Conduct your own research on one of the four protest movements that Zeynep Tufekci addresses in this selection. Give a brief description of the movement and explore the ways that it has relied on social media.
Construct an argument about the rhetorical potential of social media. Look at the ways different sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube shape our reactions to political events. Explore both the advantages and disadvantages to a public discourse conducted primarily online.
THE ARTS
Why Do Humans Create Art?
What distinguishes a work of art from all other mental activity is just the fact that its language is understood by all, and that it infects all without distinction.
—Leo Tolstoy
i he making of art is a human preoccupation. Paintings in caves and broken musical instruments left by the earliest civilizations in historical record are a testament to their attraction to art and music. Every culture ever studied has expressed itself artistically in music, poetry, painting, dance, and storytelling. Human beings have always spent a considerable share of their resources surrounding themselves with things they consider beautiful.
It is almost impossible to explain our love of art in evolutionary terms. Drawing pictures and telling fictional stories do not, seemingly, help us to survive or reproduce. As Oscar Wilde writes in his famous preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, "all art is quite useless." In fact, the time and attention that early humans spent making cave paintings and bone flutes could have been spent more productively in hunting animals and gathering resources necessary for survival. Though other animals engage in behaviors that resemble artistic expression—such as the elaborate songs of some bird species or the carefully synchronized movements of schools of fish—we can always demonstrate that these activities are biologically useful.
Just as humans in every culture have been drawn to create works of art, philosophers in every culture have been compelled to explain them. Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that deals with questions of art and beauty. Many of the greatest thinkers in world history have written about aesthetics. Plato's Symposium, for example, presents a series of monologues about beauty and the human mind. The Analects of Confucius considers the power of music to shape human behavior. And Aristotle's Poetics explores the psychology of dramatic literature.
The first two selections in this chapter deal with the aesthetics of music. In the first of these, "Against Music," the ancient Chinese philosopher Mo Tzu argues against the prevailing Confucian consensus of his day. Confucius held that music was a powerful moral force with its rhythms and tempos reinforcing the value of highly regulated personal behavior. Mo Tzu, on the other hand, sees music as a waste of resources that could be better used providing food and shelter to needy people. For Mo Tzu, the only aesthetic principle worth discussing is the principle of utility.
In the next selection, the philosopher Boethius, living during the final days of the Roman Empire, argues that music's powerful influence on the human mind gives it the potential for both good and bad. Following Plato (and echoing Confucius), he explains that some modes of music are "prudent and modest" and influence people to be prudent and modest as well. Other kinds of music are lascivious and disorderly and can lead to the moral decline of entire societies.
Another group of selections is concerned with visual art. Johannes Vermeer's Study of a Young Woman is a 350-year-old masterpiece from the Golden Age of Dutch painting. The second, Lisa Yuskavage's Babie I, is a modern painting from a contemporary feminist artist. The two works are in many ways strikingly similar in their conception of feminine beauty: both artists eschew traditional notions of beauty and focus instead on the facial features and characteristics that make their subjects interesting and unique. Complementing these images is Alice Walker's essay "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self," a deeply personal narrative of how a disfiguring childhood accident changed the author's self-image.
Two other selections in this chapter contemplate the craft of writing. In a reading from the medieval Japanese masterpiece The Tale of Genji, Lady Murasaki Shikibu explains the practical value of narrative fiction. In a much later essay, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, author of such masterpieces as War and Peace and Anna Karenina, argues that literature, and art in general, can be considered great only if it is understood by the majority of people in the world.
The final category of readings in the chapter speaks to aesthetic issues generally and can be applied to music, art, and literature. Edmund Burke's classic treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful maintains that "sublime" images—those that evoke feelings of terror and fear—are more aesthetically compelling to us than things that are merely beautiful; William Blake's illustrated poem "The Tyger" provides an example of this kind of sublimity. In the final selection, professor Elaine Scarry argues that the symmetry we find in beautiful images helps us to understand the principles upon which just social systems can be based.
The selections in this chapter represent only a small sample of the ways we can find and create meaning through artistic expression. Each reading, along with the images that accompany it, tries to understand humanity itself through the universal drive to create and appreciate works of art.
mo tzu
Against Music
[CIRCA 425 BCE]
MO TZU (CIRCA 470-CIRCA 391 BCE) holds a unique position in the canon of classical Chinese philosophers known as the hundred schools, which flourished from the sixth to the third century bce. He opposed and ridiculed both the Confucians, who he believed were overly concerned with ritual, and the Legalists, whom he saw as totalitarian and immoral. Though he had many followers during his lifetime and in the three centuries after his death, his influence steadily declined as Confucianism, rather than Moism, became the principal ethical philosophy of the Chinese state.
Mo Tzu is best known for his philosophy of "universal love," which advocated a general, impartial concern for all of humanity, with no person held in higher regard than any other. This idea rankled the Confucians of his day because it implied that the most honored relationships in Chinese culture—those between sons and their fathers and between younger and older brothers—were no more important than relationships between strangers. Mo Tzu taught that the chief value of love lay in its universality and that family ties, which he saw as mere accidents of birth, did not make people more worthy of this love.
Only slightly less disconcerting to Confucians were Mo Tzu's writings against music. Confucian orthodoxy saw ritual music as a force for good; they believed it helped to organize thoughts and regulate behavior. Mo Tzu, however, disapproved of the fact that, in ancient China, music and its benefits were limited to an extremely small number of people, namely the very wealthy. Musical instruments were expensive to manufacture, trained musicians were rare, and musical celebrations were usually accompanied by elaborate dancing and expensive feasts, all of which made "music" virtually synonymous with "luxury."
At the center of "Against Music," part 1 of which follows, are two assertions: that artistic pursuits such as music are not useful to society, and that people should not be forced to pay—with their tax dollars—for artistic programs that do not benefit them directly. Today, the first assertion often comes up in discussions about core curricula (for example, should art and music classes be required for elementary school students?). The second surfaces just as frequently in discussions about government funding for the arts through programs such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.