[lbo-talk] Harry Potter, Metritocracy, and Reward

[John Thornton]

Robert Wrubel wrote:
> joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>   >
> "I've heard this argument lots: that in a classless society there would 
> be no motive for art. But I don't buy it. Classless society is not a 
> frictionless society -- the frictions would just be more interesting: 
> life and death; order and chaos; male and female; the cyclical and the 
> linear, the natural and the artificial......all the stuff that art loves 
> to deal with.
>
> I mean, do people only sing because they're oppressed? Have you ever 
> walked through a grove at dusk and heard the avian symphonies? Have you 
> ever experienced enough darkness to really see the stars at night? Have 
> you ever been in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight? Have you 
> ever been transfixed by a beautiful woman? We live amidst a lot of 
> jaw-dropping stuff. Great food for Art!"
>    
>   Yes, you could still have a lot of Wordsworth, but not all of it:
>    
>              (The  commune is too much with us, late and soon,
>                Taking and planning, we lay waste our powers,
>                Little we see in Nature that is ours. . .)
>    
>   There couldnt be tragedy in Aristotle's sense, which requires someone of elevated stature, but more than that, someone whose fall questions the established order.
>    
>   Everything you've mentioned falls into the gee-whizz category, which isnt the usual stuff of art.  The issue may be that art requires conflict (inner or outer or both), and where would that come from in a perfectly harmonious rational society?
>    
>   But I wasnt trying to make a general argument, only that some works like the Marriage of Figaro, or Hamlet, wouldnt be possible.  The answer to me though would be: but all the Sonatas, ensembles, concertos and symphonies would. I was almost about to change my mind about Marriage, because there is really only minor conflict there, and the general atmosphere is happy -- but there would still have to be a trivial leisured class to laugh at.
>    
>   BobW

Personal conflict is just as important and inspirational as class 
conflict if not more so.
To worry that a classless society would be either devoid of great art 
and contain only gee-whizz art or else suffer from some notable 
reduction in great art seems to me a worry with no foundation.
People make art because they want to make art and to imagine that class 
conflict inspires greater artistic passion that personal conflict seems 
to me to miss what makes an artist make art.
Using The Marriage of Figaro an an example, it is only the personal 
aspects of the story that make it interesting. The class issues serve as 
a backdrop primarily for the storyteller to use to call upon certain 
archetypes. Different archetypes could be used for a similar story in a 
classless society that should be just as entertaining. To imagine we 
need to be able to laugh at the buffoonery of elites because that is 
somehow an irreplaceable type of laughter seems an odd argument. Maybe 
that is not what you intend. If not, what exactly are you saying?
In a classless society we would then call upon a host of other scenarios 
nearly unimaginable to our mind today.
Since we no longer believe in the gods of the Greeks their tragedy's in 
all probability do not mean the same thing to us as they did to them. 
This neither limits our appreciation of them nor does it require us to 
gain their specific knowledge to understand them. Which is a good thing 
since gaining that episteme is impossible.

John Thornton