The Decline of Art in Western Culture Parallels the Decline of Everything Else

For most of western history art was used as a way for patrons to showcase achievements or propagandize citizens or lionize individuals.  Maybe the single greatest artist in human history, Michelangelo, created his greatest works for patrons of various sorts.  David he created for the Florentine Guild of Wool, the Pieta for the French ambassador to the Holy See and the Sistine Chapel and St Peter's Basilica for popes. Art was, in one way or another an homage to something greater than its creator. 

Fast-forward about three centuries and the art world begun to change.  Art as an indulgence of artists, where they would paint whatever they wanted, with or without a desire that someone would pay for it is largely a child of the late 19^th century.  That’s when Impressionism, that distinctly unconventional, non traditional form or painting emerged.  In a very short period of time the world of art went from uber traditional world of Bouguereau to the anything but world of Monet, Renoir and Van Gogh.  Suddenly art was no longer a vehicle for vanity or the celebration of greatness or storytelling.  It was something else. 

In 1917 Marcel Duchamp, a French artist unveiled a urinal on a wooden box and called it “Fountain”.  A hundred years later art had “evolved” so much that a banana taped to a wall with duct tape (an actual banana… not plastic or paper mâché) would sell for $120,000 in 2019…

It is into this universe of art that we find what is supposed to be cutting edge and courageous, in the form of the Pietà by German designer Harald Glööckler.  The revisualization of the classic piece features a tattooed Christ and a trans Mary.  And what’s courageous about this piece?  It stands up to those vicious, hateful… Christians. 

In the cacophony of 2023, while there are other issues that are of far more import than this, this one might be a bit illustrative. 

Having the “courage” to stand up to Christians and defile Christian traditions and symbols doesn’t actually require any courage… because there’s no danger of anything bad actually happening besides some chastising words from a few of the offended.  No one is going to issue death threats against you, no one is going to put a bounty on your head, mobs of people aren’t going to start riots and kill others because of you, as was shown in 1986 with The Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili and 1987 with Piss Christ, by Andres Serrano. Of course there is another religion where that’s exactly what happens if one were to criticize it or its symbols… but of course those “courageous” artists aren’t assailing that religion.

This is a symbol of the bizarro world we find ourselves living in.  Other things that are counted as courageous today include a man announcing that he’s a woman, flaunting one’s morbid obesity in public or wrapping oneself in the flag of victimization for being black or gay or some other category. 

None of those things takes courage in 2023 America where being anything but a patriotic heterosexual Christian white male accords hero worship. It doesn’t take courage to assail someone or something where there is no threat of consequences. 

Heterosexual Christian white males built most (but not all) of the world we live in today.  It’s far from perfect, but no time or place in history has been perfect.  But it’s not their DNA that somehow makes them better citizens or better people. No, it’s the culture they built.

We’re told that somehow western culture is bad because it was not crafted by a multicultural collective.  That makes no sense.  Virtually every culture in human history has been built by members of a single race.  There were not a lot of whites helping to craft the Mali Empire in Africa, there were not a lot of blacks at the center of the Chinese Middle Kingdom, not a lot of yellow people helping to build the Inca Empire and there weren’t a lot of brown people helping to build Russia or the Russian Empire. No, most of human history has been dominated by monochromatic empires, nations and cultures.

It just happens to be the case that on Earth’s competitive landscape the culture built and developed by straight, Christian white males is the one that has generated the greatest increases in freedom, technology and prosperity in human history.  And it’s not even close.  But because not everyone has shared equally in the material gains from that culture, it must be destroyed…

Because that culture largely focuses on meritocracy, accountability, individual liberty and limited government rather than coercion from above, people who have yet to achieve their desired goals have the opportunity to criticize it with impunity, something they cannot do in most other parts of the world and couldn’t have done throughout most of human history virtually everywhere. Yet without the threat of consequence they often call themselves courageous. 

Western civilization, the driver of said unprecedented levels of freedom and prosperity and opportunity in all of human history, today finds itself under attack by those who have migrated to it, have invaded it or whose ancestors were brought to it, because they’ve not achieved their desired goals. This, despite the fact that conditions back wherever they or their ancestors left from are likely far worse than they are anywhere in the west.  But no matter.  These “protesters” use the freedoms accorded by western culture to attack it.  That’s a problem. No culture can survive if there are no shared values.  No culture can survive if citizens don’t have at least a common appreciation for the nations’ fundamental culture and assume it to be a good thing.   

Here at home, if those criticizing America were just a few outliers there would be no problem.  A strong nation can withstand critique, even from within, and that’s why we have a 1^st Amendment.  The problem in 2023 however is that fully half of the country has been brainwashed into believing that the bedrock principles upon which America is based are somehow evil, corrupt or illegitimate.  They got that way because one of the two main political parties has proffered that lie for decades and enlisted its fellow fabulists in the media, academia and the government to reinforce it.

That is simply not sustainable. Like the movement of art from the classical style of Botticelli, Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Rubins to the self important renderings of Basquiat, Mark Rothco, Robert Mapplethorpe and Glööckler, the transition from the a nation built on universal God given fundamental rights to one based on balkanization and subjective grievances based on “equity” and victimization promises to replace something great with something absurd.  What’s more, that absurd subjective culture cannot long stand.  Just as we’ve seen with the Democrat party since the beginning of the war in Gaza, at some point groups joined by victim status can and will splinter as their various victim classes turn against one another based on the current hierarchy of victim status. 

As we march towards what will be the most consequential presidential election in American history, we might want to start suggesting to those who seek to destroy what “white heterosexual Christian males” have built that they take a look around. They’ll not find a better combination of opportunity, freedom and real equality anywhere on earth or in history, particularly as it relates to protecting minorities.  They should, unlike the Gays for Gaza buffoons we see in the streets, consider what happens to them if they actually get what they wish for. 

Do we really want to redefine marriage?

States across the country are in the midst of debating the idea of changing the definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Five states have legalized the practice through legislative or judicial action, but despite thirty-one attempts, not a single time has a majority of citizens of a state approved such a change. Not that this is an argument for majority rule. It’s not. Every state has a republican form of government and should be governed by the rule of law rather than man. Nonetheless, at some point government is accountable to the people and constitutional change is often how citizens make their feelings felt. Thirty states, including California, have amended their constitutions to explicitly state that marriage is to be considered between one man and one woman. This week a federal judge in San Francisco threw much of that into the air. Ted Olson argued that the court is merely protecting the right to marriage, a right the court has addressed 14 times since 1888. I have to disagree with Mr. Olson and Judge Walker. This is not just like Loving v. Virginia, which did away with barriers to interracial marriage. Race is not sex. This is not opening up marriage to just another group who had been arbitrarily excluded. Men and woman are fundamentally different and marriage has always been understood to be a union between a man and a woman, not just two people.

If we step away from thousands of years of western tradition, if we take that first step in changing the definition from one man and one woman, where does that road lead? Where do we stop? It’s the slippery slope problem. Sure, today we are arguing about two people of the same sex, but why could we not just as easily argue for one man and two women or three men or three women? Could we not use the same rationale to allow a salesman who lives in Miami but works in Charlotte to have a wife and children in Florida and another family in North Carolina? And what if his Charlotte wife wanted to have a second husband from across town for the weekends when her salesman husband is down in Florida? Who says a person can’t be committed to two different people simultaneously? In 1887 Utah was forced to outlaw polygamy as the price of admission into the United States because it was understood that marriage was between one man and one woman. Will the state now have the opportunity to amend its constitution to bring back the practice? Once we change the definition the permutations could be endless. What about children? It was not so long ago that the marriage of children for political or dowry reasons was not uncommon. Do we want to go back there and allow 12 & 13 year old children to be married and traded for family favors or for “love”? Is not the age of consent arbitrary?

One might argue that much of the history of marriage had to do with the biological necessity of a heterosexual union for procreation purposes. Because science has now made an actual heterosexual union unnecessary for procreation is that sufficient grounds to abandon the principal in the first place? Scientists have been telling us for years that at some point computers will be smarter than humans. Today there is even a report about a robot that expresses and detects emotions. Make that into an anatomically correct robot and we could have relationships without human partners, male or female. Should those unions then be granted marriage status as well?

For 2,500 years western civilization has been anchored around the notion that marriage was understood to be between one man and one woman. While the form of government may have varied from democracy to republic to empire to monarchy to constitutional democracy to our own constitutional republic, marriage between one man and one woman has always been understood to be at the core of that society. The legitimacy of the government itself was sometimes explicitly based upon blood and marriage, and in all cases the institution of marriage and family was understood to be at the foundation of the society. The Catholic church lost England over marriage it was so important. Although mistresses, prostitutes and divorces have often betrayed the failure of the institution on an individual level, marriage nonetheless always remained the cultural norm and ideal.

We’re often told that there was a great homosexual tradition in ancient Rome and Greece. Pederasty may have been common in Greece and homosexuality an open secret in Rome, but in both the traditional understanding of a one man one woman marriage held sway. When Christianity induced Roman Emperors Constantius II and Constans to ban homosexual marriage, they were simply codifying what had largely existed in practice since the beginning of Rome. (Although Nero is said to have married both men and women, for the marriages where Nero played the woman, he was mocked… to the extent one could mock the Emperor in Rome. On the occasion that Nero was the bridegroom he had his slave Sporos castrated so that he could play the role of bride.) In no western country had homosexual marriage ever enjoyed countenance on equal footing with heterosexual marriage until the Netherlands legalized gay marriage in 2000.

Opposition to gay marriage should not be construed to suggest that homosexual couples should be second class citizens. On the contrary. They should have the same freedom to share in the blessings of liberty as any other citizens. Many states have approved civil unions that provide same sex couples with the same benefits and opportunities that married couples enjoy. As for the federal government and the marriage penalty, they should get out of the income tax business and implement the FairTax. For years the notion of same sex partners not being allowed into hospital rooms or not being allowed to be on one another’s insurance policy were the issues at the vanguard of the gay rights movement. Typically civil union legislation has wiped away such concerns and in many cases legislation has turned civil unions into marriage in everything but name only.

Fundamentally once you get past the issue of financial benefits and contracts, you’re left with the sheen of language. The simple question is, does the idea of, the ideal of marriage have any value to the culture as a whole? Does our government have a vested interest in promoting the ideal of the traditional nuclear family? Europe provides a stunning example of what happens when marriage ceases to be a central focus of the society. For forty years, from Italy to the UK to Portugal to Germany the experience has been very much the same. As marriage and family became less important, less of a priority, one by one the countries have become basket cases. Marriage rates are down by half across the continent. (Even amongst that greatly reduced number, a UK study recently found that in places 3 out of 4 marriages were shams for the specific purpose of staying in the country.) Divorce rates are up. Birth rates amongst native Europeans has fallen far below the replacement rate. What births they are experiencing are increasingly being had out of wedlock and more and more frequently the state is responsible for providing the basic support for those children. More and more the family is becoming irrelevant as everybody becomes a ward of the state.

Across the continent countries are losing their identities as the only growth they are experiencing comes from immigrants largely from countries that do not share the same core, fundamental, traditional western values. As a result Europe is facing tremendous challenges. Greece is burning as the socialist state can not support itself. France faces constant uprisings from youths who have spent their lives in France but feel no loyalty to the country or its culture. England is seeing growing pockets of immigrants demanding that they no longer be subject to British law but instead to Sharia. These problems start with the divorce of the state from its culture, and marriage between a man and a woman has been one of the core elements of western culture for more than two millennia.

As has so often happened over the last 200 years, the United States is where the west’s future is written... twice America was the last man standing who helped pull it back from the brink of hell. The question is, are we going to be pulled further into the European morass of cultural ambiguity where all ideals are equal, where no institutions survive an aggrieved minority and the state has no role in maintaining the nation? Or are we going to recognize that the ideal of marriage between a man and a woman, while imperfect in execution, is one of those fundamental ideas that ties us to our history, our culture and has helped shape the world we live in? If the answer is the latter, is it not worth preserving?