The End of History and the Modern Aesthetics Vs. Politics Debate

Film and TV writer Matt Zoller Seitz has written both on Twitter and in essays about a trend in arts and entertainment criticism: the tendency to judge works of art and entertainment primarily on how they measure up against today’s social values. In today’s online-speak, Seitz (and I) dislike it when writers use works of art — especially older ones that were produced in a very different time and place — as vehicles for the writer to “score points” by proving how “woke” they are.

In Seitz’s words, “ Trying to “rescue” problematic older works, or score points off them & paint the critic as a moral exemplar, are different ways of failing.” He laments not only the lack of discussions about aesthetics, but the tendency to treat today’s world as the pinnacle of history: “ I’ve old enough to remember 80s critics pulling the same b.s.: thinking the era the live in now is enlightened & their own values are peak. Decades later you read that stuff & come across casual homophobia, passive racism, etc. What blind spots do “enlightened” critics have now?”

The problem that Seitz describes is one that seems to bother many people, but I think they often feel afraid of expressing their discomfort. They feel uncomfortable partially because they fear they’ll sound conservative — it is usually conservatives who say “keep politics out of art,” and usually they mean “keep progressive politics out of art.” They also feel uncomfortable because the argument “We forgot how to separate art from politics, and we need to do that again” doesn’t really ring true, either. Aesthetics and politics are indeed inherently connected. It’s just that today, many people have a very bad and inadequate way of talking about them.

At the fall of the Berlin Wall, the neoconservative writer Francis Fukuyama used the phrase “end of history” to describe his belief that American liberal democracy had won in the free market of ideas. It was the most sustainable form of government and so it would prove to be resilient. This was a fake idea then, and in the past two decades, it has managed to become even more fake. But it persists.

This belief that our current system is not only the best but is resilient has affected the way that people judge art. It means that, when we encounter art and opinions from other eras, we judge them by the standards of our era, as if the standards of our era are so good that it is not worth judging something by any other merits. And when we see something modern that dissents from what we believe are the standards of our era, we also feel comfortable dismissing it outright.

Even if we haven’t grown up knowingly believing in the End of History, many of us often subscribe to the ideology in a way that baffles critics like Seitz. The ideology doesn’t often manifest itself as a faith in liberal democracy, per se — it is more of a faith that whatever seems to be the prevailing trend in progressive opinions is not only good but is the inevitable product of all history. We’ve been taught not to see progress as a battle but as something that will just happen if we let it. This view is so pervasive that those of us who are invested in making political change happen often see ourselves as riders on a train rather than participants in a conflict, which is what we actually are.

So, when we encounter media that disagrees with us, our reflex is to dismiss it as out of touch with the train of history. Sure, in every era, many people have believed that they had the Best Opinions in History. But the past few decades have been that on steroids. Not only do we have the Best Opinions in History: those opinions are not even ours. We are just us correctly going with the flow of Progress.

But if you accept that history is a never-ending conflict (in which you can’t help but participate) rather than a progressive stack that finally piled up into a present-day consensus, you will consider your own opinions from that perspective. If you accept that culture means constant conflict, rather than some sort of consensus with a few troublesome dissenters, what Seitz calls “scoring points” and “rescuing” no longer seems like a worthwhile practice in arts criticism.

Without the illusion that there is a post-history consensus on which art deserves to be rescued and which art deserves to be shunned, you find yourself getting to know the art itself a lot better. You will even find that the rescue-worthy art is problematic, and find value in studying its contradictions. You will be compelled to examine the target-practice art more thoroughly than you had when you let the imagined consensus do most of the work for you. You will find that much of the target-practice art, like the good art, contains contradictions that are worth examining. And when you encounter art that is actually indefensible, you will have a better idea of why that is and how it got that way, and you will no longer be susceptible to the ambient worry that maybe, in the end, everything is bad.

To thrive in a world where history has not ended but is still happening, you may find yourself relying on something very different from an imagined political consensus: an ancient art that is often called “aesthetics.”