the level of illuminated consciousness, we find the inspired works of the poets and writers of the Old Humanity. These works were more often composed in prison cells and dusty garrets than for the sake of readers emotions. The great sagas of the brokenhearted, of Don Quixote, of The Pilgrims' Progress and countless others, were born when the persecuted heart gave up all hope of social power and had nothing left but Truth.
Also, in his goofy dogma that art is wielding power to evoke an intended emotional response in the observer, Wilson completely ignored the Old Humanity delusion of money and its impact on the artistic process. I have described this factor of money at length elsewhere. Among the Old Humanity, some art was made for expectation of payment of money, and some was made without that expectation. It is historically factual, though hard for us to grasp, that some of the greatest art of the Old Humanity was made to provide money for the artist and was immediately sold for money. But it also happened that many artists spontaneously created art without thinking of money, and only afterwards discovered (and usually with great pleasure) that they could receive money for it. I strongly suspect that the social power aspect, the power to evoke a positive response in the purchaser, was influenced by whether the artist was hoping to receive money. I suspect that art created with no consideration of money had less to do with creating specific emotional responses.

The Archetypal Myths of Scientolatry

Wilson asserted that art and religion arise from epigenetics, which accounts for the recurrent myths and archetypes we find in both activities. He briefly cataloged these universal archetypal myths: the beginning and end of creation, good and evil, hero and heroines. If scientolatry was the canon of scientific materialism, we should be able to discover these archetypes in Wilson's own presentation of scientolatry. I believe we can.
Presumably, since all experience occurs in the brain, when the body dies experience stops. Belief in experience independent of the body is blasphemy. Respecting the global end of days, scientolatry frets that time is running out.
Page 245 For Wilson the arts and religion were closely related. He ascribed both to "inborn rules of mental development" and saw art and religion as agents of social stability. He wondered if epigenetics and the art they produce were mere byproducts of evolution or did they arise because they improved survival and reproduction? He concludes the latter.
The dominating influence that spawned the arts was the need to impose order on the confusion caused by intelligence . . . The arts filled the gap. Early humans invented them in an attempt to express and control through magic the abundance of the environment, the power of solidarity, and other forces in their lives that mattered most.
Artistic people are like the organizer ants who help the other ants keep everything running smoothly. That is the opposite of the truth about art. If art served as an organizer of the environment and of social power than the most well organized and socially hierarchical societies would also be the most artistic. For example, the Romans would have been more artistic than the Greeks, the Americans more than the Europeans, and the Nazis would have been most artistic of all. Art is a standing challenge to material satisfaction and social power. On an individual level, artistic inspiration was more likely to express seeking, longing, and alienation. If anything, politically powerful and rich individuals were less likely to produce great art. Furthermore, highly original art was usually ignored, if not rejected.
Page 246 Art is the only human activity that often increases in worth and value long after the artist is dead. If art served a temporal, organizational purpose it would be strongly bound to its setting. The opposite is true. The truer the artistic vision, the more independent it is from the environment. But Wilson insisted on his functional materialism, his ant-art.
The arts still perform this function, and in much the same ancient way. Their quality is measured by their humanness, by the precision of their adherence to human nature. To an overwhelming degree that is what we mean when we speak of the true and beautiful in the arts.
No, it is not. The need to deprive art of its specialness was a crotchet of anti-God consciousness. The arts arose as a need to express uncganging Truth through changing forms as symbolic realization. This is what makes art beautiful and timeless. Divine consciousness is inseparable from human consciousness and therefore art is inseparable from life.
The rest of this chapter recited cases for art as magic pursued to gain power over the environment, and thereby some mythical reproductive or biological advantage. As with his points about mind, he resorted to primitive, preliterate art to make this nonsensical case. I would repeat the point that primitive art, like other aspects of ancient preliterate societies, reflects the greater instinctuality in human consciousness during earlier incarnations and therefore lends support to Wilson's need to reduce art to a biologically adaptive function.
No barrier stands between the material world of science and the sensibilities of the hunter and the poet.


Wilson ended this chapter by stating the obvious. True enough, but such an unnecessary statement would only be made by someone who was neither a hunter nor a poet.
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