Saving ourselves from our own humanity
Legendary art history professor, painter and UCSC founding faculty member Mary Holmes was an oldschool humanist. In one of our conversations, when I mentioned overpopulation as a problem for the planet, with an ever-increasing number of humans — the world's most invasive species, now 8 billion strong and counting — consuming our way through finite natural resources and littering Earth with our waste, Mary didn't buy it: “You can't have too much of a good thing,” she argued; no matter how much damage people did to their habitat, and to each other, their cultural creations would always compensate. To doubt humanity's creative benevolence was unthinkable to her perennially sunny outlook.
That was in the mid-1980s. She died, at 91, in 2002, so she missed the chance to witness our current cascading catastrophes: an overheating global atmosphere, perpetually mutating and adapting pandemic viruses, human indifference or incapacity to respond to either with corrective behavior, skies full of smoke, oceans full of plastic and increasingly toxic politics worldwide, most horribly Vladimir Putin's criminal war on Ukraine (politics by other means), that only exacerbate the crises. We are caught in an imperfect storm of environmental, public health and political malfunctions that appear to have passed several points of no return.
Again this year, after the long drought and the CZU fires of 2020, our turn came to be whipped by the stormy lash of climate change with its floods and mudslides ravaging the human landscape. The coming years and decades promise a whole lot more misery and suffering and grief. And for all of humans' ingenuity and creativity, which will likely produce some brilliant innovations in technology and the arts, it's hard to feel optimistic about our prospects, especially as some of those innovations (AI, anyone?) promise more derangement than enlightenment.
When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Mary's tools were a paintbrush and her deep immersion in the humanities combined with her skills as a storyteller. Her former students have told me she was enchanting in her eloquence and enthusiasm as a lecturer; her discourse on art and history radiated amazement at human accomplishment through the centuries, how people had made it through myriad ordeals, evils, corruptions, plagues, apocalyptic calamities of all kinds and come out of dark ages to build cathedrals and create immortal masterworks of art and literature. She told me once that the study of history “calms the mind” by revealing recurrent patterns of crisis and recovery.
I have my doubts about what's in store for us and our children and grandchildren, but I can easily imagine how the scale and intensity of what nature deals us will generate a phenomenal flowering of the arts. We're just beginning to see what the pandemic has inspired, and the watershed social changes of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements (backlashes and all), and I expect the floods and infernos of climate cataclysms will generate memorable works that may even manifest some form of hope, or at least a cathartic consolation for what is lost.
Since the big picture looks so grim, and metastatic virtual information is a cancer on our collective consciousness, my best guess is that it is at the most intimate level where we have a chance of salvaging what's worth saving. Small self-organized communities, interpersonal relations, individual and collaborative works of artistic creation (writing, visual and plastic arts, music, theater, dance, film) may at least give some of us a chance to record joy and transform despair into an enduring account of what we've endured and a vision of what may still be possible.
That's why study of the arts and humanities remains crucial to the cultivation of our creative potential. Mary knew that to nurture imagination we must understand ourselves — not just the horrors of our crimes against nature and our political pathologies but the beauty and courage that make our species worthy of survival.