On the Design of Community
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
(2874 words)
Earlier than ten thousand years or so ago, humans hunted and gathered food in bands or tribes with no more than a few hundred members. They occupied land, a territory, which they defended against other tribes, because their lives depended on it. Those were societies similar to that of other primates, such as gorillas, baboons, or chimpanzees: a core of dominant males surrounded by females and children, and immature or aging males standing guard and sounding alarms on the perimeter of the roving group, ready to engage hostile tribes or large predators, until the big males joined the fray. In human tribes, many males and females were pairing for life or for enough years to nourish offspring to maturity, about thirteen years. At thirteen, boys became men with a bar mitzvah or something equivalent, and the girls married off, or sold, anyway turned over to reproduction and life-long service to the family. When early geniuses domesticated animals and plants in certain tribes, those tribes settled down in the most fertile area of their territory, starting the first village communities. Surplus grain, meat, and milk allowed leisure for technical innovations and the development of specialized skills. Societies became large and more complex; the chiefs became kings, the shamans, priests. Eventually, where resources were plentiful, cities emerged in the Nile delta, in Mesopotamia, and other fertile river valleys. Today, we have huge metropolitan areas, like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, Moscow, with luxurious developments, cultural centers, government buildings, transportation corridors, office buildings, manufacturing plants--also slums, crime, pollution, noise, congestion, traffic jams, and other evils. In response, thinking people ask: can we not design a community properly, as we design other systems, to meet human needs for healthful living, privacy, peace, security, and social interaction, rather than accept the massive urban agglomerations grown on our lands? Yes, we can, but to build on a design for the ideal community may be more difficult for people than to stay in the ugly urban centers they now have.
People may be afraid that the community that is designed will be uglier than one that has grown naturally. Utopia is the word for it when the outcome of the design is good, dystopia when the end product is ugly. Thomas More wrote "Utopia" to describe a socialist community ruled by just laws, not kings. King Henry VIII ordered Moore's beheading for "treason against the crown," (really for simple disobedience in the issue of the king's divorce and remarriage). In ancient times, the philosopher Plato designed his "Republic" to be ruled by a philosopher king and properly trained noble men. Plato was a philosopher and an aristocrat. According to legend, the ancient Greek city state of Sparta was designed by Lykurgos, the city's king, and turned out to be as ugly in many ways as Hitler's Nazi Germany, or Lenin's Soviet Union. Why was Sparta a dystopia? The ruling class, Dorian warriors who came to Greece from the North, conquered and enslaved the locals, who were more numerous than they. The slaves worked the fields, periodically revolting and getting punished by their Spartan overlords. Sparta was also threatened by other city states and non-Greeks, such as the Persians in the East. King Lykurgos organized his city as a permanent armed camp. All citizens, from a very young age, devoted their lives almost exclusively to exercising for war with no regard for discomfort, pain, or danger. Citizens had little time for the finer arts, learning, or even for their families. They admired strength, courage, and honor only. They lived Spartan lives. The city survived for many centuries undefeated and even prevailed over the vast Persian army, with the help of other Greeks, and later defeated the powerful city of Athens, its liberal design said to have been laid out by the legendary King Theseus.
Later in that age, Alexander the Great founded several cities he named Alexandria, the most famous one in Egypt, where his general Ptolemy and his descendants, including Queen Cleopatra, ruled for some years. Alexandria in Egypt became famous as a cultural center of the ancient world, with its vast library and scientific center, burned by a Christian mob as a pagan target, with many irreplaceable manuscripts lost forever to the world.
Eventually every community, no matter how strongly built, will collapse, as Sparta did after the rise of Macedonia and later that of Rome; survival cannot be the only principle to follow in designing a community, or a private life. Utopian dreamers should consider the principle of bringing the magic of the arts to our brief existence on earth, as the ancient Athenians did brilliantly with music, dance, painting, sculpture, architecture, drama, poetry, oratory, history, and philosophy. The design of the ideal community should allow also for expression of spiritual sentiments, the free worship of God, as each person perceives God, and above all freedom for all the people to live the way they choose, provided they bring no harm to others. A society cannot be peaceable and content when some of the people are masters while others slaves, when a few are filthy rich, while most others dirt poor, or when some are exalted, while others oppressed; above all, a good community is a just community, where all citizens may advance themselves with hard work, talent, and learning, where those who save and invest may get to keep most of their wealth for themselves and their children instead of being taxed to death and beyond; people will not be motivated to work hard and save, if most of the coin they earn is taken from them by the Sheriff of Nottingham, or Robin Hood. Most of all, the ideal community cultivates the fruit trees of imagination and creativity, which are the sources of the most abundant wealth.
Great wealth is not enough for a city if its environment is not safe and healthful. Rome may have lost its vitality and power because of the lead metal used in water pipes and containers, leading to the slow poisoning of eminent people and their children. Today, many large cities are covered with smog and toxic chemical residues; water is polluted; food is lacking in vital nutrients, because of depleted soils and over processing; crime is rampant, damaging lives and property; moving about is gruesome in mass transit or in traffic with a private car; noise is jangling our nerves in stores, streets, subways, restaurants, clubs, offices, or factories. People add to all that mess by smoking, drinking alcohol, strong coffee, tea, sugar, or stronger addictive drugs. One of the worst ills of most modern metropolitan areas is the sheer density of the population. Experiments with rats and other mammals have shown that the health of the animals rapidly declines as population density gets higher than normal in the wild. Animals become aggressive, attacking their fellows more often, raping the females, who suffer frequent miscarriages; males abuse or eat many of the young. Humans, like rats, are very adaptable, surviving in dense crowds and in other adverse conditions; surviving is not the same as living good lives.
A community may survive, but it will not thrive, unless those who are capable of doing excellent work are encouraged to produce it and profit from it. Such a community will fall behind others and decay, eventually dissolving, as it happened with the Soviet Union, where political institutions ware framed by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.
By comparison, the Founding Fathers of America, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and others, framed just institutions for the federal and state governments, with balanced powers for the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. These institutions have served America well, promoting growth, prosperity, and social peace at a high level. That is why many more people want to come to the United States than want to leave it.
The design of America is fine at the federal and state levels, not so at the county and city levels. Large cities are not suitable for good and healthful living; small towns are places where young people find little in the way of recreation, education, cultural expression, and employment. If the local factory closes down, workers have to move to the big city where there are many companies operating, as well as job opportunities in government, education, and services. Thus large cities become more populous and small towns the depositories of old and spent people. Transportation is a nightmare in metropolitan areas; the grid system of roads, which served early, largely rural, America well is clogged with automobiles. Cities grow horizontally, spreading over much prime agricultural land, asphalt and concrete covering large areas. Master-planned communities, such as Mission Viejo, Woodbridge, and Valencia in California have provided bikeways, walkways, parks, and excellent street landscaping for commercial purposes, in order to sell track homes, and condos. In the last decade of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first, high-rise condos for affluent people, and mixed-use buildings for childless couples and single people have revitalized many downtown centers. Unfortunately, they have also added to congestion.
History shows that civilization and high culture do not flourish in large, congested, cities or small towns and villages, but in prosperous cities of one to a few hundred thousand people, such as those of ancient Greece or Renaissance Italy. Those were city states, each about the size of a county.
County governments today have little power to correct problems like congestion and heavy traffic. Cities look to their own interests and are fixated on growth at any cost. The federal government with its broad and extensive powers must impose zoning and construction codes that will establish properly designed and distributed cities of moderate size, not too large, not too small. Good ideas come from Arcosanti in Arizona, being built slowly by architect Paolo Soleri and his students on a plateau north of Phoenix. This is a three-dimensional city which incorporates industry, agriculture, housing, offices, entertainment, all the needed amenities, with the use of little land, and hardly any roads. It is a city designed to a human scale, where people can recapture their tribal heritage, living in it without pollution or strife.
Such three-dimensional cities, separated by wide areas of open land zoned for agriculture, parks, or wilderness, would serve us far better than our current population centers. Each city would be designed with a planned maximum size, no more than a million people, and once that size was reached it would stop growing. Individuals and companies would own the framework of spaces to finish for their uses: industry below ground, stores on the surface, offices next up, and residential units higher still. The top of the city would be used for solar panels, wind turbines, antennas, pools, sport facilities, gardens, and helicopter pads. In the city's compact space, few pollutants, CO2 for example, will be generated and can be more easily trapped for disposal; everything used can be recycled. Transportation corridors would exist between cities, but inside the city, traffic would be with elevators, escalators, bikes, and feet for the most part. The entire structure would be air-conditioned efficiently by central facilities on the roof and basement.
I visualize such a structure, with a different shape for each city to fit its particular function and character; it would be a steel and concrete building inside a cube of ten miles all around, with an average population density of one thousand people in each cubic mile; cities would separated by open country one hundred miles in each direction. Such a dispersion of our cities would make America safer from acts of war or terrorism, even from natural disasters, such as meteors, hurricanes, flooding, and volcanic eruptions. One structure might suffer extensive damage, but others not much. It would not be like the damage America would suffer if a major metropolitan area is struck, as New Orleans by hurricane Katrina. The social organization inside the city would also fare better than New Orleans did, because people would be more closely knit together by proximity and allegiance to their community.
I do not mean to imply that city design would involve much social engineering, such as proposed in B. F. Skinner's "Walden II." People would naturally be more closely knit, cooperating better with each other in a stable, well-organized, and civilized city, than in a megalopolis full of the slums of disadvantaged people. I don't subscribe to social engineering which forces human beings into molds for which they have not evolved and to constraints they are not pleased to assume. I respect freedom above security, comfort, wealth, even life itself.
Humans cannot be happy and fruitful living like social insects, bees, ants and such, with a reproducing queen, all others completely constrained to specific tasks: food gathering, warfare, nursing, etc. Humans have minds that adapt readily, allowing them to grow, change, and form creative relationships with other people. It is human nature to want to be with others, enjoying work and recreation together. Community engineers and dictators should stop trying to turn their fellow humans into social insects.
People in the ideal city should have the freedom to enter into any social arrangements they choose, to form the friendships, marriages, contacts, neighborhoods, tribes they choose, without undue interference from government. In our large cities now, we have Chinatown, Korea town, Greek town, Germantown, etc. That will also be fine in our city of the future.
In the U. S. there have been many experiments with forming communities on religious grounds, such as the Amish, Shakers, Oneida, and the early Mormon tribe. Some of these tribes still exist--enlarged or diminished. The nineteen sixties and seventies brought us many communes, dedicated to independence from the consuming culture of American life, instead sharing resources among the people, not competition and personal enrichment. The vast majority of these communes have disbanded, as most socialist movements usually do, but have brought some of their values to the rest of society. Other people created modern business cultures: corporate tribes, such as Apple Computers, Microsoft, eBay, Amazon, Google, and many others in Silicon Valley and beyond. A business organization, of course, has to be geared to the efficient production of goods in order for an enterprise to compete and survive. A government organization, too, needs to be effective in serving the people, or their rulers.
In the ideal city, and country, politics should serve the people, not rulers of any sort. I reject autocracy in any form, even that of Singapore which thrived with autocracy under Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, or that of prospering Russia under Putin. China, Pakistan, Myanmar, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Lybia, Zimbawe, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and many other nations have worse problems with autocracy. Monarchs, tyrants, dictators, entrenched presidents, ruling political parties, usually controlling the army and secret police, restrict freedoms, oppress, exploit, torture, and kill people who resist their dominance of social affairs.
Our American democratic system serves justice well, but it can be improved to fit better our design of new high-rise communities widely surrounded by open land. Take the voting system for example. We require that new immigrants pass a simple test to get citizenship after at least five years of residence. Citizens born in America don't have to pass such a test, except in school, out of which children frequently drop out. Born idiots are allowed to vote, senile seniors too. A graduate from Podunk High School with 1.1 GPA has one vote; so does a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Political Science. During elections, people are asked to vote for officials on the basis of what they read in papers, see on television, or after listening to speeches crafted by paid political writers, which simply spew out what the voters want to hear.
In our new cities, every one thousand adults could vote for leaders in their neighborhood they would know well, and one thousand such leaders could elect officials to manage the city. One thousand city officials could then pick state officials, and one thousand state officials could appoint the top officials to run the federal government. Such an election system would be grass-roots democratic, major voting decisions made by knowledgeable people, expert in administrative processes. We would get a hierarchy of power, created from the bottom to the top, a hierarchy changing with each election, not becoming entrenched.
What we have thought about the ideal community may be fine, but how do we build one? Who has the power of Alexander the Great, Julius Cesar, or Napoleon the Great to accomplish such a task? Great people build to become even more powerful, glorifying their names. Big companies with master plans for new communities proclaim broad social ideals, while pursuing narrow commercial interests: the bottom line. The rest of us, though, can get together and vote for changes in our society with enlightened leaders whom we elect wisely. To a degree, the necessary changes are already occurring in our society. We can also change our nation by choosing to live in a city that meets our criteria for a good community, moving out of a city which does not, as long as we have the means and freedoms to choose.
Showing posts with label Cultures. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cultures. Show all posts
Monday, February 9, 2009
An Inquiry into the Flowering of Cultures
An Inquiry into the Flowering of Cultures
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
All cultures are valuable and worthy of study, Margaret Mead would say. All cultures are equal, interesting, and must be preserved for posterity; each contains unique elements which may prove essential to human survival and growth; that’s the truth indeed. Yet, some cultures flourish at times in human history above the norm. We had the splendor that was Greece, and the might that was Rome. Barbarian tribes nearly destroyed all that and Jewish theology put the finishing touches to the advent of the dark ages. Renaissance finally dawned in Italy, giving us da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Galileo. Then the new flowering of culture spread to the barbarian lands of Holland, Spain, France, England, Germany, Russia, and smaller nations in Europe. The proud nations of Europe later discovered other cultures of great importance that had flourished in the past: in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, Middle America, Peru, Indochina, and other lands. What was the common thread that gave rise to such extraordinary growths in art, science, technology, politics, and religion? How was this thread cut, leading to decay, apathy, ignorance, and the death of the creative mind? The thread was the reach of leading noble citizens for creativity, for excellence, and for the divine; the thread was cut when barbarians, from home or abroad, brought down those citizens.
The word in Sanskrit for noble is aryan, a word debased by Nazi ideologues. In Hinduism arya is a title of honor and respect, meaning noble or spiritual. In Greek the word “arete” was used to describe what was best in anything, indicating superlative ability and nobility, from which derived aristos (best) and aristocracy. Aryan is also related to Iran (Persia) and Zoroastrianism, a germinal religion of ancient times which gave rise to the belief in the immortality of the spirit. Being noble is to seek the best things in life. Excellence is the passion to achieve great works, in fierce competition with equally talented antagonists. The divine, the ultimate nobility, is that state of being which is full of peace, contentment, creativity, power, wisdom, great knowledge, compassion, and joy--the attributes of God.
In the past, people believed attributes of nobility were passed on to offspring through breeding, or blood. Nobles bequeathed their wealth, titles, and powerful positions to their first sons, who were sometimes idiots; the smart second or third sons went to America to build wealth for themselves. Today, genetics provides some explanations for the transfer of hereditary traits. Certainly some physical characteristics are inherited: for example, the color of eyes, hair, and skin, even stature of body and size of brain. Spiritual qualities may be a different matter. King David gave birth to Solomon; but Marcus Aurelius to Commodus. Moreover, many great men and women have come from humble backgrounds, from commoners or even serfs. Yet, with the rise of democracies throughout the world, perhaps we have swung too far in neglecting birth and breeding. We should honor and support nobility no matter what the source of it. The British are wise to confer knighthoods to people, such as Ben Kingsley, actor, son of an East Indian, who tap their source of nobility and contribute to society something of value and importance.
In 1919 Munich, the Thule Society discovered the source of nobility in Atlantis, which sank they claimed in the Northern Atlantic Ocean a million years ago; The Thule attributed much virtue to the blond, blue-eyed Nordic strain of humans. The Society sponsored Deutsche Arbeirpartei, which became the Nazi party under Adolph Hitler. Teutonic people were the master race, and every other type of human was inferior. That would leave out the ancient Greeks, and the modern European Jews, who have contributed greatly to civilization. Jesus, the Jewish carpenter, was not light skinned and blond; neither was Einstein. In every field of civilized life, European Jews excelled, yet Hitler decided they had to be exterminated. I am not a Nordic type, and most likely, you are not either. Even Southern Germans are not very blond. Blond men may be superior, but popular opinion holds that blond women are dumb. Disregarding eugenics, gentlemen prefer blonds, so blonds have more fun; that’s why so many silly women become blonds, and with contact lenses, blue-eyed too.
Blond or dark, certain strains of humanity build civilization better than others. We should encourage them to continue doing this and discourage those people who tend to destroy culture. The best way to discourage barbarians from destroying the fruits of culture is to civilize them. Ancient Romans in the West were successful to some extent doing that with the French, Western Germans, and the Anglo-Saxons; they failed in Eastern Germany (and Scotland, where Hadrian built a wall to stop them); eventually, the barbarian armies sacked Rome and took over the Holy Roman Empire. Many centuries later, in the East, the Byzantines made progress with the Arabs, but were overwhelmed by the Turks. Barbarians usually win the conflict in the end, because barbarians live in tough circumstances, become strong and aggressive, and have higher birthrates. Civilizations degenerate from ease and weakness; then barbarians destroy them. Barbarians are always charging at the gates of the city with high culture.
The French call it “haute culture,” when talking about clothing fashions. I refer to culture that noble people create, which has little to do with clothing, wooden masks for ceremonies, the igloo, or the boomerang—good things as these may be. High culture is when noble people strive to reach God, the ideal of perfection. I realize you may dispute the distinction between high culture and low. What is fine music, great painting, good science, useful technology, powerful religion or politics, all are subject to taste and fashion. But for now let us accept the opinions of teachers or critics. They instruct us to admire the achievements of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and before them the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians who invented writing and other arts. We can see in National Geographic about archaeological discoveries in Middle and South America and admire the remains of the Mayan and Inca civilizations. In the East, we can tour in person or by travelogue Cambodia’s Angkor Vat, India’s magnificent temples, Japan’s Kyoto treasures, and China’s Ming artworks. What brought about such achievements?
Nobility is essential for great achievements, but not sufficient; wealth is also necessary. You can hardly be noble without money. You cannot indulge in the arts and sciences, when you are struggling each day for bare survival. Civilizations don’t emerge in villages and farms. A good river is almost always there for a city to grow big and prosperous. A coastline with a natural harbor helps too. The Egyptian civilization was the gift of the Nile, and Babylon the gift of two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates. It seems that each great city is next to a river flowing by to supply water for irrigation, drinking and sewage disposal. Rome, Tiber. Paris, Seine. London, Thames. Vienna, Danube. Palestine, Jordan. Ancient Athens had Cephissus, small but competent. The plains of Attica were fertile, growing olives, grapes, wheat, and vegetables, which formed the early wealth of the city. The harbor of Piraeus was close and the road to it was walled in. The Athenians ventured out to the Aegean and beyond to trade with their olive oil, wine and other products. Later Athenians acquired slaves, set up factories, and exported manufactured products. Athenian navy allowed people to travel to Egypt and other centers of civilization, which were already ancient in their time. During the Persian wars the Athenians led the Greeks in victorious battles and later formed the Delian League of city states, collecting taxes and tributes for the common defense against Persians. The Persians caused no further trouble, so Pericles, elected city leader for over thirty years, used the money to create splendid cultural monuments on the Acropolis and elsewhere for the enjoyment of the people and to impress visitors. The age of Pericles is known as the Golden Age of Greece.
Pericles was a democratic leader, descended from aristocratic families, especially on his mother’s side. He was accused by enemies of being a populist, because he gave the vote to poor people and provided free theater seats for them with city money. But the plays he sponsored were tragedies by Aeschylos, Sophocles, and Euripides, with some comic relief from Aristophanes.
The sculptor Pericles favored was Phidias. Phidias was also a great painter and architect, seeking perfection in everything he created. Once he was asked why he bothered to make the backs of statues in front of walls as carefully as the fronts, since people could not see the backs. Phidias answered that the Gods could see the backs. Like da Vinci and Michelangelo in the Italian Renaissance, he was probably gay.
Being gay may give some men and women a special sensitivity that allows them to excel in the arts. Not being burdened by a family to support, gay persons may fully dedicate their lives to their art.
With the efforts of gays or straights, culture branches out, growing like a tree to any size, sprouting in all directions to infinity, eventually becoming the Deity. There can never be an end to artistic or scientific innovation. Limits occur only in the minds of spiritless people, who give up too soon. The popular arts always persist in their charming but pointless existence. Folk songs and dances go on. The handicrafts continue and philosophy becomes a collection of old sayings. When the leading people, the born aristocrats, stop striving, when they turn to pleasures and futilities, neglecting self discipline and hard work, abandoning total dedication to their chosen fields, these people decline and their society quickly follows into decay. Then tyrants, dictators, autocrats of the state take over, boxing in minds, depressing and oppressing those who would freely create new ideas. In the tree of culture whole branches dry out, dying. Perhaps most of the tree of culture withers as in the Dark Ages. But the roots seem to persist and the tree sprouts again on some other land, in some other age, when freedom of expression is again allowed.
In America, in 1776, freedom and democracy came to life again after many centuries of autocratic rule in the Old World, and with these blessings came the flowering of culture in the thirteen colonies, such as we have not seen since. Benjamin Franklin was a statesman, businessman, author, inventor, and scientist, one of the founders of electrical science. Thomas Jefferson, besides being a plantation owner and statesman, was an architect, a writer of renown with his Declaration of Independence. John Adams was an attorney and statesman with a major intellect. The bona fide genius was the elitist Alexander Hamilton, one of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, who perished in a duel with his political enemy Aaron Burr before he became 50. Hamilton contributed to the formation of a strong federal government and chief executive in the form of a president. James Madison, a political theorist, was one of the framers of the Constitution and its chief author, designing checks and balances in the distribution of federal power. George Washington was no genius but a man of immense character, an able general, and the first president; he declined to become a king as he was urged by his admirers. The U. S. was fortunate indeed to have such people who founded a republic with a reasonably good balance between freedom and discipline. Culture has flourished in America at least in science and technology.
The fine arts instead have not done as well. Artists require patronage from people of noble vision, who support contemporary work, not the classics only. The classics, traditional works, are fine to admire up to a point. I suggest that half of the support money should go to honor the classics, and the other half to support the work of living artists. Most wealthy collectors in America pay millions for the paintings and sculptures of artists long dead on the advice of their experts, and do very little to patronize living artists of merit. Our orchestras play old symphonies and operas and very little of contemporary works.
Don’t we have contemporary artists of great merit? We probably do, but these people prefer to go into business to make some real money. They are unwilling to work for fifty cents an hour like Michelangelo when he was creating the Sistine chapel’s decorations for Pope Julius II. Perhaps we don’t have patrons willing to pay even that much for art they cannot resell for profit. Anyway, egalitarian societies such as ours are not likely to give rise to fine culture. Populist or socialist societies do even worse. What came out of the Nazi socialists or the communists? They produced nothing worthwhile except for better weapons. Good artists made a run out of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union whenever they could. Creative people and oppressive governments don’t go well together. Yet, too much freedom leads to degradation and triviality, the art of urinals. Creativity depends on a sound tradition to build on, but enough freedom to reach out to new spaces for the tree of culture. Massive, centralized, governments do not advance civilization very much.
In ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, and eighteenth century Germany, people had a great flowering of culture in a political environment of city states, with noble rulers patronizing creative talent in competition to outshine with each other with great monuments for own glory and that of their city. Prime examples of such rulers were Pericles, Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence, who patronized da Vinci, Hungarian Prince Esterhazy, who supported Joseph Haydn to produce 106 magnificent symphonies, Mozart’s Prince-Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg and Emperor Joseph II in Vienna. Mozart created great operas in Vienna, such as The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni, until he fell into hard times during the Austro-Turkish War of 1787, when prosperity dropped and aristocrats were giving less money to the arts.
In hard financial times or when aristocracies fall, we see a decline in cultural growth. But a too strong, centralized government is a worse calamity for culture. In America we would do better making counties the centers of our political power and wealth, in the form of city states. Elected officials in the county, well known to the local people, may elect state governors, and governors elect the president; the same process can apply to other branches of government, the judicial and legislative, with only the most basic and necessary functions relinquished to state and federal entities. You can be sure local leaders will not give up too much power to the central governments as popular voting does in our current system. Prominent citizens may thus perform the roles of democratic princes, like Pericles or Lorenzo, each county governed by a city of modest size, certainly less than a million people. Massive urban centers, like New York or Chicago may support the arts, but not their creation as much. Most of the money goes to popular entertainments with little artistic merit for the masses.
Artistic merit prevailed in Paris during the eighteenth century; Paris was the center of the world in culture, and it was a large city; but the artistic center of it where intellects thrived was very small. Learning and creativity were nourished at the Sorbonne. The same could be said for London in the seventeenth century with Oxford and Cambridge, which produced modern science, Shakespearean theater, and other fine arts with money from exploration, the raiding of Spanish galleons by privateers, manufacturing and trade. The Dutch in Amsterdam, rich from trade, followed a similar route with the English, producing Rembrandt (patronized by Prince Frederik Hendrik), Huygens (mathematician and scientist), and Spinoza, one of greatest philosophers of all time. This was the Golden Age for the Dutch and the English.
If we want a Golden Age for planet Earth, not any more isolated flowerings of culture that quickly wither, we who know where the roots of culture are, let us remember the lessons of History and apply them to our private and social lives. An individual grows and bears fruit with a firm purpose in life, working hard to achieve it, never weakening, never giving up. The civilized person needs to be not only smarter and better trained than the barbarian, but also stronger, producing and raising children to be the same. A society, a world society today, constituted by such noble persons of birth or aspiration will prevail over the barbarians that abound everywhere in great numbers, and lead humanity to a shining future, here on Earth and elsewhere in the Universe, where astronauts may travel to build the city of God.
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
All cultures are valuable and worthy of study, Margaret Mead would say. All cultures are equal, interesting, and must be preserved for posterity; each contains unique elements which may prove essential to human survival and growth; that’s the truth indeed. Yet, some cultures flourish at times in human history above the norm. We had the splendor that was Greece, and the might that was Rome. Barbarian tribes nearly destroyed all that and Jewish theology put the finishing touches to the advent of the dark ages. Renaissance finally dawned in Italy, giving us da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Galileo. Then the new flowering of culture spread to the barbarian lands of Holland, Spain, France, England, Germany, Russia, and smaller nations in Europe. The proud nations of Europe later discovered other cultures of great importance that had flourished in the past: in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, Middle America, Peru, Indochina, and other lands. What was the common thread that gave rise to such extraordinary growths in art, science, technology, politics, and religion? How was this thread cut, leading to decay, apathy, ignorance, and the death of the creative mind? The thread was the reach of leading noble citizens for creativity, for excellence, and for the divine; the thread was cut when barbarians, from home or abroad, brought down those citizens.
The word in Sanskrit for noble is aryan, a word debased by Nazi ideologues. In Hinduism arya is a title of honor and respect, meaning noble or spiritual. In Greek the word “arete” was used to describe what was best in anything, indicating superlative ability and nobility, from which derived aristos (best) and aristocracy. Aryan is also related to Iran (Persia) and Zoroastrianism, a germinal religion of ancient times which gave rise to the belief in the immortality of the spirit. Being noble is to seek the best things in life. Excellence is the passion to achieve great works, in fierce competition with equally talented antagonists. The divine, the ultimate nobility, is that state of being which is full of peace, contentment, creativity, power, wisdom, great knowledge, compassion, and joy--the attributes of God.
In the past, people believed attributes of nobility were passed on to offspring through breeding, or blood. Nobles bequeathed their wealth, titles, and powerful positions to their first sons, who were sometimes idiots; the smart second or third sons went to America to build wealth for themselves. Today, genetics provides some explanations for the transfer of hereditary traits. Certainly some physical characteristics are inherited: for example, the color of eyes, hair, and skin, even stature of body and size of brain. Spiritual qualities may be a different matter. King David gave birth to Solomon; but Marcus Aurelius to Commodus. Moreover, many great men and women have come from humble backgrounds, from commoners or even serfs. Yet, with the rise of democracies throughout the world, perhaps we have swung too far in neglecting birth and breeding. We should honor and support nobility no matter what the source of it. The British are wise to confer knighthoods to people, such as Ben Kingsley, actor, son of an East Indian, who tap their source of nobility and contribute to society something of value and importance.
In 1919 Munich, the Thule Society discovered the source of nobility in Atlantis, which sank they claimed in the Northern Atlantic Ocean a million years ago; The Thule attributed much virtue to the blond, blue-eyed Nordic strain of humans. The Society sponsored Deutsche Arbeirpartei, which became the Nazi party under Adolph Hitler. Teutonic people were the master race, and every other type of human was inferior. That would leave out the ancient Greeks, and the modern European Jews, who have contributed greatly to civilization. Jesus, the Jewish carpenter, was not light skinned and blond; neither was Einstein. In every field of civilized life, European Jews excelled, yet Hitler decided they had to be exterminated. I am not a Nordic type, and most likely, you are not either. Even Southern Germans are not very blond. Blond men may be superior, but popular opinion holds that blond women are dumb. Disregarding eugenics, gentlemen prefer blonds, so blonds have more fun; that’s why so many silly women become blonds, and with contact lenses, blue-eyed too.
Blond or dark, certain strains of humanity build civilization better than others. We should encourage them to continue doing this and discourage those people who tend to destroy culture. The best way to discourage barbarians from destroying the fruits of culture is to civilize them. Ancient Romans in the West were successful to some extent doing that with the French, Western Germans, and the Anglo-Saxons; they failed in Eastern Germany (and Scotland, where Hadrian built a wall to stop them); eventually, the barbarian armies sacked Rome and took over the Holy Roman Empire. Many centuries later, in the East, the Byzantines made progress with the Arabs, but were overwhelmed by the Turks. Barbarians usually win the conflict in the end, because barbarians live in tough circumstances, become strong and aggressive, and have higher birthrates. Civilizations degenerate from ease and weakness; then barbarians destroy them. Barbarians are always charging at the gates of the city with high culture.
The French call it “haute culture,” when talking about clothing fashions. I refer to culture that noble people create, which has little to do with clothing, wooden masks for ceremonies, the igloo, or the boomerang—good things as these may be. High culture is when noble people strive to reach God, the ideal of perfection. I realize you may dispute the distinction between high culture and low. What is fine music, great painting, good science, useful technology, powerful religion or politics, all are subject to taste and fashion. But for now let us accept the opinions of teachers or critics. They instruct us to admire the achievements of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and before them the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians who invented writing and other arts. We can see in National Geographic about archaeological discoveries in Middle and South America and admire the remains of the Mayan and Inca civilizations. In the East, we can tour in person or by travelogue Cambodia’s Angkor Vat, India’s magnificent temples, Japan’s Kyoto treasures, and China’s Ming artworks. What brought about such achievements?
Nobility is essential for great achievements, but not sufficient; wealth is also necessary. You can hardly be noble without money. You cannot indulge in the arts and sciences, when you are struggling each day for bare survival. Civilizations don’t emerge in villages and farms. A good river is almost always there for a city to grow big and prosperous. A coastline with a natural harbor helps too. The Egyptian civilization was the gift of the Nile, and Babylon the gift of two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates. It seems that each great city is next to a river flowing by to supply water for irrigation, drinking and sewage disposal. Rome, Tiber. Paris, Seine. London, Thames. Vienna, Danube. Palestine, Jordan. Ancient Athens had Cephissus, small but competent. The plains of Attica were fertile, growing olives, grapes, wheat, and vegetables, which formed the early wealth of the city. The harbor of Piraeus was close and the road to it was walled in. The Athenians ventured out to the Aegean and beyond to trade with their olive oil, wine and other products. Later Athenians acquired slaves, set up factories, and exported manufactured products. Athenian navy allowed people to travel to Egypt and other centers of civilization, which were already ancient in their time. During the Persian wars the Athenians led the Greeks in victorious battles and later formed the Delian League of city states, collecting taxes and tributes for the common defense against Persians. The Persians caused no further trouble, so Pericles, elected city leader for over thirty years, used the money to create splendid cultural monuments on the Acropolis and elsewhere for the enjoyment of the people and to impress visitors. The age of Pericles is known as the Golden Age of Greece.
Pericles was a democratic leader, descended from aristocratic families, especially on his mother’s side. He was accused by enemies of being a populist, because he gave the vote to poor people and provided free theater seats for them with city money. But the plays he sponsored were tragedies by Aeschylos, Sophocles, and Euripides, with some comic relief from Aristophanes.
The sculptor Pericles favored was Phidias. Phidias was also a great painter and architect, seeking perfection in everything he created. Once he was asked why he bothered to make the backs of statues in front of walls as carefully as the fronts, since people could not see the backs. Phidias answered that the Gods could see the backs. Like da Vinci and Michelangelo in the Italian Renaissance, he was probably gay.
Being gay may give some men and women a special sensitivity that allows them to excel in the arts. Not being burdened by a family to support, gay persons may fully dedicate their lives to their art.
With the efforts of gays or straights, culture branches out, growing like a tree to any size, sprouting in all directions to infinity, eventually becoming the Deity. There can never be an end to artistic or scientific innovation. Limits occur only in the minds of spiritless people, who give up too soon. The popular arts always persist in their charming but pointless existence. Folk songs and dances go on. The handicrafts continue and philosophy becomes a collection of old sayings. When the leading people, the born aristocrats, stop striving, when they turn to pleasures and futilities, neglecting self discipline and hard work, abandoning total dedication to their chosen fields, these people decline and their society quickly follows into decay. Then tyrants, dictators, autocrats of the state take over, boxing in minds, depressing and oppressing those who would freely create new ideas. In the tree of culture whole branches dry out, dying. Perhaps most of the tree of culture withers as in the Dark Ages. But the roots seem to persist and the tree sprouts again on some other land, in some other age, when freedom of expression is again allowed.
In America, in 1776, freedom and democracy came to life again after many centuries of autocratic rule in the Old World, and with these blessings came the flowering of culture in the thirteen colonies, such as we have not seen since. Benjamin Franklin was a statesman, businessman, author, inventor, and scientist, one of the founders of electrical science. Thomas Jefferson, besides being a plantation owner and statesman, was an architect, a writer of renown with his Declaration of Independence. John Adams was an attorney and statesman with a major intellect. The bona fide genius was the elitist Alexander Hamilton, one of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, who perished in a duel with his political enemy Aaron Burr before he became 50. Hamilton contributed to the formation of a strong federal government and chief executive in the form of a president. James Madison, a political theorist, was one of the framers of the Constitution and its chief author, designing checks and balances in the distribution of federal power. George Washington was no genius but a man of immense character, an able general, and the first president; he declined to become a king as he was urged by his admirers. The U. S. was fortunate indeed to have such people who founded a republic with a reasonably good balance between freedom and discipline. Culture has flourished in America at least in science and technology.
The fine arts instead have not done as well. Artists require patronage from people of noble vision, who support contemporary work, not the classics only. The classics, traditional works, are fine to admire up to a point. I suggest that half of the support money should go to honor the classics, and the other half to support the work of living artists. Most wealthy collectors in America pay millions for the paintings and sculptures of artists long dead on the advice of their experts, and do very little to patronize living artists of merit. Our orchestras play old symphonies and operas and very little of contemporary works.
Don’t we have contemporary artists of great merit? We probably do, but these people prefer to go into business to make some real money. They are unwilling to work for fifty cents an hour like Michelangelo when he was creating the Sistine chapel’s decorations for Pope Julius II. Perhaps we don’t have patrons willing to pay even that much for art they cannot resell for profit. Anyway, egalitarian societies such as ours are not likely to give rise to fine culture. Populist or socialist societies do even worse. What came out of the Nazi socialists or the communists? They produced nothing worthwhile except for better weapons. Good artists made a run out of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union whenever they could. Creative people and oppressive governments don’t go well together. Yet, too much freedom leads to degradation and triviality, the art of urinals. Creativity depends on a sound tradition to build on, but enough freedom to reach out to new spaces for the tree of culture. Massive, centralized, governments do not advance civilization very much.
In ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, and eighteenth century Germany, people had a great flowering of culture in a political environment of city states, with noble rulers patronizing creative talent in competition to outshine with each other with great monuments for own glory and that of their city. Prime examples of such rulers were Pericles, Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence, who patronized da Vinci, Hungarian Prince Esterhazy, who supported Joseph Haydn to produce 106 magnificent symphonies, Mozart’s Prince-Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg and Emperor Joseph II in Vienna. Mozart created great operas in Vienna, such as The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni, until he fell into hard times during the Austro-Turkish War of 1787, when prosperity dropped and aristocrats were giving less money to the arts.
In hard financial times or when aristocracies fall, we see a decline in cultural growth. But a too strong, centralized government is a worse calamity for culture. In America we would do better making counties the centers of our political power and wealth, in the form of city states. Elected officials in the county, well known to the local people, may elect state governors, and governors elect the president; the same process can apply to other branches of government, the judicial and legislative, with only the most basic and necessary functions relinquished to state and federal entities. You can be sure local leaders will not give up too much power to the central governments as popular voting does in our current system. Prominent citizens may thus perform the roles of democratic princes, like Pericles or Lorenzo, each county governed by a city of modest size, certainly less than a million people. Massive urban centers, like New York or Chicago may support the arts, but not their creation as much. Most of the money goes to popular entertainments with little artistic merit for the masses.
Artistic merit prevailed in Paris during the eighteenth century; Paris was the center of the world in culture, and it was a large city; but the artistic center of it where intellects thrived was very small. Learning and creativity were nourished at the Sorbonne. The same could be said for London in the seventeenth century with Oxford and Cambridge, which produced modern science, Shakespearean theater, and other fine arts with money from exploration, the raiding of Spanish galleons by privateers, manufacturing and trade. The Dutch in Amsterdam, rich from trade, followed a similar route with the English, producing Rembrandt (patronized by Prince Frederik Hendrik), Huygens (mathematician and scientist), and Spinoza, one of greatest philosophers of all time. This was the Golden Age for the Dutch and the English.
If we want a Golden Age for planet Earth, not any more isolated flowerings of culture that quickly wither, we who know where the roots of culture are, let us remember the lessons of History and apply them to our private and social lives. An individual grows and bears fruit with a firm purpose in life, working hard to achieve it, never weakening, never giving up. The civilized person needs to be not only smarter and better trained than the barbarian, but also stronger, producing and raising children to be the same. A society, a world society today, constituted by such noble persons of birth or aspiration will prevail over the barbarians that abound everywhere in great numbers, and lead humanity to a shining future, here on Earth and elsewhere in the Universe, where astronauts may travel to build the city of God.
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