Comments on the arts. “Fine art” vs. “popular art”. Philosophy of art also called the study of aesthetics. Problems with arts, entertainment, and technology.

In previous sections of this website, I discussed music and film, primarily from the point of view of which ones interested me personally. As I explain in the Introduction to Volume I of my book, the arts are not one of the subjects I discuss in my book because I do not believe that they contribute to the purposes of my book. However, I still want to say something about them to the reader and about their personal significance to me. This section of this website is the last of my discussions of the arts, however I also want to justify later in this section why I excluded the arts in my book, and why the arts over a period of many years have become of secondary importance to me personally, although I will have more to say about what value I think they still have. First, let me address the subject of pictorial art, also known as one of the fine arts.

Probably when I was about college age, I wanted to learn more about fine art. I don’t think that I was very systematic about learning in the beginning. I do know that it wasn’t long before I decided that I preferred modern art. This would be consistent with my tastes in music and film, so it is not surprising. I also remember first being attracted to Impressionist style art. At that time, that was the only modern art I remember seeing, and since it is one of the most popular if not the most popular of the styles of modern art, it was easy to see examples of it. I only recall going to museums to see art there on a couple occasions, nor do I enjoy museums then or now. I will explain why later. I’d rather look at prints or books. I took only one art history class in college and it was a not a good way to learn because the teacher let his personal preferences for classical art get in the way of his teaching by devoting all his time to classical art to the exclusion of modern art. So once I decided what styles I liked, I decided to learn about modern art by buying used books on those styles primarily from used bookstores or book sales. However, if the reader is interested in learning more about fine art, I suggest starting with a historical survey from ancient to modern times so the reader learns about the different styles. The book, the History of Art, by H.W. Janson was used for years as the standard textbook in art history classes. I don’t know if it is still used. There are probably many similar texts. This book contains many photos. The text is divided into four parts: Ancient world, Middle ages, Renaissance and Modern world.

I want to let the reader decide for themselves what kind of art they like. Analyzing art turns out to be a more complicated task than one would imagine, but before beginning that discussion, I want to say something about the use of art. We are surrounded by the effects of art in various forms, especially commercial art, namely the art that goes into almost every product that we buy in order to attract buyers by its functional design or beauty. The most powerful art that surrounds us is probably architecture. I discuss architecture in the first section of this website. The ordinary person has no control over the architecture of our surroundings, especially of cities, although undoubtedly corporations, governments and other institutions do have control for better or worse. However, we can have some control over the art that surrounds us in our own home, but even this choice can be problematic. My favorite style of fine art is known as Expressionism, which was primarily by German artists, and in particular I like artist Max Beckmann, but I only have two small prints of his on the walls in one room, with prints in other locations by other artists who are generally unknown to the average person, for variety. For myself, I like to be surrounded by objects that are pleasing to me which includes more than just printed copies of paintings. I also like handicrafts. Once chosen, I like the objects to remain in place. In order to do that, they must have some kind of timeless quality to them. But there is more to the arts than just fine art and interior decoration.

There are a few definitions, or controversies where there is disagreement about them, which I want to discuss before continuing my discussion here about the arts. One issue is whether there is a difference between “high art” also known as “fine art” and “low art” or “popular art”, and whether fine art is better. I cannot speak for anyone else’s view on this, but I will take the position that this distinction is not important to me. I can find value in both. Another issue is who is affected by the arts. There is a big difference between what art means to the creator and what it means to the consumer. As I said at the beginning of my section on music on this website, it is sufficient justification for the arts if the artist enjoys doing it and might be able to make a living at it, but there is a social aspect to this question as well. A nation of nothing but artists is not likely to work, although I will have more to say in Volume III of my book about applying artistic sensibilities to everyday living. There are many issues relating to the effects on the consumer and about the social costs of the arts, entertainment and information technology which are not easily resolved and which I will discuss in the last part of my discussion of the arts below.

Another issue I want to mention is: what is considered art? My view is that the arts have largely been absorbed into the entertainment industry. I will say more below about what scholars think are the purposes of art. Since the purpose of most entertainment might be described as forms of escapism, this tends to create a problem in deciding what is art and what isn’t. I do not wish to enter into a discussion at this point of the negative psychological and social effects of modern western society, but here is a sample listing of what daily experiences people might wish to escape from according to the book This Virtual Life : Escapism and Simulation in Our Media World, by Andrew Evans (p.56):

News
Work
School
Money
Family
Relationships
Boredom and other negative feelings, etc.

Following the list of experiences people wish to escape from is a list of escapes which includes the following. I have added (art) next to those escapes which I think most people would consider an art form, and (entertainment) next to those that aren’t (p.58-9):

Drama/singing/dancing (art)
Writing (I think whether this is art depends on the kind of writing)
Going to car rallies, air shows, etc. (entertainment)
Puzzles/crosswords/quizzes (entertainment)
Playing cards (entertainment)
Computer and video games (entertainment)
Internet (depends on what it is being used for)
Sex as entertainment? (attitudes vary greatly)
Cooking (practical)
Shopping (practical) and collecting
Gardening (when it is a professional occupation, then it is an art)
Outdoor activities (entertainment)
Exercise
Travel
Sports (do professional athletes think of themselves as more than just entertainers?)
Meditation
Listening to music (consumer of art), practicing/playing music (art), but what kind of music?
Reading or school (what kind of reading?)
Watching movies (what kind of movies?)
Watching TV (depends on what is being watched)
Drugs/alcohol
Gambling

Some of the above are pretty clearly entertainment, but what if someone is teaching one of those activities? That raises the value of it considerably, for teacher and student. In order to add another point of view in trying to answer the question what is art?, here’s a summary of possible definitions of art from the book The Art of Understanding Art, by Irina Costache (p.xxiv-xxx)

Art for art’s sake
Art as biography
Art as commentary on contemporary times and issues
Art as commentary on the past
Art commentating about art
Art and the community/public art
Art for commemorative purposes
Art as decoration
Art as documentation
Art and emotions
Art as enjoyment
Art and everyday life
Art for functional purposes
Art and history
Art and human nature/psychology
Art as ideas and thought process/art as knowledge
Art and ideals
Art as information
Art and life/nature
Art as memory
Art and philosophy
Art and politics
Art and reality
Art and religion/spirituality
Art as self-expression and personal statement
Art as social statement
Art as “truth”

These are a great many purposes, and they all seem valid. One of the reasons I tried to look at the question of art vs. entertainment above is to see if there was a group of arts about which there wouldn’t be any question about their value as art. However, it turns out that there are questions even about the recognized or established arts. Questioning the value of art has a long history going back to the Greek philosopher, Plato, at least as far as we have written records. Plato was also concerned with the role of art in society. The issue he first raised has been referred to as the “ancient quarrel between philosophy (or philosophers) and poetry (or poets)”. This dispute could be described as a question about what is communicated by art and whether Plato believed art could be a source of reliable or useful knowledge. Several books have been written on this subject including two books with the above phrase in the title. Two other books are The Fire & the Sun : Why Plato Banished the Artists, by Iris Murdoch, and Images of Excellence : Plato’s Critique of the Arts, by Christopher Janaway. While I am sympathetic to many of Plato’s ideas, my books and this website which supplements my books rely on modern writers to support my conclusions about the subjects I discuss in my book, so I will not discuss these two books further here, but the reader may consult them as both of the above writers are well recognized in their fields.

To begin my discussion of some of the philosophical issues of art, below are selections from Philosophy of the Arts : an Introduction to Aesthetics, by Gordon Graham, several of whose books on other subjects I discuss in Volume II of my book and will discuss in Volume III of my book. These selections are from Chapter 1: Art and Pleasure, and Chapter 2: Art and Emotion, a short summary of Chapter 3: Art and Understanding, and a selection from Chapter 8: Theories of Art. First is a discussion of the question of what is the value of art which I will present with a lengthy continuous selection from Chapter 1, as I want to include the entire argument. I have kept the paragraphs as they appear in the book:

“We are going to assume that the most profitable approach to theorizing about art is a normative one. That is to say, for the next three chapters we will treat aesthetics as the attempt to formulate a theory of art that will explain its value, rather than one which, say, seeks to define what art is, or to determine its social function. One way of beginning to formulate a normative theory of art is to ask this question: ‘What is it that we expect to get from art?’ A spontaneous answer, even to the point of being commonplace, is pleasure or enjoyment. Most people wishing to pass favourable judgment on a book or a film will say that they ‘enjoyed it’.

Hume and the standard of taste

Some philosophers have thought that the value of art is necessarily connected with pleasure or enjoyment, because, they argue, to say that a work is good is just the same as saying that it is pleasant or agreeable. The best known philosopher to hold this view was the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. In a famous essay entitled ‘Of the standard of taste’ he argues that the important thing about art is its ‘agreeableness’, the pleasure we derive from it, and that this is a matter of our sentiments, not its intrinsic nature. ‘Judgments’ about good and bad in art, according to Hume, are not really judgments at all, ‘because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it’ (Hume 1975: 238). ‘To seek the real beauty, or the real deformity, is as fruitless an enquiry, as to seek the real sweet or real bitter’ (ibid.: 239). That is to say, aesthetic preferences are expressions of the taste of the observer, not statements about the object, and Hume thinks the wide diversity of opinions about art that we find in the world is confirmation of this fact.

At the same time, Hume recognizes, while it is true that opinions differ widely, it is no less widely believed that at least some artistic sentiments can be so wide of the mark as to be discountable. He considers the example of a minor writer being compared with John Milton, the great poetic genius who wrote Paradise Lost. Though, says Hume, ‘there may be found persons who give the preference to the former . . . no one pays attention to such a taste; and we pronounce without scruple the sentiment of these pretended critics to be absurd and ridiculous’. What this implies is that, even though taste is a matter of feeling things to be agreeable or disagreeable, there is still a standard of taste, and the question is how these two ideas can be made consistent.

Hume’s answer is that the standard of taste arises from the nature of human beings. Since they share a common nature, broadly speaking they like the same things. When it comes to art, he thinks, ‘Some particular forms or qualities, from the original structure of the internal fabric [of the human mind], are calculated to please, and others to displease’. There are of course aberrant reactions and opinions; people can favour the oddest things. But Hume believes that the test of time will eventually tell, and that only those things which truly are aesthetically pleasing will go on calling forth approbation as the years pass.

On the face of it, Hume’s theory does seem to fit attitudes to art. Artistic tastes differ greatly, but at the same time there is something to be said for the idea that by and large the same features of art find favour with most people; broadly speaking, most people like and admire the same great masterpieces in music, painting, literature, or architecture. Despite this and contrary to Hume, we cannot move from patterns of common taste to a standard of taste. The fact that a belief or feeling is shared by many people does not of itself mean that everyone is rationally obliged to adhere to it. If someone does have extremely peculiar musical tastes, say, we may regard them as odd, but if Hume is right that aesthetics is all a matter of feeling, we have no good reason to call them ‘absurd and ridiculous’; they are merely different. If we want to say that some views about art are mistaken, we cannot make the mistake rest on human feeling about art – it just is what it is – but on something about the art itself.

It follows that the connection between art and pleasure is not a necessary one; to say that a work of art is good or valuable is not the same as saying that we find it enjoyable. Nevertheless it can still be argued that art is to be valued chiefly because of the pleasure or enjoyment it gives, and this is, I think, what most people who connect art and enjoyment mean to say.

Mill and pleasure

It is worth recording, however, that it is not altogether natural to speak of enjoyment uniformly for all the arts. People quite naturally speak of enjoying novels, plays, films, and pieces of music. But it is odd to speak of enjoying paintings, sculptures, and buildings, as opposed to liking or loving them. It follows that even if we were to agree that ‘enjoyment’ were the principal value of art, some further explanation would still be needed to show just what this might mean in the case of some of the principal art forms.

But the main problem with ‘enjoyment’ is not this. It is rather that in asserting that art offers enjoyment, we have said almost nothing. People who enjoy their work can be asked to explain what it is they find enjoyable, and in their answers that they reveal what they find of value in it. ‘Enjoyment’ merely signals that they do find it so. Similarly, with art the initial claim that art is a source of enjoyment is not in itself informative. It means little more than that it is worth attending to; what we need to know is, what makes it worth attending to.

People who offer the explanation ‘enjoyment’ often have something more precise in mind, namely, pleasure. The notion of ‘pleasure’ also requires examination and clarification, because it too can be used in such a general fashion as to mean nothing more than ‘enjoyment’ in the sense just described. Moreover, mistaken notions of pleasure abound: those which treat pleasure and happiness as synonymous for instance, or which define pleasure as the psychological opposite of pain, as in the writings of the nineteenth-century British philosophers John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, classically representative authors of philosophical utilitarianism. These misconceptions are understandable because most thinking about pleasure and happiness is caught up from the outset in a network of ideas which includes the contrasts between ‘work and leisure’, ‘toil and rest’, ‘anxiety and contentment’. The sense of ‘pleasure’ we want to examine here is something like ‘entertainment value’ which, following R. G. Collingwood in The Principles of Art, we might call ‘amusement’.

Collingwood is partly engaged in the traditional task of philosophical aesthetics – that is, defining what art is – but the way he approaches it embodies a normative or evaluative theory of art as well, an explanation of what is to count as ‘true art’. Collingwood wants to show that art as amusement (along with art as craft and art as magic) falls short of art ‘proper’ and that those who turn to the arts for their amusement have made a certain sort of mistake. It may indeed be the case that they find their amusement in plays, novels, and so on. This is an important point to stress. No one need deny that there is indeed recreational amusement to be obtained from the arts. But Collingwood’s contention is that if this is all we find there, we have missed the thing most worth finding. His strictures on art as amusement will be examined more closely in the next chapter. Here we need only register a doubt he raises about the facts of the case. The thesis that art is valuable for the pleasure or amusement we derive from it depends, among other things, on its being the case that we do indeed derive pleasure from it.

Is this in fact true? What is undoubtedly true is that people profess to enjoy works of art and many will expand upon this by recording the pleasure they get from them. Whether if we asked them to substitute the word ‘amusement’ for pleasure they would happily do so is much less certain. This is because the pursuit of pleasure in the sense of amusement does not explain the social estimation of art in a wider context. People generally think that great art is more important than as a mere source of amusement. Nor does it accord with the distinction that is commonly made between art and non-art, or the discriminations that are made between better and less good works (and forms) of art, between, say, pantomime and Shakespearean tragedy.

These points need to be considered one by one. It is widely accepted that art is a respectable object for the devotion of large amounts of time and considerable quantities of financial and other resources. Few people find it improper for schools and universities to encourage their students to devote themselves to intensive study of the arts (though some may query the content of the curriculum), nor do they call for special justification when governments, companies, and foundations spend large sums of money on galleries and orchestras. But they might well object if they were told that in teaching art, schools aimed to amuse their pupils, and would probably have serious doubts if similar sums were spent on extravagant parties or other occasions, whose much more obvious purpose is pleasure or amusement. Similarly it is acceptable, even admirable, for artists and critics to make a lifetime commitment to their work. By contrast any talk of commitment to a life of amusement would inevitably carry the same kind of jocular overtones as the phrase ‘serious drinking’.

These estimations may be erroneous of course. This is a possibility that we ought not to rule out. It would prejudge many of the questions pertinent to normative philosophy of art if we were to assume that art has a value other and greater than amusement value. The point here, however, is that, if we identify pleasure with amusement, it is far from clear that the pleasure theory of art is as commonplace as it may have seemed at the start. It may be generally acceptable to say that people turn to Beethoven largely for pleasure, but less acceptable to suggest that they find his music amusing.

It might be said that this only shows that pleasure is not the same as amusement. However, once we shift our attention from what people are inclined to say, to the beliefs reflected in their social practices, it is not at all clear that most people do find most of what we call art pleasurable in any straightforward sense. Those in pursuit of pleasure who are faced with a choice between a detective story by Rex Stout or a novel by William Faulkner are almost certain to choose the former, just as they will prefer a Marx Brothers film to film noir or the work of Jean Luc Godard, though Faulkner and Godard are evidently artistically more significant. This need not be the case universally for the general point to hold; great novels can also be diverting and amusing. But the fact that pleasure and significance in art can be divorced in this way gives us reason to observe, along with Collingwood, that the prevalence of the belief that art is pleasurable may itself distort people’s ability to ask honestly whether anybody is much amused by it. Indeed, Collingwood thinks there is often a measure of self-deception in people’s attitudes, and if we are honest we will have to agree that the entertainment value of high art is for most people quite low compared to other amusements.

‘The masses of cinema goers and magazine readers cannot be elevated by offering them . . . the aristocratic amusements of a past age. This is called bringing art to the people, but that is clap-trap; what is brought is still amusement, very cleverly designed by a Shakespeare or a Purcell to please an Elizabethan or a Restoration audience, but now, for all its genius, far less amusing than Mickey Mouse or jazz, except to people laboriously trained to enjoy it.’ (quoted from Collingwood)

These social facts about art and the status it is usually accorded raise doubts about the depth of allegiance to the commonplace pleasure theory of art. There is thus a serious question whether it is true that art is for most people a source of pleasure, and it seems the answer is, ‘probably not’. But even if we were to agree, contrary to what has been said, that all art can be relied upon to amuse, a further question arises as to whether, on this ground alone, we would have any special reason to pursue it. There are many other cheaper and less taxing forms of amusement – games, picnics, crossword puzzles, for example. If simple pleasure is what is at issue, on the surface at any rate art can at best be a contender for value and in all probability a rather weak one.

It is tempting to reply to this point by claiming that an enjoyable life does not consist in large quantities of ‘pleasure’ in the abstract, but a variety of different kinds of pleasure. This may be true – we can easily become surfeited by just one sort of pleasure – but it does not overcome the philosophical difficulty. Even if we concede that painting, drama, and so on are distinctive types of pleasure, this fact alone generates no reason to think that a pleasurable life must contain any of them. If the good life is defined as the life of pleasure, then provided that such a life has a variety of pleasures in it, art need play no part in it. This might be the correct view for a hedonist (someone who believes that the best life is the most pleasurable one) though hardly for an aesthete (a lover of the arts), but the point to be emphasized here is that an appeal to the value of pleasure does not generate any reason to value art above any of the many other ways in which amusement and diversion may be found.

In response to this line of thought, it is tempting to try to establish a difference between higher and lower pleasures and argue that art provides a kind of pleasure higher than that generated by the more mundane recreations listed above. This move is closely related to the third objection to be considered, the distinction most art lovers would draw between the light and the serious in art. This is a distinction hard to dispense with, and one worth examining at some length. Almost everyone wants to draw an evaluative distinction between both styles and works of art in terms of the serious and the light: between for instance tragedies and farces, Beethoven symphonies and Strauss waltzes, the poetry of T.S. Eliot and that of Edward Lear, the novels of Jane Austen and those of P.G. Wodehouse. In each case while the latter has many merits and is genuinely amusing, it is the former which is regarded as more significant or profound.

It should be noted here that the distinction between serious and light is not the same as that between high and low art. Some writers have thought that the ‘bourgeois’ elevation of the art of the gallery and the concert hall, and the corresponding denigration of folk art are part of the ideological underwriting of a certain social structure. But as far as our present concerns go, much folk art can be regarded as serious and much high art as frivolous; it still remains to explain this difference.

Can such a difference be explained in terms of higher and lower pleasures? John Stuart Mill’s attempt to draw this distinction, which appears in the essay entitled Utilitarianism, is not expressly directed at the question of the value of art. But it is hard to see how any such distinction could be drawn other than in the ways he suggests. There appear to be two possibilities only. Either we say that higher pleasures hold out the possibility of a greater quantity of pleasure, or we say that a higher pleasure is of a different quality. The first of these alternatives is plainly inadequate because it makes the value of art strictly commensurable with that of other pleasures. If the only difference is that pleasure in art is more concentrated, it can be substituted without loss by more items affording a lower pleasure. Thus, if what Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina has over Melrose Place or Neighbours is quantity of pleasure, we can make up the difference simply by watching more episodes of Melrose Place. The implication of this line of thought is that people who have never acquired any familiarity with any of the things that pass for serious art, including the serious elements in folk art, are in no way impoverished, provided only that they have had a sufficient quantity of more mundane pleasures. Most of us would want to dissent from such a judgment, but whether we do or not, the fact of this implication is enough to show that the pleasure theory of art understood in this way is inadequate, since it cannot show art to have any special value at all.

Mill thinks that ‘it is absurd that . . . the estimation of pleasures should be supposed to depend on quantity alone’ (Mill 1985: 12). Instead he appeals to the respective quality of different pleasures.

‘If I am asked, what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there is but one possible answer. Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure. If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it . . . we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality. . . On a question which is the best worth having of two pleasures . . . the judgment of those who are qualified by knowledge of both, or, if they differ, that of the majority among them, must be admitted as final.’ (ibid.: 14–15)

According to Mill, this higher quality of pleasure more than compensates for any diminution in quantity and will in fact offset a good deal of pain and discontent. In a famous passage he concludes:

‘It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the pig, or the fool, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.’ (ibid.: 14)

Whether Mill’s account of higher and lower pleasures is adequate for his purposes in Utilitarianism is not the question here. Rather we want to ask whether the same strategy can be used to explain the difference in value that is attached to light and serious art. And the answer plainly seems to be that it does not. This is chiefly because, as we know, tastes differ in art, and consequently the test he proposes cannot be used to adjudicate between competing responses to works of art. Suppose for instance that a dispute arises about the relative quality of pleasure to be obtained from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and King Lear. Mill is obviously correct in his assertion that someone who has seen only the former is not qualified to give judgment. Consequently it is his majority test that must do the work. Assuming, almost certainly without foundation, that majority opinion among those who have seen both favours Shakespeare, we have no reason to infer from this that Shakespearean tragedy generates a higher quality of pleasure than a good western. The judgment that it does may signal no more than a difference of taste between the majority and the minority. We cannot show that beer is better than wine simply by showing that more people prefer it. Since it is possible for an individual to prefer a worse thing to a better thing, it is also possible that the majority of people will do so.

It might be said that construing Mill’s test in terms of taste ignores an important suggestion: higher pleasures involve the higher faculties; this is what makes them of a higher quality. Such seems certainly to be Mill’s view, and it is what justifies him in discounting the opinions of the fool and the pig. Their experience is of a lower order and hence their pleasures are too. Applied to the subject of art what this implies is that serious art engages aspects of mind that lighter art does not address. Now this may, in general, be true, but it is unclear whether this would make a difference to the relative value of the two in terms of pleasure. Most people will accept Mill’s claim that there is more to human life than eating, sleeping, and procreating. We might also agree that human beings can expect to enjoy pleasures which are closed to pigs because of innate endowments of mind and emotional capacity. But these evident differences give us no reason to think that the engagement of a higher capacity brings a higher pleasure. Pigs cannot do crosswords, and fools cannot while away the time with mathematical ‘brainteasers’. Such activities undoubtedly engage higher faculties, but this of itself does not give us reason to think that the pleasure we derive from them is of a more valuable kind than the pleasure to be found in more simple pastimes. We can stipulatively define ‘higher’ pleasures as those which involve the higher faculties if we choose, but this will not give us reason to rank crosswords and the like as more significant or important than any other pleasurable pastime.

More importantly still, even if, despite this point, majority judgments of the sort Mill describes could be consistently aligned with ‘serious’ art (which is doubtful), his account assumes that the explanation of this lies in the pleasure that is generated by different experiences. But why should artistic preference be based upon pleasure rather than some other value, yet to be fully disclosed? It is logically consistent (whether true or not) to maintain the following three propositions.

1 Over the ages majority opinion has found there to be greater value in serious than in light art.

2 People customarily speak of this value in the language of enjoyment.

3 This greater value is not adequately explained in terms of pleasure or enjoyment.

But if these three propositions are consistent, this shows that nothing has yet been said to substantiate the pleasure theory of art, and the objections we have considered imply that the value of art does indeed lie elsewhere.

Kant and beauty

So far we have been operating with a uniform notion of pleasure as just one kind of experience. But it has sometimes been argued that what we find in art is not a higher grade of everyday pleasure but a distinctive kind of ‘aesthetic pleasure’. The Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden, for instance, urges us to recognize that aesthetic pleasures ‘have a special character of their own and exist in a different manner from the pleasures deriving from a good meal or fresh air or a good bath’. (It should be added that Ingarden thinks this recognition to be just a small first step in arriving at a proper understanding of aesthetic value.) Whether there is such a thing as a distinctively aesthetic pleasure is obviously an important question in itself. But still more important for present purposes is another question. Can it give a satisfactory explanation of the value of art? An appeal to ‘aesthetic’ pleasure will accomplish very little if we mean by this nothing more than ‘the special kind of pleasure art gives’. To avoid this sort of emptiness what is needed is another term for aesthetic pleasure. Then we need to establish a relation between this new term and some value other than everyday pleasure or amusement.

One possible term which is to be found frequently in writing about art, is ‘beauty’. The idea that the reward for the art lover is ‘delight in the contemplation of the beautiful’ is an old and familiar theme, an idea probably given its fullest expression by the great eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. The introduction of beauty allows us to say that the impoverishment of the pig or the fool, whose pleasure is of rather an earthy kind, is not to be explained in terms of ordinary pleasure at all but in terms of the absence of beauty.

The idea of the beautiful is a recurrent topic in the philosophy of art. Its merits have usually been discussed as a defining characteristic of art and, as we shall see in Chapter 8, definitions of art encounter serious difficulties. However, it is not difficult to construe the connection with art and beauty as a normative thesis, that is, beauty is something valuable and art is valuable because it consists primarily in the creation and contemplation of beauty. Something of this thesis is to be found in Kant, and his ideas can usefully be considered in this context. …

Of course it might be asserted that beauty’s value lies in nothing but itself. This, leaving aside Kantian aesthetics, reflects a simpler and more widespread claim, that beauty is to be valued for its own sake. ‘Beauty for beauty’s sake’ is a familiar artistic slogan, similar in spirit to Oscar Wilde’s celebrated remark that all art is quite useless. Yet to accept, as most people probably would, that the value of beauty is not to be reduced to or explained in terms of something else such as usefulness, still leaves a gap in the argument. We cannot make the jump from the value of beauty to the value of art without some additional explanation. Kant does have something to say about the ‘genius’ of the artist and its relation to the beautiful, but the fact is we can value the beautiful simply by contemplating it, and perhaps preserving it. Since the world already has beauty in it without any creative activity on our part, why do we need art as well? It is for this reason that the appeal to beauty as an irreducible value leaves unexplained the value, if there is any, in artistic activity. It also leaves unexplained the multiplicity of art forms. If we already have music, why do we need poetry?” (p4-14)

Below are selections from Chapters 2: Art and Emotion:

“We have now explored two accounts of the value that is to be found in art in both commonplace and sophisticated versions. It is true that works of art can give pleasure and can be valued precisely because they give pleasure. To value them solely for this reason, however, is to give art no special status over other sources of pleasure and to rank its importance rather lower on the scale of human values than most writers on art are apt to do. Gadamer’s thesis – that art is to be understood as a form of play – overcomes something of this difficulty because play may be serious, even solemn, as well as lighthearted and pleasurable. This modified version of the pleasure theory also has its drawbacks, however, since it gives us no reason to rank art higher than sport. In itself this may not be an objection; perhaps they are equally valuable, unpalatable though this conclusion would be to many art enthusiasts. What it fails to explain is a difference between all sport and some art, namely, that although art, like sport, consists in structured activity, unlike sport, art can also have content, be about something. Any theory of the value of art which does not take account of this important difference must be regarded as to some degree defective. It was concerning this question of content that expressivism was considered. It has to be acknowledged that, as a matter of fact many works of art do arouse emotion, and this seems to be one of the ways in which art can give audiences pleasure. Perhaps it is this fact that sustains the more generally widespread belief in Romanticism and expressivism. But the expressivist holds more than this, namely that the content of art is emotion. A number of problems confront this contention. First, it is difficult to locate the expression of emotion in a relevant and plausible account of the relation between artist, work, and audience. Second, an emphasis on the artist’s emotion robs artistic activity of what would seem to make it special, namely imagination. Third, there is nothing valuable in the expression or arousal of emotion for its own sake. Collingwood offers us a more sophisticated version of expressivism which has the great merit of avoiding what we might call ‘psychologism’, and which proves as good an explanation of the value of art as one could want. But on closer investigation we saw that these advantages are won through an effective abandonment of the essentials of expressivism. What we end up with, if we follow Collingwood’s theory to its logical conclusion, is an account of art as a distinctive way of understanding human experience. And this is the suggestion that is to be investigated in the chapter that follows.” (p40-1)

If one of the features of art is that it is designed to cause a particular emotion in the viewer, then that seems problematic to me, like movies that are made solely to cause the audience to laugh or to scare the audience. However, if the art reflects emotions which the artist felt and which the artist is trying to portray in the artwork, and if the viewer can relate to that portrayal, particularly in a personal way, namely that the viewer has felt the same thing, then that to me is a more valuable connection between art and emotion. Indeed, as I mentioned in my discussion of film in the previous section of this website, among the kinds of films I like are those that portray an experience I have had and what we remember about experiences are usually how they made us feel at the time.

In Chapter 3: Art and Understanding, Gordon Graham describes what he thinks should be another feature of art which I also think is important, namely that art consist of something more than pleasure and emotion, that it possess some kind of content, which he calls understanding. Does a particular artwork tell us something about the human condition in general, whether or not that corresponds to our personal experience? Does it bear witness to the artist’s experience? Does it educate?

Finally, there are unresolved questions about what constitutes art. This is from Chapter 8:

“In the history of the subject since Kant, there has been continual uncertainty as to whether the subject matter of art theory is subjective states of mind, that is, do we theorize about the attitudes of observer or audience, or is the subject matter objectively existing artefacts, that is, the works of art themselves? That is to say, is a theory of art a theory about the kind of human judgment and/or perception that arises when we are confronted with a work of art, or is it a theory about actual objects – paintings, poems, plays, pieces of music, and so on? The origin of this uncertainty is found in Kant himself. While Kant is primarily interested in the status of a state of mind which calls an object beautiful, he also has a theory of what it means for something to be a work of art, and the relation between the state of mind and the external object itself is very uncertain.

Arguably this uncertainty has plagued philosophical aesthetics ever since Kant. Despite the opening words of the passage from Clive Bell quoted above, the theory of ‘significant form’ has for obvious reasons focussed attention on created objects – it is the form of the objects which matters – while expressivism, and more specifically Romanticism, have tended to give pride of place to states of mind both of artist and spectator. The problem has been compounded by the emergence of a third possibility. Functionalist and institutional theories of art tend to focus on neither the aesthetic attitude nor on individual works, but on the general activity of art making and art viewing, and on their social role. The result of all this is that aesthetics has in part come to be a dispute about what it should dispute about, and what one theorist regards as central another will regard as irrelevant. In addition to the problem of unwarranted generalization then, philosophical definitions of art have a problem about subject matter. Are we seeking a definition or generalization about attitudes or artefacts or functions or activities? Even if both these difficulties could be overcome, and many writers have thought they can be, there is a third. This is the objection that most alternative sociological theories have made their starting point. It arises from the observation that every language is a cultural product with a history, and that consequently concepts themselves have a history. When philosophers have spoken about ‘Art’, this objection runs, they have implicitly supposed that there is some object or category or activity or attitude which finds universal application and is indifferent to cultural context and historical development. But socio-historical investigation seems to show this to be false. One sociologist of art, Janet Wolff, puts it this way. The social history of art shows, first, that it is accidental that certain types of artefact are constituted as ‘art’. . . . Secondly, it forces us to question distinctions traditionally made between art and non-art . . . for it is clear that there is nothing in the nature of the work or of the activity which distinguishes it from other work and activities with which it may have a good deal in common.

Her point is that what is regarded as art at any one time is the outcome of social influences, not of the nature of the art objects themselves. This important fact, according to Wolff, will not be overcome by appeal to the accepted conclusions of art criticism: aesthetics can find no guarantee of any corpus of works or canon in art criticism or literary criticism. These discourses, too, are the historically specific product of social relations and practices, and hence as partial and contingent as art and literature themselves.

In other words, the mind of the art critic, or the reading public for that matter, is not itself immune to social interest and conditioning. Art critics do compile lists of ‘classic’ works, but this list is as subject to historical influence and change as the concept of art itself. The precise force of the sociological objection to traditional aesthetics will be considered more closely a little later on. For the moment, it is enough to observe that something in this sociological line of thought is incontestable. What is to be called ‘Art’ is not even today universally agreed upon, and we do not have to look very far to see that the concept of ‘Art with a capital A’ does not have application in many other times and places. The distinction between art and craft, for example, brought to prominence in modern aesthetics by Collingwood, whose version of expressivism was examined in Chapter 2, cannot be translated into the language of Plato and Aristotle. Nor is it easy to relate this distinction to that which the eighteenth century made between fine and mechanical arts. This way of thinking about language and concepts reveals that philosophical aesthetics, even if it is not essentialist, is Platonist. Plato held that everything has an eternal unchanging ‘Form’ which the things we see around us mirror or imitate, and in a similar way, it can be argued, philosophical aesthetics supposes that there is a universal unchanging form called ‘Art’, which can be apprehended at any and every time. But the truth is, or so the sociologist of art holds, that the practice, the criticism, and the institutions of art are all social products, and have to be understood in terms of historical development. They are neither fixed nor final, and they differ both in time and place. If this is true, philosophical aesthetics is not merely using the wrong methods, but seeking to explain the non-existent.” (p153-4)

To repeat what I said at the beginning of my discussion of art on this website, the reason why I am raising these issues about art is that I want to justify my omission of the arts from my books, because I do not look to the arts to support the arguments in my books. However, I also want to justify my personal views about the arts. While I took the time above to present a scholarly discussion of problems with deciding what is and isn’t art, and what is the practical (not monetary) value of fine art, ultimately the conclusions I want to present here, which are based on what value art has to me personally at the present time, are not the result of any scholarly discussion presented here or that I have ever read at any time in my life. Instead, my conclusion has come about because of how I feel about it. One way to explain this is by saying that the nature of all entertainment in general, and the arts in particular, has caused me turn away from them.

Before presenting the issues that I have with the arts, entertainment and information technology, I want to raise two further questions. The first question is about the location of art. This applies mainly to fine art. The second question is about whether there is a difference between good and bad arts, entertainment and information technology. Assuming that the arts exist because of some innate human need for creativity, and assuming that one of the satisfactions of making art is to share the experience with other people, does it make sense to confine fine art works to special buildings known as museums, with guards and admission fees or to special arenas for public performances? I realize that due to their monetary value and uniqueness valuable artworks must be protected. Fortunately, prints and books with reproductions help solve that problem, although they are not free either. I just want to point out that this confinement seriously restricts the ability of fine arts to reach people and for people to benefit from whatever aesthetic experience, education, etc. that fine arts can provide. So even the fine arts, which many consider to be above the problems of the popular arts, still have problems of their own.

However, I think the fine arts are a mere fraction of what people are exposed to on a daily basis from the popular arts, entertainment and information technology which have a different purpose in mind, namely profit to corporations. While some artists may be more interested in the money, I am mainly concerned with how the popular arts are used in our society. Once profit enters into the equation, then there isn’t much motive to create good art as opposed to bad art, but rather art that sells. Furthermore, I also believe that another motive, or perhaps it is a consequence, of the selling of popular arts, entertainment and information technology is to saturate people’s minds with an endless number and varieties of  product and, I believe a more sinister purpose is to create an environment where people don’t need to think or create any more. They just passively consume what is provided to them. While I am able to find some value in music, movies and television which I discuss elsewhere on this website, what I find valuable is also a mere fraction of the total, and discovering the gold nuggets among the silt is not easy. It requires study, which is one reason why I don’t want to take the time any more to search. Consuming art is also still passive as are going to museums and live performances.

One last positive purpose which I can possibly see popular culture having is the potential ability to share a particular work with someone close as a way of understanding each other. This is most likely to apply to music with lyrics and to movies. However, in order to be able to do that, it is necessary to find someone with the same tastes. In my own experience, I have not been very successful in finding someone who either has the same tastes or is willing to listen. In terms of what value the arts have to me personally, if I were to try to come to a conclusion about why certain works appealed to me, I think the answer would have to be that they fulfilled an emotional need. What I like is unrelated to any kind of academic judgment about them. Instead, I relate to the lyrics in a song, or the characters in a movie, or the artist’s vision in a pictorial work, i.e. painting, drawing, woodcut, etc. In other words, as Henry Miller says about books, what is valuable is what speaks to you, but that purpose no longer has the importance to me that it once did. The remainder of this discussion of the arts, with support from other writers, will try to explain why.

So in addition to the falling away of one of the reasons why I was interested in the arts in the first place, there are additional problems which I want to discuss now, which might be called the psychological and social problems that arts, entertainment and information technology create. As I was writing this discussion of the arts, I was trying to find a name for the problem I was trying to describe. I found two writers that discuss this subject, namely because it constitutes a distraction from life. I make lengthy selections from both writers below in order to present the entire message. The first writer is an artist and teacher. The book is How to Do Nothing : Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell (Melville House, 2019). The title is not to be misinterpreted by taking it literally. Here’s how the author explains the problem:

“This book is … a field  guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy …  I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized. A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.

THE FACT THAT the “nothing” that I propose is only nothing from the point of view of capitalist productivity explains the irony that a book called How to Do Nothing is in some ways also a plan of action. I want to trace a series of movements: 1) a dropping out, not dissimilar from the “dropping out” of the 1960s; 2) a lateral movement outward to things and people that are around us; and 3) a movement downward into place. Unless we are vigilant, the current design of much of our technology will block us every step of the way, deliberately creating false targets for self-reflection, curiosity, and a desire to belong to a community. When people long for some kind of escape, it’s worth asking: What would “back to the land” mean if we understood the land to be where we are right now? Could “augmented reality” simply mean putting your phone down? And what (or who) is that sitting in front of you when you finally do?

It is within a blasted landscape of neoliberal determinism that this book seeks hidden springs of ambiguity and inefficiency. This is a four-course meal in the age of Soylent. But while I hope you find some relief in the invitation to simply stop or slow down, I don’t mean this to be a weekend retreat or a mere treatise on creativity. The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive. My argument is obviously anticapitalist, especially concerning technologies that encourage a capitalist perception of time, place, self, and community. It is also environmental and historical: I propose that rerouting and deepening one’s attention to place will likely lead to awareness of one’s participation in history and in a more-than-human community. From either a social or ecological perspective, the ultimate goal of “doing nothing” is to wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm.

I am not anti-technology. After all, there are forms of technology—from tools that let us observe the natural world to decentralized, noncommercial social networks—that might situate us more fully in the present. Rather, I am opposed to the way that corporate platforms buy and sell our attention, as well as to designs and uses of technology that enshrine a narrow definition of productivity and ignore the local, the carnal, and the poetic. I am concerned about the effects of current social media on expression—including the right not to express oneself—and its deliberately addictive features. But the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction. It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms and affect the way we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live. … I can’t help but ask the question: What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes? … The first half of ‘doing nothing’ is about disengaging from the attention economy; the other half is about reengaging with something else. That ‘something else’ is nothing less than time and space, a possibility only once we meet each other there on the level of attention. Ultimately, against the placelessness of an optimized life spent online, I want to argue for a new ‘placefulness’ that yields sensitivity and responsibility to the historical (what happened here) and the ecological (who and what lives, or lived, here).

In this book, I hold up bioregionalism as a model for how we might begin to think again about place. Bioregionalism, whose tenets were articulated by the environmentalist Peter Berg in the 1970s, and which is widely visible in indigenous land practices, has to do with an awareness not only of the many life-forms of each place, but how they are interrelated, including with humans. Bioregionalist thought encompasses practices like habitat restoration and permaculture farming, but has a cultural element as well, since it asks us to identify as citizens of the bioregion as much as (if not more than) the state. Our ‘citizenship’ in a bioregion means not only familiarity with the local ecology but a commitment to stewarding it together.

It’s important for me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bioregional awareness because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another. It’s also important because of the parallels between what the economy does to an ecological system and what the attention economy does to our attention. In both cases, there’s a tendency toward an aggressive monoculture, where those components that are seen as ‘not useful’ and which cannot be appropriated (by loggers or by Facebook) are the first to go. Because it proceeds from a false understanding of life as atomized and optimizable, this view of usefulness fails to recognize the ecosystem as a living whole that in fact needs all of its parts to function. Just as practices like logging and large-scale farming decimate the land, an overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose “production” slowly destroys the soil until nothing more can grow. As it extinguishes one species of thought after another, it hastens the erosion of attention.

Why is it that the modern idea of productivity is so often a frame for what is actually the destruction of the natural productivity of an ecosystem?  This sounds a lot like …  how narrow the concept of ‘usefulness’ is. When the tree appears to the carpenter in his dream, it’s essentially asking him: Useful for what? Indeed, this is the same question I have when I give myself enough time to step back from the capitalist logic of how we currently understand productivity and success. Productivity that produces what? Successful in what way, and for whom? The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that that entails for any mortal being. In those moments, the idea of success as a teleological goal would have made no sense; the moments were ends in themselves, not steps on a ladder.” (from the Introduction: “Surviving Usefulness”)

The second writer is a psychotherapist, counselor, lecturer and writer. The book is The Power of Off : the Mindful Way to Stay Sane in a Virtual World, by Nancy Colier (Melville Books, 2016). Nancy Colier further develops the ideas presented by the previous writer:

“Every day, when I wake up, I try to remember to ask myself: What is the most important thing? What is my heart’s longing? What parts of myself do I want to nourish and grow? What do I want to offer? In essence, What really matters? Every day I try to touch into what this astounding experience of being alive is really about. The contemplation of the most important thing keeps me connected to my most sincere and profound longings and my deeper wisdom. When I am grounded in what is most important, I am more discerning in my choices, less likely to be swayed off course by my small-minded aspects, and far more likely to finish the day feeling good.

As a psychotherapist, interfaith minister, and spiritual counselor, I spend my days talking with people about their lives, internal and external. While functioning successfully in the world, many of those I meet with report a sense of overwhelm, of being consumed by the distractions and chronic multitasking that technology makes possible and to some degree necessary. Whether we’re tinkering on social media, Googling old acquaintances, looking up facts on Wikipedia, or updating and learning new software, we are spending far too much of our time doing things that don’t really matter to us. At this moment in history, as a result of the new opportunities and demands that technology creates, we have forgotten not only what is most important but also that we need to ask ourselves that question. Why do so many people describe the feeling of being disconnected from what really matters, from what makes us feel nourished and grounded as human beings? And, most importantly, how do we remember not to forget to ask, What really matters?

What is real and what is virtual are shifting as technology explodes into our daily lives. At the same time, we are transforming as a society and a species. What is the most important thing? seems like a question in transition. But is it really? Because of my profession, I have a front-row seat from which to witness, investigate, and try to understand the metamorphosis that we human beings are undergoing. And I am not just a witness to but also an inhabitant of this brave new world, experiencing the effects of technology on myself, my children, my friends, my clients, and all others in my life. We are all facing new issues and difficulties as a result of our use of and reliance on technology. We are changing emotionally, relating to one another and ourselves in profoundly different ways than we did before the technology explosion. How we spend our time, what motivates us, what we want — all are on a radical course of transformation. In many cases, the adaptations that are occurring work well for technology. By the second, technology is growing and evolving into something we can’t live without. But is technology helping us humans to grow, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually? Or do we need to alter our relationship with technology so that we humans can also continue to evolve?

I observe more and more of my clients, as well as friends, family, and others, becoming dependent on their devices in order to feel complete, ‘calm,’ and basically okay. Many people now need their devices and the ongoing infusion of entertainment, information, and communication that technology provides to keep themselves from feeling bored and agitated, which are now considered the normal sensations for a life that is ‘turned off.’ What we expect from the present moment has changed: we are now accustomed to ongoing stimulation and feel anxious and lacking without it. There is a continual sense that we should be doing something, which then causes us to grab our smartphones to seek some relief from that anxiety. And while most people now check their smartphones 150 times per day, or every six minutes, not enough of us consider our behavior around technology to be a real problem.

Over a relatively short span of time, our use of technology has exploded — smartphones, mobile devices, tablets, social and other media, emails, texting, apps, games, music, videos, photo sharing, and all the rest. Technology has become a persistent presence in our public and private worlds, day and night. The average person now spends more than eight hours a day on their phone and laptop, more time than they spend sleeping, and most have their phones turned on all the time, even in bed. And young adults are now sending an average of 110 texts per day. But perhaps more remarkable even than how much our use of technology is increasing is how we are relating to it. On that front, 46 percent of smartphone users now say that their devices are something they ‘couldn’t live without.’

With the assistance of technology, we now have the ability to know, do, watch, and learn almost anything. But by indulging that ability, we have created a state in which every nook and cranny of our internal and external space is filled with stuff to do, think about, watch, listen to, know, and learn. Our internal hard drives are jammed beyond capacity with thoughts, information, and new tasks. People I meet with, work with, live with, and everything else with consistently report a great longing for space, room to breathe, time with themselves, or, as we now call it, ‘bandwidth’ — and yet such peace, quiet, and downtime are harder and harder to find or create. Our lives are filled with more possibilities than ever before to connect, consume, and discover — all good things — but in the face of these possibilities, we are also feeling less connected, less centered, and less satisfied. The digital age is an age of both too much and not enough. How do we stay in touch with what is most important to us when we’re buried under hundreds of emails and texts and technological tasks each day?

How do we stay in the present moment in a society that beckons us with relentless — and enticing — distractions? How do we maintain connection in our relationships when conversations are interrupted dozens of times and so many people are busy staring into their personal screens? Where do we find the silence and focus we need when there is almost nowhere left to escape from the chimes, bells, and vibrations that constantly invade our private spaces, when every activity is part of a larger multitasking operation? With what skills can we stay empowered and calm when we must continually figure out how to keep our technology running smoothly just so we can participate in the world? How do we hold onto a sense of tangible reality when so much of our life is virtual? And, most importantly, how do we stay grounded and connected to our deeper wisdom at this time in history, on this wild digital ride that the human race has embarked upon? How do we live peacefully with the excitement and madness and do it all without going mad ourselves?

… Technology is a powerful tool for communication, and yet the way we are using it and the authority we are awarding it are also making it into a powerful impediment to our sense of presence and awareness. We are succumbing to our more primitive tendencies toward unconsciousness, going under a kind of technological anesthesia, which renders us unaware of where we actually are physically and with whom we are sharing company. Technology is dazzling us into a form of entertaining sleep, and too many of us are not yet making conscious choices about whether we agree with what is happening and in fact want to disappear from our lives. Technology offers the potential for everything we can imagine, but when we do make the effort to get quiet, we often discover that what we really want, ‘the most important thing,’ is to experience a good life, one filled with contentment, love, meaning, and depth, a life filled with rich experiences and relationships — not more of everything virtually possible. Technology, as too many of us are now using it, is not leading us to a better life, not to a state of fundamental well-being.” (from the Introduction: “Finding Ground in a Virtual World”)

“When it comes to engaging ourselves, there is an aspect of us that is wired to opt for the passive route. Human beings like to be entertained, and we like it when things come without effort. Ultimately, however, we need the ability to imagine and create, to be able to engage ourselves — not simply distract ourselves — in order to be self-sufficient and feel fully alive. Without this ability, we will become robots, relinquishing the best of our humanness as we accomplish tasks and frantically fill up the spaces between them with distractions. So, too, we will lose the great joy to be had when we create something out of nothing — and the knowledge that we are fundamentally okay with only our own imagination to play with, the capacity to know ourselves as not boring.” (from Chapter 7: “An Epidemic of Boredom”)

“Although we humans create computers, we have forgotten that these machines are our tools — and not the other way around. We are now deferring to technology as if it can choose the answers for us rather than help us choose our own. Do we need to create a program that will remind the computer — or, perhaps more effectively, us — who the boss is here? … How do we prevent ourselves from becoming a society of conformists, blindly accepting the information provided by a ghost inside a machine? How do we avoid turning our authority over to the computer, allowing it to determine what we can and cannot do and, most importantly, what we actually want?

To be self-reliant is to know and trust that we have the answers for ourselves, that our intuition and intelligence are the source of our greatness, and that we can be trusted to create and guide our own destinies. Thinking out of the box may not be the path of least resistance, but the path of least resistance may end up being the path of extinction and will undoubtedly be the end of our awareness. In fact, we need some resistance in our lives to stay awake and not slip into unconsciousness. If we humans do not want to end up as sleepwalking passengers in our own lives, then we need to examine our willingness to turn our lives over to technology, to relinquish the right to determine our fates, and to allow the finite box of the computer to stand in for our infinite wisdom.” (from Chapter 8: “When Technology Bosses Us Around”)

In her book, Nancy Colier has several chapters about mindfulness techniques, but I have not discussed them since they are not relevant to my subject here, but I will include mindfulness where it will be relevant in Chapter 12 of Volume III of my book when I will discuss psychology. If the reader is interested in further study of the above subjects, there appear to be many books which discuss the negative effects of entertainment and technology, but the books I chose here cover the points I wanted to present. Everyone has to make their own choice about which and how much they allow media to run their lives. Nevertheless, while I understand that humans don’t want to return to living in caves, I believe the path we’re on now is unbalanced and won’t lead to a good outcome. As for myself, I don’t consider that the arts, or any imitation of reality, holds a candle to what is God-given. I will accord arts, entertainment and information technology value where I think they have value and keep the rest to a minimum so I can move on to other subjects that I consider more important for everyone, and for me personally, namely relationships, which I discuss in the last section of this website, a subject which I have not solved in my own life.