Weezer was the First Weezer Tribute Band

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 6 August 2015.



Thanks for the generous response. So many thoughts. First one a statement from Bryce: "Weezer was the first Weezer tribute band."

I like your balanced Christian cynicism of both parties as well as of the trash talkers on Facebook. It's important to hear. I do find it terrifying to see the left unmoored from its foundations, first and foremost, from the inviolable dignity of the human person. This is not a new development. Camus saw this clearly in his own day:

Traditionally, the left has always been at war against injustice, obscurantism, and oppression. It was always thought that those phenomena were interdependent. The idea that obscurantism can lead to justice, the national interest to liberty, is quite recent. The truth is that certain intellectuals of the left (not all, fortunately) are today hypnotized by force and efficacy as our intellectuals of the right were before and during the war. Their attitudes are different, but the act of resignation is the same. The first wanted to be realistic nationalists; the second want to be realistic socialists. In the end they betray nationalism and socialism alike in the name of a realism henceforth without content and adored as pure, and illusory, technique of efficacy.

This is a temptation that can, after all, be understood. But still, however the question is looked at, the new position of the people who call themselves, or think themselves, leftists consists in saying: certain oppressions are justifiable because they follow the direction, which cannot be justified, of history. Hence there are presumably privileged executioners, and privileged by nothing...But this is a thesis which, personally, I shall always reject. Allow me to set up against it the traditional point of view of what has been hitherto called the left: all executioners are of the same family.  ("The Artist and His Time")

Substitute some details from that first paragraph--namely the idea that killing the weakest of the weak can somehow lead to liberation--and you have the contentless progressivism of modern times (Baudrillard called it "moribund"). No longer can it be said, as it was in Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," "We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.”

Camus also lamented this same divorce from an atheistic perspective in his essay "Helen's Exile":

It is Christianity that began substituting the tragedy of the soul for contemplation of the world. But, at least, Christianity referred to a spiritual nature and thereby preserved a certain fixity. With God dead, there remains only history and power. For some time the entire effort of our philosophers has aimed solely at replacing the notion of human nature with that of situation, of replacing ancient harmony with the disorderly advance of chance or reason's pitiless progress. Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will's impulse in the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly. For the Greeks, values pre-existed all action, of which they definitely set the limits. Modern philosophy places its values at the end of action. They are not but are becoming, and we shall know them fully only at the completion of history.

Some of this sounds a lot like your statement "the less art, music, and poetry in the world, the less people will value what it means to be human or feel nostalgia about things that exalted the human experience (mainly, God) or that created boundaries around the human experience (mainly, death)." This is one of the guiding principles I've adopted from you, that the artist has a very particular role to play and that no one in a time like this will appreciate that role. More Camus:

We must simultaneously serve suffering and beauty. The long patience, the strength, the secret cunning such service calls for are the virtues that establish the very renascence we need...the era of chairbound artists is over. But we must reject bitterness. One of the temptations of the artist is to believe himself solitary, and in truth he hears this shouted at him with a certain base delight. But this is not true. He stands in the midst of all, in the same rank, neither higher nor lower, with all those who are working and struggling. His very vocation, in the face of oppression, is to open the prisons and to give a voice to the sorrows and joys of all. This is where art, against its enemies, justifies itself by proving precisely that it is no one's enemy. By itself art could probably not produce the renascence which implies justice and liberty. But without it, that renascence would be without forms and, consequently, would be nothing. Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

Chinua Achebe has some great statements about this in his interview with Bill Moyers, maintaining an activist orientation while at the same time differentiating the role of the poet or storyteller from that of the "war drummer" and "warrior":

Well, if you look at the world in terms of storytelling, you have the warrior, you have the war drummer; the man who drums up the people first of all, the man who agitates the people, I call him the drummer, And then you have the warrior, who goes forward, you know, and fights. But you also have the storyteller, who takes over to recount the event. And this is one who survives, who outlives all the others. It is the storyteller, in fact, that makes us what we are, that creates history...The memory which the survivors must have, otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.

And of course, implicit in his statements, is the fact that his own countrymen almost assassinated him in the post-colonial period. Poetry needs to somehow straddle this fine line between activism and neutrality; its allegiance is never for sale even in the most polarizing of situations (cf. also Yeats's "Easter, 1916": "Hearts with one purpose alone / Through summer and winter seem / Enchanted to a stone / To trouble the living stream").

As Camus writes, "In my mind, neither one is ever separated from the other and I measure the greatness of the artist (Molière, Tolstoy, Melville) by the balance he managed to maintain between the two."