Lou Marinoff observes in "The Middle Way" that China is on the ascendant, and that Americans seem not to be prepared for it. While I do not necessarily agree that a good Chinese economy is necessarily bad for the U.S. economy (again, the economy is not a pie divided up so some get more only when others get less, but is growing), he is right in saying that "Americans are already steeped in denial regarding the internal deficiencies contributing to their nation's decline -- not only in global public opinion, but crucially in cultural assets -- which means they are not prepared to reverse the damage" (38).
I do not think that Marinoff is saying that we should do everything we can to get everyone to like us. People who do that are not psychologically healthy, and we should not expect a country to do that either. However, it is a sign of some kind of sociopathology when you go out of your way to make people mad. Did the Congress really have to bring up for a vote the resolution against Turkey regarding the Armenians in WWI? Does the U.S. absolutely need anti-missile weapons in Poland and the Czech Republic? These are unnecessary annoyances and provocations. Further, our country needs to avoid the appearance of impropriety -- we need to not only not do some things, we need to make it clear we don't do them. This is why I'm in favor of transparency in most things regarding government. We would go a long way toward improving global public opinion if we were consistent in doing what we say we believe in.
This then brings us to the issue of cultural assets. I think if we give an honest assessment of most of the cultural products of most cultures, we will find far more pop culture than high culture. In fact, what may have been one culture's pop culture can become another one's high culture. Plato seemed to think that tragedy was mere pop culture for the hoi poloi -- his student Aristotle gave us the opinion we now hold of it as being the height of theater. So we do want to be careful about such divisions. But are we creating a public that truly appreciates good art and literature? The cultural elites love works by authors like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon -- works which I myself like, but recognize that to be on the fringe of what the average human being can understand -- while the real best sellers are Christian Romances. There is a huge disconnect between the two that make students think art and literature have nothing to do with their lives and the real world. Our art is in the same situation, as is philosophy. How many people think that philosophy is something that can or should have an impact on our lives? This is because philosophy has turned into something that can noly be accessed by those who have Ph.D.'s in philosophy. This is exacerbated when postmodern philosophers insist that what they do has no value or purpose. If this is the case, why study it? And, if we look at it from a university standpoint, why fund it? Thus, our universities are turning into trade schools, and our students go in expecting to learn a trade and that the purpose of a degree is to get oneself a job. The "liberal" part of liberal education is going out the door, and nobody is making a single objection to it going. But without a liberal education, what will we be but workers in a machine? We will not have the freedom that only liberal education can teach. Literature gives us new worlds to experience. Art lets us see the world in new ways. Philosophy teaches us to know ourselves to live a better life. Or, at least, they once did. Now they are specialist fields as inaccessible to the public as is quantum physics. And that is the real problem: we deny the average citizen access to his own cultural assets. We treat them as something that belongs to an elite. The rest get bread and circuses. This is a dangerous division.
We should count ourselves fortunate that on occasion someone -- typically a filmmaker nowadays -- attempts to bridge this gap. But even so we typically see a gap between what the educated critics like and what the public likes. Why don't people think it is possible to have a work that is both entertaining and beautiful? We need cultural products that tap into all aspects of who we are as people: they should be entertaining, beautiful, intelligent, and emotional. Indeed, let me go back to one of the things in the list in particular: beauty. It seems that it is beauty which we are missing in our lives. And it is beauty which is the Middle Way which Marinoff seems to really be getting at in his book. The Golden Mean is a principle of beauty. This is why Aristotle, in talking about virtue as a mean between two extremes also says that virtue aims at the beautiful ("to kalon," typically translated as "the good" or "the noble"). It is beauty which is missing in America -- and in the world at large.
But there is a great deal of confusion about what beuaty is, so let me supply a list of what, together, constitutes beauty:
Beauty has the following features:
Complexity within Simplicity
Digital-Analog
Emergent from Conflict
Evolutionary (changes over time)
Generative and Creative
Hierarchical Organization
Play
Reflexivity or Feedback
Rhythmicity
Rule-Based
Scalar Self-Similarity
Time-Bound
Unity in Multiplicity
The following agonally unified opposites also constitute beauty:
Native – Foreign
Light – Shadow
Logos – Eros
Emotion – Intellect (Reason)
Conscious – Unconscious
Soul – Technology
Feeling – Thinking
General – Specific
Universal – Particular
I am convinced that there is a strong relationship between things that are evolving, growing, self-organizing, and emergentist and beauty. Thus, let us look at the features of self-organization and see why:
Emergence
Complexity
Cohesion (digital-analog)
Openness
Bottom-up-Emergence
Downward Causation
Non-linearity
Feedback loops, Circular causality
Information
Relative Chance
Hierarchy
Globalisation and localisation
Unity in Plurality (Generality and Specificity)
Emergence has the following features:
Synergism (productive interaction between parts)
Novelty
Irreduceability
Unpredictability
Coherence/Correlation
Historicity
When our cultural assets contain the above features, our culture will be healthy. When our government, our economy, our society and our selves have these features, then each of them will also be healthy. This is the true Middle Way. But you cannot cure a sick patient who denies that he's even sick.
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