One of the outstanding features of civilization is the antagonism that develops between what comes to be called science and art. The former term literally means "knowledge"; the latter, "a way of doing things."

If wisdom is the union of these two, their separation implies a loss of meaning,
a fall into absurdity.

The scientist becomes the exemplar of left-hemisphere functions: cold, logical, dispassionate, objective, verbal and highly literate... The artist becomes the scientist's polar opposite: emotional, often inarticulate, intuitive, irrational, passionately involved in life... Just as the neurologist tends to describe the left hemisphere as the "major" and the right as the "minor" in our technological survival value system the artist is by far a more dispensable creature than the scientist.

In political and financial terms,
this means that the scientist is assured of success;
the artist, at best, is assured of a hard struggle.

In the Golden Age, when existence was most basic and nonspecialized, an individual could assume any number of different roles - hunter, gatherer, sorcerer, craftsman, parent -- and every member of the group could share these roles more or less equally, with a minimum burden to the psyche. ... There was a vital and participatory appreciation for the practice of the various crafts, especially as they could be combined into the unified expression of the most profound spiritual truths animating and uniting the populace... no need either for the mystique of the Great Artist, or for the glorification of art.

Because there was genuine involvement of the people in a creative project, craftsmen were expected to do their best according to the canon of collective belief, and so there was no reason to ostentatiously proclaim or criticize their accomplishments.

Insofar as the expressive functions of what we now call art are concerned, there was no necessary specialization, either into stereotyped roles or by sex. Claude Levi-Strauss reports that in a certain Brazilian tribe it is the women who do the more physically demanding sculpture and the men who do the painting... indicating the fluidity of expressive functions regardless of sex.

But most important, at this primordial, mythic stage of development EVERYONE expresses himself or herself through some medium.

Ironically, as the species has become more highly developed - that is, involved in its technical capacity as an end in itself - the unique evolutionary capacity of human being for nonspecialization has become more and more abused.

But the problem of specialization did not become globally critical until the development of a mechanistic technology in Europe during the late Iron Age. Accompanying this development was the split of cerebral functions, leading to the creation of the two archetypal roles of artist and scientist.

Through the Bronze Age and into the mid-Iron Age, what we now would call the arts had achieved a high level of technical virtuosity and symbolically expressive sophistication. Yet, generally speaking, there was no such thing as the practice of art for its own sake; nor was the role of artist regarded with special favor or, more important, as a person's sole occupation.

... In the Yuan Dynasty of China (13th-14th century A.D.), for instance, the arts reached a technical and expressive level unsurpassed in any other culture. But the artisans who created these works were not strictly professional artists in the way we would understand the term today. Among other things, these men and women painted, made pottery and sculpture, and wrote poetry; yet making art was rarely ever their sole or even chief occupation. In their society the refined practice of some art or craft was expected of anyone who aspired to be a cultivated human being. In the words of Lun Yü,

A man should stir himself with poetry
Stand firm in ritual
Complete himself in music.

... The criticism of today, which defines art and on which art thrives, is the result of aesthetic confusion consequent to the breakdown of collective spiritual tradition. Aesthetic confusion is what makes art as a specialized notion possible; it is what happens when the psychotechnical balance has been greatly disturbed. Such a disturbance occurred at the end of the Middle Ages; Marshall McLuhan attributes it largely to the invention of the printing press, with its overemphasis on the visual mode, a theory corroborated by Castaneda's statement that "in European membership the world is built largely from what the eyes report to the body."

Art Degraded, Imagination Denied, War Govern'd the Nations
- William Blake

This is an accurate description of modern conditions... art (as innate expressive means) is degraded in the educative process and looked upon as an essentially noncontributive social nicety;

imagination, the intuitive function of the right hemisphere, is denied and condemned as being irrational...

as a consequence, humanity lacks broad-scale positive expressive means, and war does govern the nations.

The important insight in Blake's aphorism is the relationship between art (as innate expressive means) and war - the negative expression of the repressed imbalance of human energy.

Though war is the thread of history, in a split-brain culture it pre-empts all other forces in gathering and focusing the power of the collective imagination.

Right-hemisphere energy, denied its natural outlet, seeks release in bizarre and unexpected - irrational - behavior.

The degraded art Blake protested against is the creation of specialists who, since the Renaissance, have only aggravated the psychocultural imbalance by appropriating for themselves the expressive means and investing them with the alienating fine-arts values that have ensured their general social uselessness.

... Art will exist as long as war does, for both are symptoms of the same neurocerebral disease. When war truly ceases, then art as an end in itself will cease.

But for this to occur, the artist who totally identifies with his particular role, like the career army general and the laboratory scientist, would have to be "therapized" and introduced into other ways of being human.

Chapter 2. page 1..2..3

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