THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE: Santaphobia
Scruton, Roger
T H e P U R s U I T o f k n o W L e d G e Santaphobia by Roger Scruton est landfill, it is time to ask what a conservative should think about Christmas. For many years I was of the Scrooge...
...Americans with a dilemma...
...Roger scruton, the writer and philosopher, is most recently the author of Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (Encounter Books...
...This sacred time, when Christians commemorate the central mystery of their faith, is one ripe for emotional displacement...
...The good side is made apparent by children, who cause people to travel vast distances in order to congregate in their presence...
...Kitsch begins in doctrine and ideology and spreads from there to infect the entire world of culture...
...For many years I was of the Scrooge school of thought, entirely Now that it is all over and the tons of non-biodegradable trash have been stuffed into the nearendorsing that tragic hero’s dismissal of the “humbug” that springs up in otherwise honest souls during the days of Advent, and deprecating A Christmas Carol as the most pernicious of Dickens’s many assaults on the stoic virtues...
...I asked...
...nevertheless figurative imagery is now Kitsch is like a disease, a mold that settles over the entire works of a living culture, when people prefer the sensuous trappings of belief to the thing truly B t a h . o l i r u n d e w o d a h s e r f n e b n e v e d a h i phi- of realm in tions ques teasing I find myself confronting the entire one of the most d t isputable...
...That happened everywhere in the 19th century, as the mass-produced votive figures flooded ordinary households, the holy precursors of today’s garden gnomes...
...But Americans have the nagging doubt in the back of their minds as to whether it is right to live in such luxury and to own so much...
...The bad side is connected with the good...
...Hence their need for fake gods like Santa, who are the gods of abundance, who endorse the American way of life but who also provide the opportunity at Christmas time to declare to the world that nobody really believes in them and that the whole thing is a sentimental game...
...That is surely what we witness in the Disneyfied culture of America...
...the kitschification of religion...
...Now I have to survive Christmas on the same terms as more righteous people and have been forced to recognize that it has a good side as well as a bad, and that the two are organically connected...
...The same corruption that leads the Muslim to turn away from the demanding message of the Koran, so as to attach his emotions to a picture of a paranoid old man in a beard, leads the Christian to set up his icon of Santa on the lawn, knowing that this image of a divinity in whom he no longer believes authorizes all his other pretenses...
...The secular religion substitutes that tore Europe apart in the 20th century were as kitschified as the religions that they strove to abolish: This you see from the art, just as you read it in the slogans, of the totalitarian movements...
...Nor do you escape from kitsch by abandoning religion...
...This is not kitsch but the ism,” which uses form and color to liberate emotion deepest spiritual truth, and one that we are helped from the prison of narrative...
...In a celebrated article, “Avant- major artistic motive, prompting the impressionist garde and Kitsch,” published in Partisan Review and cubist revolutions as well as the birth of atonalin 1939, Clement Greenberg presented educated ity in music...
...What certain is that, by the time of Bouguereau, Millet, is it, and why is it bad...
...the interesting fact is that the rest of the world, which opposes that culture with a justified indignation, has nothing to offer in its place but simply adopts its mannerisms and goes the same way...
...And it is pretense, rather than ignorance, that explains the ever-expanding ocean of Christmas kitsch...
...Kitschification has even infected the world of Islam, once immune to idolatry in all its forms, but rapidly becoming the most idolatrous of contemporary religions...
...It is not that the figurative artist must produce kitsch in the mid20th century...
...Mass-produced Ganeshas have knocked the sublime temple sculpture from its aesthetic pedestal...
...It was an American critic who and the Pre-Raphaelites, kitsch was in the driving made the concept fundamental to the understand- seat...
...Kitsch is like a disease, a mold that settles over the entire works of a living culture, when people This sacred time, when Christians commemorate the central mystery of their faith, is one ripe for emotional displacement...
...To enter a shopping mall chockablock with toxic waste for children, to be coaxed from every doorway by Disneyland Santas and living teddy bears, to hear the Christmas carols crooned in close harmony, with a backing of drums and bass guitar, and to see the once Christian festival of Christmas everywhere renamed as “holidays”—itself a blatant lie since all this trash has no other function than to rub out the last vestiges of holiness—is to long once again for the days when I could retire from Christmas with a book and shut a door against the clouds of aesthetic pollution...
...All that changed with the arrival of a family...
...Is it that they are more religious than other people, or less...
...Equally grotesque has been the kitschification of Hinduism and its culture...
...The sight of old life making way for new is always encouraging, but it is the more so at Christmas, when quarrels are set aside and tensions smoothed over for the sake of these self-centered monsters who couldn’t care less about any emotions of which they are not themselves the objects...
...Alas, however, life is not so simple and, even if we deplore Greenberg’s taste and influence, we are bound to recognize a core of truth in his argument...
...Genuine art In the blue robe of a Bellini virgin we encounter must belong to the avant-garde, breaking with the the ideal of motherhood, as an enfolding purity figurative tradition in favor of “abstract expression- and a promise of peace...
...on the verge of kitsch, and only mental and moral discipline of the kind exhibited by Hopper can prevent the “fall” into fakery...
...Kitsch icons of favorite ayatollahs are now held high above the chanting crowds of selfdeceived believers, and they hang from household walls next to Koranic verses in kitsch-kufic script...
...Figurative painting, It is not only in the world of art that we observe he argued, was dead—it had exhausted its expres- the steady advance of kitsch...
...So much has to be pretended at Christmas that pretense begins to take over...
...Both answers, it seems to me, have a truth in them...
...It is precisely for this reason that kitsch comes into its own at Christmas...
...I don’t,” came the reply, “but it helps me to live with Communism, which is kitsch with teeth...
...T H e P U R s U I T o f k n o W L e d G e Santaphobia by Roger Scruton est landfill, it is time to ask what a conservative should think about Christmas...
...Some might take exception to the idea that it is pretense rather than high spirits that is the cause of Christmas kitsch...
...prefer the sensuous trappings of belief to the thing truly believed in...
...A dissident friend of mine, condemned as a punishment to stoke the boilers of a hospital in Prague, spent what money he had on the sub-Mucha posters and plaster-cast cherubs that you could still buy in local junk stores, furnishing his underground boiler room as a gaudy refuge from the drab pavements above...
...Greenberg’s intemperate condemnation of figurative painting prompts the opposite judgment...
...In this way Greenberg to understand through the power and eloquence believed in...
...For a reformed Santaphobe like myself, Christmas in America is an ordeal that all but overcomes the fragile faith in reproduction...
...Why then are Americans so given to kitsch...
...Why do you like this kitsch...
...Far more important, sive potential, and its representational aims had given its influence on the popular psyche, has been been bequeathed to photography and the cinema...
...Images are of enorAny attempt to continue in the figurative tradition mous importance in religion, helping us to underwould inevitably lead to kitsch, in other words to art stand the Creator through idealized visions of his with no message of its own, in which all the effects world: concrete images of transcendental truths...
...Look back at figurative art in the Western tradition and you will observe that, prior to the 18th century, there was primitive f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 5 1 T H e P U R s U I T o f k n o W L e d G e of the image...
...When false sentiment and self-deception are iconized in this way, however, they enter the culture, poisoning the worlds of art, music, and literature and reducing emotion to a toy version of itself...
...And it is, I think, one of the most interesting and pertinent questions of our time, why Americans are particularly susceptible to it, devoting vast resources not only to producing and consuming the stuff, but to spreading it around the globe as though offering nourishment rather than poison to their less fortunate contemporaries...
...It is not only Christian civilization that has undergone kitschification in recent times...
...But I would respond by saying that kitsch is pretense by definition: It comes with a fatal flaw, and that flaw is self-deception...
...All that suggests something important about kitsch, which is that it is not, in the first instance, an artistic phenomenon, but a disease of faith...
...the talas of Indian classical music have been blown apart by tonal harmonies and rhythm machines, and the sutras and puranas have been detached from the vision of Brahman and reissued as childish comic strips...
...The religious need is stronger in America than almost anywhere else in the world of material abundance...
...M e aybe o Greuze shows i tr M aces o l f it W . Mayb d r a e p p a t r fi n o n e m o n e h p e t n e h t s u J . h c s i k ut then curiosity gets the better of me, and ar t t, na ïve a w rt, rou h tine and decorativ s e art, bu e t n i i o e s s losophy, which is the question of kitsch itself...
...were copied and all the emotions faked...
...promoted the paintings of incompetents like De Kooning and frauds like Pollock and Rothko, while condemning Edward Hopper, surely one of the greatest of American painters, as “shabby, secondhand and impersonal...
...However, as the puritans have always reminded us, such an image stands on the verge of idolatry, and with the slightest push can fall from its spiritual eminence into the sentimental abyss...
...Why is this...
...That and the meet of foxhounds on Boxing Day would preserve the joyous solitude that is otherwise the principal casualty of Christmas...
...5 2 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8...
...During my bachelor years it was my habit to spend Christmas firmly shut away with a fellow Santaphobe, dedicating the day itself to work and study, with a quiet meal of roast pork and claret at the end of it...
...The gut conservative reaction is that whatever gets up the nose of modernists and puritans must be good...
...Not content with the Santafied interior, in which sickly baubles hang from every ledge and picture frame, people turn their houses into temples of pretense, polluting their porches and lawns with as much tasteless garbage as they can lay their hands on: illuminated Santas drawn by sparkling plastic reindeer, strings of fairy lights and holographs of Christmas trees, whole acres of tacky pageantry driving out the divine gift of darkness and 5 0 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 R o G e R s c R U T o n declaring that Santa Claus is God, and also that we don’t believe it...
...Presents were forbidden between us and we treated church with the utmost caution, as another santastic and bambiferous place where you ran the added risk of being greeted...
...At the same time, fear of kitsch had become a ing of modernity...
Vol. 41 • February 2008 • No. 1
