There is an adage, homily, metaphor, or what you will about what parents want for their children through ensuing generations. I could look it up to get an exact version but that would probably undermine my extrapolation or, at the very least, deprive the tale of an endearing mystique. The story, as I remember it, goes something as follows:
A couple work the land to put food into their mouths and hope that their children can go to school, learn a profession so they do not need to work with their hands, that they might, perhaps, become Teachers.
Those Teachers then grow up to form their own families and work to better their children’s lives that they might grow to become Doctors or Scientists.
Those Doctors or Scientists labour with their minds, enriching their families such that their children might grow to become Writers and Artists.
The idea is a progression from working with our hands, to working with our minds and finally to working with our hearts, or wherever else is considered to be the seat of our talents. The story is not meant to disparage one activity over the other, it does not suggest that those who till the land are less than those who heal the sick or sculpt marble. It is more about a parents desire that their children live fulfilled lives. We hope that future generations will have an easier life with less physical hardship, we hope that they live doing what they love.
This progressive idea is repeated in a number of social environments and activities. If we look at employment in the Western world, we see that there is a growing shift towards selling virtual or digital products and building machines to do our heavy lifting. Such a development is not without its drawbacks as many fear the loss of physical manufacturing and rage over the difficulty in finding a plumber when you need one. It has become almost inevitable, however, that over time any activity that can be clearly defined and quantified will be handled more and more by machinery. The human involvement will deal more with how that machinery is applied.
Likewise in the leisure industry, we have gone from a day of rest to embracing new activities on our days off. Visits to foreign lands are de rigueur once a certain level of financial stability is achieved. Nowadays, there is a move on from just going to see something to creating a memorable “experience”. Such things are hard to define as they combine a range of events, activities and mood becoming, in their own way, more like Art. Those who arrange these experiences have something of the Artist about them.
The problem with patterns like this, however, is that once you see them, you cant stop seeing them. And maybe, after all, these examples simply represent a common human yearning towards fulfillment. At first, we strive to cover our physical needs using our physical skills because these are most readily available to us at a younger age. As we grow older, we think of better ways to do things, we try to optimize our physical effort through our mental skills. But what explains the move towards art? I consider art as a means of connecting to those things just out of reach, a way of putting our soul out there. As we grow, we learn to understand human nature through some form of working philosophy. Inevitably, many areas remain outside our ken. We travel as far as we can, realize we cannot move much further but we still know that the road stretches tantalizingly ahead. It is our guess at this vision which is art.
Art is thus Religion, Religion Art.
I probably should have done more groundwork in getting to this point. The general progression is one where we start with practical organizations, move through thinking about better ways to live together, go on to the philosophy of life and finally the art of that philosophy. We arrive at that which is out of reach, undefined and indefinable: faith.
Once you do get there, the entire discussion about religion and its affect on our society becomes somewhat moot. Concepts like “separation of Church and State” become a nonsensical issue between governments and organized art. Theocracies become states organized around an artistic viewpoint as though pointillism had its own country. The ethics or rules of any religion become descriptive terms for that artform, having minimal impact on the world unless of course you live in Impressionistan. This is not too say that art cannot influence our opinions, it can and should. Art is wonderful for communicating the vague and ephemeral. But does anyone in the real world want to be ruled entirely by art?
Stephen Jay Gould, the famous scientific historian, talked about religion and science being “non-overlapping magisteria” and he could not have been more right. Science is of the mind, religion is of the heart.
