Consuming Art Makes Us Better People
Recently, while browsing in the Museum of Modern Art store in New York, I came across a tote bag with the inscription, “You are no longer the same after experiencing art.” It is a nice sentiment, I thought, but is it true? Does consuming art, music, literature and the rest of what we call culture make you a better person?
Ages ago, Aristotle thought it did, but these days a lot of people seem to doubt it. Since the early 2000s, fewer and fewer people say that they visit art museums and galleries, go to see plays or attend classical music concerts, opera or ballet. College students are fleeing the humanities for the computer sciences, having apparently decided that a professional leg up is more important than the state of their souls.
I still cling to the old faith that culture is vastly more important than some training in algorithms and software systems. I am convinced that consuming culture furnishes your mind with emotional knowledge and wisdom; it helps you take a richer view of your own experiences; it helps you understand the depths of what is going on in the people right around you.
The novelist Alice Walker lamented that she lacked models. She was not aware of enough Black female writers who could serve as inspirations as she tried to perceive her world and tell her stories. Then she found the novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, who, decades before, had pointed the way, shown her how to see and express, enabled her to write about her mother’s life, about voodoo, the structures of authentic Black folklore. Thanks to Hurston she had a new way to see, a deeper way to connect to her own heritage.
I would argue that we have become so sad, lonely and mean as a society in part because so many people have not been taught or do not bother to enter sympathetically into the minds of their fellow human beings. We are overpoliticized while growing increasingly undermoralized, underspiritualized, undercultured. The alternative is to rediscover the humanist code. It is based on the idea that unless you immerse yourself in the humanities, you may never confront the most important question: How should I live my life?
Ralph Waldo Emerson argued that we consume culture to enlarge our hearts and minds. We start with the tiny circle of our own experience, but gradually we acquire more expansive ways
of seeing the world. The humanistic mind expands outward to wider and wider circles of awareness.
I went to college at a time when many people believed that the great books, poems, paintings and pieces of music held the keys to the kingdom. If you studied them deeply, they would improve your taste, your judgments, your conduct.
Our professors at the University of Chicago had sharpened their minds and renovated their hearts by learning from and arguing against books. They welcomed us into a great conversation, traditions of dispute stretching back to Aeschylus, Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Clifford Odets. They held up visions of excellence, people who had seen farther and deeper, such as Augustine, Sylvia Plath and Richard Wright.
They introduced us to the moral ecologies that have been built over the centuries and come down as sets of values by which we can choose to live: stoicism, Buddhism, romanticism, rationalism, Marxism, liberalism, feminism.
All of us could improve by becoming familiar with the greatest art, philosophy, literature and history. The hard sciences help us understand the natural world. The social sciences help us measure behavior patterns. But the liberal arts help us enter the subjective experience of particular people: how this individual felt; how this one longed and suffered. We have the chance to move with them, experience the world, a bit, the way they experience it.
We know from studies by the psychologists Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley that reading literature is associated with empathy skills. Deep reading, immersing yourself in novels with complex characters, engaging with stories that explore the complexity of this character’s motivations or that character’s wounds, is training for understanding human variety. It empowers us to see the people in our lives more accurately and more generously, to better understand their intentions, fears and needs, the hidden kingdom of their unconscious drives. The result is emotional knowledge.
The novelist Frederick Buechner observed that not all the faces Rembrandt painted were remarkable. But even the plainest face “is so remarkably seen that it forces you to see it remarkably.” We are jolted into not taking other people for granted but to respect the depth of each human soul.
Experiences with great artworks deepen us in ways that are hard to describe. To have visited Chartres Cathedral or finished Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” is not about acquiring new facts but to feel somehow elevated, enlarged, altered. In Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” the protagonist notices that as he ages, he is able to perceive life on a deeper level: “I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish.”
Perception is a creative act. You take what you have experienced during your life, the models you have stored up in your head, and you apply them to help you interpret all the ambiguous data your senses pick up, to help you discern what really matters.
Artists are constructing a complex, coherent representation of the world. The universe is a silent, colorless place. But by using our imaginations, we construct colors and sounds, tastes and stories, joy and sorrow. Paintings, poems, novels and music help multiply and refine the models we use to perceive and construct reality. By attending to great perceivers, the Louis Armstrongs, the Jorge Luis Borgeses, the Jane Austens, we can more subtly understand what is going on around us and be better at expressing what we see and feel.
When you go to the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, you do not just see Picasso’s “Guernica”; forever after you see war through that painting’s lenses. You feel the wailing mother, the screaming horse, the chaotic jumble of death and agony, and it becomes less possible to romanticize warfare. We do not just see paintings; we see according to them.
The philosopher Roger Scruton argued that this kind of education gives us the ability to experience emotions that may never happen to us directly. He wrote: “The reader of Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’ learns how to animate the natural world with pure hopes of his own; the spectator of Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’ learns of the pride of corporations, and the benign sadness of civic life; the listener to Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ symphony is presented with the open floodgates of human joy and creativity; the reader of Proust is led through the enchanted world of childhood and made to understand the uncanny prophecy of our later griefs which those days of joy contain.”
Your way of perceiving the world becomes your way of being in the world. If your eyes have been trained to see by the way Leo Tolstoy saw, if you understand people with as much complexity as Shakespeare did, then you have enhanced the way you live your life.
Attention is a moral act. The key
Reading literature can heighten our empathy skills.
to becoming a better person, Iris Murdoch wrote, is to be able to cast a “just and loving attention” on others. It is to shed the self-serving way of looking at the world and to see things as they really are. We can, Murdoch argued, grow by looking. Culture gives us an education in how to attend.
The best of the arts are moral without moralizing. Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” is an inquiry into the knowledge of right and wrong, told through the eyes of one who suffers, with all the pity and sorrow that involves.
One of my heroes is Samuel Johnson, the essayist, playwright, poet, dictionary compiler, one of the greatest critics of all time. He was something of a mess as a young man — lazy, envious, unreliable. Over the decades, he read, wrote and felt his way to greatness.
He wrote about the great works of the Western tradition, and especially about his own sins as if he were trying to beat it out of himself through the scourge of self-examination. His awareness of human depravity led to humility and redemption. By the end of his life he was lavishly generous, a man who had the ability to see the world with absolute honesty and sympathetic perception. Johnson socialized with artists and statesmen, but he invited society’s outcasts to live with him so that he could feed and shelter them. One night he found a woman, likely a prostitute, lying ill on the street. He put her on his back and brought her home to join the others.
When he died, his eulogist observed that he left a chasm that nothing could fill. He embodied that old humanist ideal. He had become a person of culture, a wonderful man.