What Is The Role of Art in a New Society?
Balaji Srinivasan, Lucretius, and Agitprop
Balaji Srinivasan wants to found a new country. His guiding principle is “cloud first, land last.” He explains:
We build the embryonic state as an open source project, we organize our internal economy around remote work, we cultivate in-person levels of civility, we simulate architecture in VR, and we create art and literature that reflects our values (emphasis mine).
I agree with Srinivasan’s insight that creating art and literature are integral to society, and yet I’m skeptical that art primarily intended to convey “our values” will be any good. (Maybe it doesn’t matter, as long as it mobilizes ideological passion—but then maybe we shouldn’t call it art).
Of course, all art implicitly conveys some values—but if art is just a vehicle for transmitting value—why do it? Is art really just part of the values “stack”. This is certainly how you might think of art if you’re a sociologist or anthropologist, but phenomenologically, it seems to miss the experience of artists and viewers.
Lucretius might disagree with me. He wrote a long poem, On the Nature of Things, whose goal was to express Epicurean philosophy in verse. He compares poetry to the honey that helps the medicine (philosophy) go down. The task of art is to move, he thinks. But this task is subordinate to the object, which is philosophical truth. Swap in politics or ethics for philosophy and you have the same Lucretian principle. The Soviets called it agitprop. But the best Russian artists knew how to be more than just mouthpieces of ideology. Similarly, in the Renaissance, many great artists took up theological themes and were often patronized by the Church, but their work was not reducible to the orthodoxy it expressed. Dante is a great example of someone whose work does much more than convey standard religious values—if it even does that.
I’m pluralistic about the uses of art, but a country whose artists are patriot-ideologues first and artists second may be one where the art is unworthy of its attention. If I were founding a country, I would patronize artists whose work is meaningful, irrespective of whether it expresses the values of the country I wanted to create.
What role would art play in your new world?
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