The past century has been characterized (indeed plagued!) by a pseudo-creativity which has usurped true creativity.
This has even afflicted those were were potentially, or at-first, genuinely-creative geniuses - so that these individuals have turned against truth, beauty and/or virtue and end-up harming culture to a similar extent that earlier geniuses used to benefit culture.
Likely examples would include Picasso, Schoenberg, James Joyce, Wittgenstein, Keynes, Freud, and several other heroes of the 'modern' era.
Real creativity is characterized by its being aligned with divine creation and contributing to it.
It generates 'energy' and leaves the field richer than it found it; and with (often) multiple positive potential new growth-points.
Therefore real creativity is generative: the more creation happens, the more creation is possible. It is self-sustaining because it taps-into inexhaustible sources of divine vitality and purpose.
Entropic-pseudo-creation, by contrast, uses-up the energies and potential of a field of discourse.
In effect; it generates energy from the destruction of form and positive motivations; and 'burns' actual creation to generate the energy (and attractive appeal) needed to make, sustain and promote pseudo-creation.
False creation is therefore entropic because it depletes achieved divine creation; it erodes God's-work in order to do more of the devils-work.
Entropic-pseudo-creation is therefore, like all evil, parasitic upon the Good.
This kind of novelty or 'originality' therefore consumes the past - consumes 'the Good that is'; in order to construct novelty.
And those who take-up this novelty, make it fashionable, attractive and rewarded; are doing essentially the same thing (albeit at the lower level of consuming cultural capital - by the degradation of status systems, education, philosophy, critical discourse etc).
It is this entopic-pseudo-creativity that underlies the continual and accelerating social destructiveness that has characterized The West over the past century; and this partially-explains why it is necessary for the Establishment always to be destroying more-and-more that is Good.
Because, in a deep and real sense - the combustion of the Good-past is what fuels the addictive novelties of the Evil-present.
8 comments:
Artists can align themselves with or against creation. Up until the beginning of the modern era it was almost always the former but since then it has been increasingly the latter, and now almost always. So they turn good, creativity, to evil, destruction of real truth and beauty.
Excellent post. Aligning with or against God and creation is the ultimate difference between magic and witchcraft.
Most contemporary art, novels, films, and music give me a dark feeling. The postmodern trend of desecrating real art (such as Photoshopping a mustache on the Mona Lisa) bothers me as well. Art that is truly beautiful and uplifting is considered kitsch, so we are surrounded by creativity that arises from a demonic source.
This hits close to home, since I absolutely idolized James Joyce (and later, for broadly similar reasons, Lord Byron and Vladimir Nabokov) for many, many years and still dip into Finnegans Wake from time to time to this day. I think you're right, though, that what they were doing was distinct from real creation.
The term tour de force is a useful touchstone, I think. No one would ever describe the Iliad that way, or The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If a work comes across primarily as a "feat of strength" -- as a display of brilliance, a deliberate pushing of the limits of the medium -- that's probably a red flag.
@Wm - I know Joyce pretty well - I have read Ulysses at least five times - but despite efforts have always regarded Finnegans Wake as an irritating waste of time.
Joyce was certainly a superb prose writer, and wrote some really memorable scenes; but I suppose the work is ultimately shallow because the man was shallow. He didn't have anything much to write about except himself and his growing up.
I think is an interesting idea even with regards to AI. It has become a concern among digital artist that modern art-AI like midjourny are trained on all the data of human artists . The AI can then create new variants but the artistic styles themselves are still bound by the data from the human creators. On wonders what will happen if digital art becomes obsolete but at the same time the AI's depend on the input of humans to provide new genres and styles.
Your term entropic pseudo-creation covers a vast region of our contemporary cultural space. It has afflicted every one of the arts. It has seriously damaged philosophy and the humanities. Worst of all, it’s steadily creeping into the sciences. The promulgators must not be worried about the afterlife.
One can see some of the geneses easily. The corruption of poetry is a vivid example. The adulteration of music with garbage that has neither melody nor harmony is another. As for the visual arts, little remains of the skills and loving attention to subject, perspective, and detail that the old masters practiced. In these districts, the specious authority of "critics" was essential to the onset of the disease.
The concept deserves further exploration, especially with regard to the sciences. You'd think the rigorously disciplined exploration and expansion of objective human knowledge would be immune, but it is not so. And it threatens us all.
"The DIM Hypothesis"
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