Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (103 page)

By the middle of the century two main themes could be discerned in serious
music. One was the loss of commitment to tonality, and the other was the general failure of twelve-tone serialism to gain widespread acceptance.
³⁶
Tonality did continue, notably in the works of Sergei Prokofiev and Benjamin Britten (whose
Peter Grimes,
1945, even prefigured the ‘antiheroes’ of the angry young men of the 1950s). But after World War II, composers in most countries outside the Soviet Union were trying to work out the implications ‘of the two great contrasted principles which had emerged during and after World War I: “rational” serialism and “irrational” Dadaism.’ To that was added an exploration of the new musical technology: tape recording, electronic synthesis, computer techniques.
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No one reflected these influences more than John Cage.

Born in Los Angeles in 1912, Cage studied under Schoenberg between 1935 and 1937, though rational serialism was by no means the only influence on him: he also studied under Henry Cowell, who introduced him to Zen, Buddhist, and Tantric ideas of the East. Cage met Merce Cunningham at a dance class in Seattle in 1938, and they worked together from 1942, when Cunningham formed his own company. Both were invited to Black Mountain College summer school in North Carolina in 1948 and again in 1952, where they met Robert Rauschenberg. Painter and composer influenced each other: Rauschenberg admitted that Cage’s ideas about the everyday in art had an impact on his images, and Cage said that Rauschenberg’s white paintings, which he saw at Black Mountain in 1952, gave him courage to present his ‘silent’ piece,
4′ 33″,
for piano in the same year (see below). In 1954 Rauschenberg became artistic adviser to Cunningham’s dance company.
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Cage was the experimentalist par excellence, exploring new sound sources and rhythmic structures (
Imaginary Landscape No. 1
was scored for two variablespeed gramophone turntables, muted piano, and cymbals), and in particular indeterminacy. It was this concern with chance that linked him back to Dada, across to the surrealist Theatre of the Absurd and, later, as we shall see, to Cunningham. Cage also anticipated postmodern ideas by trying to break down (as Walter Benjamin had foreseen) the barrier between artist and spectator. Cage did not believe the artist should be privileged in any way and sought, in pieces such as
Musiccircus
(1968), to act merely as an initiator of events, leaving the spectator to do much of the work, where the gulf between musical notation and performance was deliberately wide.
³⁹
The ‘archetypal’ experimental composition was the aforementioned 4 ‘33 “ (1952), a three-movement piece for piano where, however, not a note is played. In fact Cage’s instructions make clear that the piece may be ‘performed’ on any instrument for any amount of time. The aim, beyond being a parody and a joke at the expense of the ordinary concert, is to have the audience listen to the ambient sounds of the world around them, and reflect upon that world for a bearably short amount of time.

The overlap with Cunningham is plain. Born in 1919 in Centralia in Washington State, Cunningham had been a soloist with the Martha Graham Dance Company but became dissatisfied with the emotional and narrative content and began to seek out a way to present movement as itself. Since 1951, Cunningham had paralleled Cage by introducing the element of chance into dance. Coin tossing and dice throwing or clues from the
I Ching
were used to
select the order and arrangement of steps, though these steps were themselves made up of partial body movements, which Cunningham broke down like no one before him. This approach developed in the 1960s, in works such as
Story
and
Events,
where Cunningham would decide only moments before the production which parts of the dance would be performed that night, though even then it was left to the individual dancers to decide at certain points in the performance which of several courses to follow.
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Two other aspects of these works were notable. In the first, Cage or some other composer provided the music, and Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, or other artists would provide the settings. Usually, however, these three elements – dance, music, and set – did not come together until the day before the premiere. Cunningham did not know what Cage was producing, and neither of them knew what, say, Rauschenberg was providing. A second aspect was that, despite one of Cunningham’s better-known works being given the title
Story,
this was strongly ironic. Cunningham did not feel that ballets had to tell a story – they were really ‘events.’ He intended spectators to make up their own interpretations of what was happening.
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Like Cage’s emphasis on silence as part of music, so Cunningham emphasised that stillness was part of dance. In some cases, notices in the wings instructed certain dancers to stay offstage for a specified amount of time. Costumes and lighting changed from night to night, as did some sets, with objects being moved around or taken away completely.

That said, the style of Cunningham’s actual choreography is light, suggestive. In the words of the critic Sally Banes, it conveys a ‘lightness, elasticity … [an] agile, cool, lucid, analytic intelligence.’
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Just as the music, dance, and settings were to be comprehended in their own right, so each of Cunningham’s steps is presented so as to be whole and complete in itself, and not simply part of a sequence. Cunningham also shared with Jacques Tati a compositional approach where the most interesting action is not always going on in the front of the stage at the centre. It can take place anywhere, and equally interesting things may be taking place at the same time on different parts of the stage. It is up to the spectator to respond as he or she wishes.

Cunningham was even more influenced by Marcel Duchamp, and his questioning of what art is, what an artist is, and what the relationship with the spectator is. This showed most clearly in
Walkaround Time
(1968), which had decor by Jasper Johns based on
The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even
and with music by David Behrman entitled …
for nearly an hour,
based on Duchamp’s
To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour.
This piece was Johns’s idea. He and Cunningham were at Duchamp’s house one evening, and when Johns put the idea to him, the Frenchman answered, ‘But who would do all the work?’
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Johns said he would, and Duchamp, relieved, gave permission, adding that the pieces should be moved around during the performance to emulate the paintings.
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The dance is characterised by people running in place, small groups moving in syncopated jerkiness, like machines, straining in slow motion, and making minuscule movements that can be easily missed.
Walkaround Time
has a ‘machine-like grace’ that made it more popular than
Story.
⁴⁵

With Martha Graham and
Twyla Tharp,
Cunningham has been one of the most influential choreographers in the final decades of the century. This influence has been direct on people like Jim Self, though others, such as Yvonne Rainer, have rebelled against his aleatory approach.

Cunningham, Cage, the abstract expressionists, and the pop artists were all concerned with the form of art rather than its meaning, or content. This distinction was the subject of a famous essay by the novelist and critic Susan Sontag, writing in 1964 in the
Evergreen Review.
In ‘Against Interpretation,’ she argued that the legacy of Freud and Marx, and much of modernism, had been to overload works of art with meaning, content, interpretation. Art – whether it was painting, poetry, drama, or the novel – could no longer be enjoyed for what it was, she said, for the qualities of form or style that it showed, for its numinous, luminous, or ‘auratic’ quality, as Benjamin might have put it. Instead, all art was put within a ‘shadow world’ of meaning, and this impoverished it and us. She discerned a countermovement: ‘Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories…. The flight from interpretation seems particularly a feature of modern painting. Abstract painting is the attempt to have, in the ordinary sense, no content; since there is no content, there can be no interpretation. Pop art works by the opposite means to the same result; using a content so blatant, so “what it is,” it, too, ends by being uninterpretable.’
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She wanted to put silence back into poetry and the magic back into words: ‘Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted…. What is important now is to recover our senses…. In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.’
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Sontag’s warning was timely. Cage and Cunningham were in some respects the last of the modernists. In the postmodern age that followed, interpretation ran riot.

In the spring of 1964, just weeks after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, his successor as president, Lyndon Johnson, delivered a speech on the campus of the University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor. That day he outlined a massive program for social regeneration in America. The program, he said, would recognise the existence and the persistence of poverty and its links to the country’s enduring civil rights problem; it would acknowledge the growing concern for the environment, and it would attempt to meet the demands of the burgeoning women’s liberation movement. Having reassured his listeners that economic growth in America appeared sustained, with affluence a fact of life for many people, he went on to concede that Americans were not only interested in material benefit for themselves ‘but in the prospects for human fulfilment for
all
citizens.
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Johnson, an experienced politician, understood that Kennedy’s killing had sent a shockwave across America, had been a catalyst that made the early 1960s a defining moment in history. He realised that to meet such a moment, he needed to act with imagination and vision. The Great Society was his answer.

Whatever judgements are made about the success or otherwise of Johnson’s idea, he was right to recognise the moment, for the 1960s saw a collective shift in several areas of thought. Often characterised as a ‘frivolous’ decade of fashion frippery, musical ‘intoxication,’ sexual licence, and a narcotics-induced nihilism, the decade was in fact the time when, outside war, more people in the West than ever before faced up to – or were faced with – the most fundamental dilemmas of human existence: freedom, justice, and equality, what they meant and how they could be achieved. Before examining what Johnson
did,
it is necessary first to examine the context of his Michigan speech, which went back further, and ranged far wider, than the assassination of one man in Dallas on 22 November 1963.

On 17 August 1961, East German workers had begun building the Berlin Wall, a near-impregnable barrier sealing off West Berlin and preventing the escape of East Germans to the West. This followed an initiative by Nikita Khrushchev, of the USSR, to President Kennedy of the United States, that a German peace conference be held to conclude a treaty and establish Berlin as a free city, the
Soviet leader proposing simultaneously that talks be held about a ban on nuclear tests. Although talks about a test ban had begun in June, they had broken down a month later. The construction of the Berlin Wall thus marked the low point of the Cold War, and provided an enduring symbol of the great divide between East and West. Relations soured still more in January of the following year, when the three-power conference (United States, U.K. and USSR) on nuclear test bans collapsed after 353 meetings. And then, in October 1962 the Cuban missile crisis flared, after Russia agreed to provide Fidel Castro – who had seized power in Cuba in 1959 after a prolonged insurrection – with arms, including missiles. President Kennedy installed a blockade around Cuba, and the world waited anxiously as Soviet ships approached the island. The crisis lasted for six days until, on 28 October, Khrushchev announced that he had ordered the withdrawal of all ‘offensive’ weapons from Cuba. It was the closest the world had come to nuclear war.

In 1961 communism stretched beyond Russia to East Germany and seven East European states, to the Balkan countries of Yugoslavia and Albania, to China, North Korea, and North Vietnam, to Angola in Africa, Cuba in the Americas, with a major Soviet or local Communist Party presence in Italy, Chile, Egypt, and Mozambique. The Soviet Union was providing arms, education, and training to several other countries, such as Syria, the Congo, and India. The world had never before been so extensively polarised into two rival systems, the centralised, state-centred and state-led Communist economies on the one hand and the free-market economies of the West on the other. Against such a background, it is perhaps no surprise that books began to appear examining the very notion of freedom at its most fundamental. Communism involved coercion, to put it mildly. But it was being successful, even if it wasn’t being popular.

One of the central tenets of Friedrich von Hayek’s
Road to Serfdom,
published in 1944, was that there is in life a ‘spontaneous social order,’ which has grown up over the years and generations, that things are as they are for a reason, and that attempts to interfere with this spontaneous order are almost certainly doomed to failure. In 1960, at the height of the Cold War, Hayek published
The Constitution of Liberty,
in which he extended his argument beyond planning, the focus of his earlier book, to the moral sphere.
²
His starting point was that the values by which we organise and operate our lives have evolved in just the same way that our intelligence has. It follows from this, he says, that liberty – the rules of justice – ‘is bound to take priority over any specific claim to welfare’ simply because liberty and justice
create
that very welfare: ‘If individuals are to be free to use their own knowledge and resources to best advantage, they must do so in a context of known and predictable rules governed by law.’ Individual liberty, Hayek said, ‘is a creature of the law and does not exist outside any civil society.’ Laws, therefore, must be as universal as possible in their application, and abstract – that is, based on general, and generally accepted, concepts rather than on individual cases.
³
He adds two further important points: that liberty is
intimately linked to property rights, and that the concept of ‘social justice,’ which would become very much a vogue in the following years, and which certainly underpinned the Great Society, was and is a myth. For Hayek, the freedom to live as one wishes on one’s own private property, always supposing of course that one does not, in so doing, interfere with the rights of others, was the ultimate good. Being evolved, law is for Hayek ‘part of the natural history of mankind; it emerges directly from men’s dealings with each other, is coeval with society, and therefore, and crucially, antedates the emergence of the state. For these reasons it is not the creation of any governmental authority and it is certainly not the command of any sovereign.’
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Hayek was therefore against socialism, in particular the Soviet variety, on very fundamental grounds: the government – the state – organised the law, and had no second chamber, which Hayek thought was the natural antidote in the realm of law. Nor did Soviet communism allow any private property, by which the general principles of liberty translated into something practical that everyone could understand; and because it was centrally directed, there was no scope for law to evolve, to maintain the greatest liberty for the greatest number. Socialism, in short, was an interference in the natural evolution of law. Finally, and most controversially at the time, Hayek thought that the concept of ‘social justice’ was the most powerful threat to law conceived in recent years. Social justice, said Hayek, ‘attributes the character of justice or injustice to the whole pattern of social life, with all its component rewards and losses, rather than to the conduct of its component individuals, and in doing this it inverts the original and authentic sense of liberty, in which it is properly attributed only to individual actions.’
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In other words, the law must treat men anonymously in order to treat them truly equally; if they are not treated individually, serious inequities result. What is more, he argued, modern notions of ‘distributive’ justice, as he called it, involve some notion of ‘need’ or ‘merit’ as criteria for the ‘just’ distribution in society.
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He observes that ‘not all needs are commensurate with each other,’ as for example a medical need involving the relief of pain and another regarding the preservation of life when there is competition for scarce resources.
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Other needs are not satiable. It follows from this, he says, that there is ‘no rational principle available to settle the conflict’; this ‘infects’ the lives of citizens ‘with uncertainty and dependency on unforeseeable bureaucratic interventions.’
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Hayek’s view was – and remains – influential, though there were two main criticisms. One concerned spontaneous order. Why should spontaneous order occur? Why not spontaneous disorder? How can we be sure that what has evolved is invariably the best? And isn’t spontaneous order, the fruit of evolution, a form of panglossianism, an assumption that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and that we can do little to improve things?

Constitution of Liberty
is primarily a work about law and justice. Economics and politics, though not absent, are in the background. In 1950 Hayek had left Britain when he was appointed professor of social and moral sciences and a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. It
was a colleague in Chicago who took up where Hayek had left off, reflecting a similar view but adding an economic dimension to the debate. In
Capitalism and Freedom
(1962), Milton Friedman advanced the then relatively unpopular view that the meaning of
liberalism
had been changed in the twentieth century, corrupted from its original nineteenth-century meaning – of economic liberalism, a belief in free trade and free markets – and converted instead to mean a belief in equality brought about by well-meaning central government.
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His first aim was to regain for liberalism its original meaning, and his second was to argue that true freedom could only be brought about by a return to a true market economy, that real freedom could only exist when man was economically free.
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This view was more contentious then that it is now because, in 1962, Keynesian economics were still in the ascendant. In fact, Friedman’s arguments went much further than traditional economic interests in markets. Besides arguing that the depression had been brought about
not
by the Crash, but by economic mismanagement by the U.S. government in the wake of the Crash, Friedman argued that health, schooling, and racial discrimination could be helped by a return to free market economics. Health, he thought, was hampered by the monopoloy which physicians had over the training and licensing of fellow doctors. This had the effect, he said, of keeping down the supply of medical practitioners, which helped their earning power and acted to the disadvantage of patients. He outlined many ‘medical’ duties that could be carried out by technicians – were they allowed to exist – who could be paid much less than highly trained doctors.
¹¹
With schools, Friedman’s ideas distinguished, first, a ‘neighborhood effect’ in education. That is to say, to an extent we all benefit from the fact that all of us are educated in a certain way – in the basic skills of citizenship, without which no society can function. Friedman thought that this type of schooling should be provided centrally but that all other forms of education, and in particular vocational courses (dentistry, hairdressing, carpentry) should be paid for.
¹²
Even basic citizenship education, he thought, should operate on a voucher system, whereby parents could exchange their vouchers for schooling for their children at the schools of their choice. He thought this would exert an influence on schools, through teachers, in that the vouchers would reward good teachers and ought to be transferred into income for them.
¹³
Regarding racial discrimination, Friedman took the long-term view, arguing that throughout history capitalism and free markets had been the friend of minority groups, whether those groups were blacks, Jews, or Protestants in predominantly Catholic countries. He therefore thought that, given time, free markets would help emancipate America’s blacks.
¹⁴
He argued that legislation for integration was no more and no less ethical than legislation for segregation.

One of the criticism of Friedman’s arguments was that they lacked the sense of urgency that was undoubtedly present in Johnson’s speech in Michigan. Kennedy’s assassination had an effect here, as did the rioting and standoffs between blacks and law-enforcement agencies that flared throughout the 1960s. There was also the relentless aggressiveness of communism in the
background. But in 1964 there was another factor: the ‘rediscovery’ of poverty in America, of squalor amid abundance, and its link to something that all Americans could see for themselves – the disfiguring decline of its cities, especially the inner areas. While Hayek’s and Friedman’s books, controversial as they were, were calm and reflective in tone, two very different works published at the same time were much more polemical, and as a result had an immediate impact.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
by Jane Jacobs, was ironic and argumentative.
The Other America: Poverty in the United States,
by Michael Harrington, was downright angry.
¹⁵

The Other America
must count as one of the most successful polemics ever written, if judged by its ability to provoke political acts. Published in 1961, it was taken up by the
New Yorker,
where it was summarised under the title ‘Our Invisible Poor.’ By the end of the following year, President Kennedy was asking for specific proposals as to what might be done about poverty in the country.
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Harrington’s style was combative, but he was careful not to overstate his case. He admitted, for example, that in absolute terms poverty in the third world was probably worse than in North America. And he granted that though the affluent society helped breed ‘spiritual emptiness and alienation … yet a man would be a fool to prefer hunger to satiety, and the material gains at least open up the possibility of a rich and full existence.
¹⁷
But he added that the third world had one advantage – everyone was in the same boat, and they were all pulling together to fight their way out. In America, on the other hand, there was ‘a culture of poverty,’ ‘an under-developed nation’ within the affluent society, hidden, invisible, and much more widespread than anyone had hitherto thought. He claimed that as many as 50 million people, a quarter of the nation, were poor.
¹⁸
This sparked a subsidiary debate as to what the criteria should be for drawing the poverty line, and whether poverty in America was increasing, decreasing, or static. But Harrington was more concerned to show that, despite the size of the poor, middle America was blind to its plight. This was partly because poverty occurred in remote areas – among migrant workers on farms, in remote islands or pockets of the country such as the Appalachian Mountains, or in black ghettoes where the white middle classes never went.
¹⁹
Here he succeeded in shocking America into realising the problem it was ignoring in its own backyard. He also argued that there was a ‘culture of poverty’ – that the lack of work, the poor housing, the ill health, high crime and divorce rates, all went together. The cause of poverty was not simply lack of money but systemic changes in the capitalist system that caused, say, the failure of the mines (as in the Appalachians) or of the farms (as in areas of California). It followed from this that the poor were not primarily to blame for their plight, and that the remedy lay not with individual action on their part but with the government. Harrington himself thought that the key lay in better housing, where the federal government should take the lead. His book was, therefore, addressed to the ‘affluent blind,’ and his searing descriptions of specific instances of the culture of poverty were deliberately designed to remove the indifference and blindness. How far he succeeded may be judged from the fact that his phrases ‘the culture of poverty’ and ‘the cycle of deprivation’ became part of the language, and
in Johnson’s State of the Union address, in January 1964, four months before his Great Society speech, he announced a thirteen-point program that would wage ‘unconditional war on poverty … a domestic enemy which threatens the strength of our nation and the welfare of our people.’
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