An essay called “The Uses of Art” has generated a lot of traffic here at Just Wrought in the three and a half years since I posted it.1 I’m not sure why it’s so popular, maybe because it’s short and quick and has the kind of easily scannable list that’s very attractive on the internet these days. I’m still quite proud of the piece, even though I should probably admit now that I just sort of tossed it off from accumulated old notes. Recently, however, my thoughts have gone in a converse direction, towards those employments we generally assume art can be put to that it really can’t, or at least not very well: the misuses of art. A few months ago I began brain-brewing a list (by no means complete):
- Persuade through rationality
- Sell itself
- Self-evaluate
- Maintain objectivity2
- Manage its own knee-jerk radicalism
- Recognize its own inborn conservatism
- Successfully proselytize for any particular religion or political party
- Know its own strength
- Pay its own way
- Know its own weaknesses
- Maintain its subversiveness beyond a generation
- Properly define the parameters of its success.
- Effectively manage its infection vectors3
Art is Lousy at Rational Persuasion
At some point I hope to dig in on every line of the list above. (Then again, I had the same hope for “The Uses of Art” and I miserably shirked my self-assignment.). For now, I will constrain my remarks to the first item: persuasion through rationality. Art is lousy at this, though many good and earnest artists, including myself, have repeatedly and mistakenly produced art under the contrary belief.
For instance, about a year ago I wrote a short one-act called “Openly We Carry” which premiered at the first annual SOAPFest. (You can catch this year’s SOAPfest June 4 –8. Click here for more information.) “Openly…” was my attempt to confront the spreading chronic disease of gun extremism in the United States. I had been so hurt and angry for so long over the ever mounting litany of avoidable tragedies from Columbine to Café Racer (just blocks from where I live here in Seattle) to the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre that took the lives of 20 children younger than my own, and on to the most recent nightmare in Santa Barbara happening as I write this piece. (And perhaps there will be another before I post it? The odds seem to promise it, as does the lack of any meaningful action). After Sandy Hook I decided I would use my art, then playwriting, to confront the problem and try to effect change, and thus wrought a fairly good short play set in a world where guns were worshipped as God.
If my goal for the play was to change minds—and I confess that on some level it was—then the play was a failure. I am nearly certain that not a single person who came to the play believing that more guns make our society safer left the theatre thinking differently. For that matter, I am nearly certain not a single person who came believed that premise in the first place. My audience, like most Seattle theatre audiences, was a self-selected, narrow-band sample of liberal theatre lovers—and what’s more—and possibly worse— mostly theatre practitioners. There’s nothing like new plays for preaching to the choir.
But preaching to the choir isn’t the only problem with “Openly…”. My essential mistake, inherent in the script, and independent of any audience, is that I was trying to change people’s minds through the common logical tactic of reductio ad absurdum. By showing a world where guns were worshipped, I was trying to convince people of two connected points: that the horrifying world of the play is not so far from the one in which we live, and that such a world would be ultimately unlivable. But those not likely to agree initially would also be unlikely to be convinced by watching. Some quotes from an internet-based open carry advocacy group called forum.opencarry.org, whose members found an early draft of “Openly We Carry”, show what I mean:
Definitely written by an anti-gun, anti-Christian Democrat with delusions of adequacy running through his drug-soaked grey cells. Both of them.
I'm certainly hoping he doesn't have to use his artist pencil to defend his or his families [sic] life someday.”
The play was written by a man supremely convinced of his own intelligence.
The principal reason art isn’t very good at rational persuasion is that rational persuasion in general might not actually be possible, or at least not nearly as effective as we persuade ourselves to hope. A recent article in the The New Yorker “I Don’t Want to Be Right” reports on a recent Dartmouth study which investigated how people naturally tend to persist in believing things that are plainly not true, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The researchers studied a sample of vaccine opponents (an utterly misguided group, which tends to include a lot more well-meaning liberals than the gun fetishist demographic).
Could various pro-vaccination campaigns change parental attitudes toward vaccines? Each household received one of four [pro-vaccination] messages…. A control group did not receive any information at all. The goal was to test whether facts, science, emotions, or stories could make people change their minds.
The result was dramatic: a whole lot of nothing. None of the interventions worked.
The study basically puts some hard data around something we all experience, and which Jonathan Swift codified succinctly in aphorism some three hundred years ago: “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”
So How Can We Make a Difference?
Thus thwarted from using reason as a tool, moral artists are still obliged to persists in their efforts, and ask, “How do we change people’s hearts and minds?” Well, the Dartmouth study points at a strategy that we artists have always known about and frequently employ, but which we also just as frequently lose sight and despair of.
…Persistently false beliefs stem from issues closely tied to our conception of self… Rather than correcting or augmenting facts, [the researchers] decided to target people’s beliefs about themselves… from a self-affirmation angle, an approach that had previously been used for fighting prejudice and low self-esteem.
Could recalling a time when you felt good about yourself make you more broad-minded about highly politicized issues, like the Iraq surge or global warming? As it turns out, it would. On all issues, attitudes became more accurate with self-affirmation, and remained just as inaccurate without. That effect held even when no additional information was presented—that is, when people were simply asked the same questions twice, before and after the self-affirmation.
As the great and recently departed Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." In the case of the struggle I attempted to engage with “Openly…” I might do better getting people to let go of their guns by offering them some kind of uplift. Looking back at my original essay, I see that at least half of the items on the list would qualify as tools for this performing this task.
Artists need to put their faith and efforts into the uses of art that actually work, even though the blessing/curse of art—and the larger law of life—is that we can almost never know whom we touch, whom we improve. We do our best. With luck, others inherit it.
1 It’s actually the top return from a Google search on the exact phrase, “the uses of art.”
2 I can hear my living newspaper collaborator, journalist Tom Paulson saying “So what?”
3 That is, affect where, how and whom said art reaches.
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