Art reminds us endlessly that human life is essentially unchanging, that we are not different from our forebears, whose concerns and fears and dreams we share, that history is more cyclical than linear. Science tells us the opposite: that history is linear and progressive, that the world and human society are perfectible, and that we are ever-advancing: it is a kind of post-religious eschatology.
Some time ago, writing about Chaplin and Einstein, I wasn’t precisely sure why we now so strongly prefer science to art, but I partially suspect it is because science offers a much more alluring myth than art does, and consoles us in our mortality by telling us that with every decade our species advances towards an unspecified state of angelic or utopian transcendence.
(Read Mills’ entire post here)
Perhaps a slight shift in terminology would help matters. Instead of thinking of science and the arts as linear and cyclical, I offer cumulative and non-cumulative. Science is procedural and progressive, in that any research or discovery necessarily builds upon the work of preceeding generations that the arts (and history) simply cannot. Certainly in these fields (the humanities) one is indebted to one’s intellectual/stylistic predecessors, but only to a point. The final product is ultimately the artist’s alone.
The allure of science lies, I think, in its participatory power. Not, however, in the sense that it leads to a utopian telos. Rather science provides a comfortable anonymity within which to leave a minute, if meaningful (but not necessairly progressive), legacy. Most often this takes the form of children. But science, like reproduction, is imperative (and operative) only of humanity in total, not the individual. Art’s creation and its experience, on the other hand, is almost wholly confined to the individual.
Art is a lonely endeavor of Romantic futility. Its legacy will remain unknown to all but the most famous of artists during their lifetimes. It requires a character of sisyphean constitution. Creation requires continual labor and struggle, only to begin anew. Once the artist is gone, so too ends the art.
But while art is rock (more specifically, pushing a rock), science is snow. Only through accumulation does it acquire force. Most importantly, it only takes the smallest bit to cause a progressively increasing mass to emerge. Snow rolling down a hill continues long after the initial push.
Life as a hill; a rather prosaic metaphor, I agree. But I think it encapsulates the competing visions that science and art offer about society and the individual. I leave it to Mills’ to conclude my own thoughts:
I mean to take nothing from science in noting that although it is among the finest achievements of humanity, certain facts remain which art is better-suited to convey: that despite the Large Hadron Collider and jet airplanes and vaccines and psychotherapy, we remain deeply strange, hopeful, fearful, loving, jealous, giving, deranged, ingenious creatures as mortal as we’ve ever been, and that whatever humanity’s future evolution every one of us lives and dies alone.
