This idea of conservative anarchism sums up a lot of the Western political tradition, in which the whole idea of government both is justified by and meant to counteract the wildness of the human mind. As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, in a world without government, life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” But as many people have noticed through the years, this way of looking at the world creates something of a chicken-and-egg problem: is it that we need authorities to protect us from our own wildness, or is it more the case that authorities invent this idea of wildness in order to justify their own rule? As paradoxical as the terms “conservative” and “anarchist” sound, there is a way in which they reinforce and support each other. Conservatives need anarchists to justify their faith in rules, and anarchists need conservatives to give their rebellion meaning. And politics, more often than not, is a sad dance between these two mismatched partners.
The creative life, on the other hand, stands apart from both these words “conservative” and “anarchist”. Creativity is never conservative, in the sense that an artist believes that the imagination thrives when rules are suspended, not enforced. But creativity isn’t anarchic either, for an artist is not free to view what arises in his imagination as mere chance or chaos. He must take the hidden rhythms and mysterious patterns he finds in his imagination as seriously as any external law. This delicate balance between order and wildness is hard enough for a soul to strike in isolation; in our culture of conservative anarchism, it is an immense feat. This is because conservative anarchism can only accept art as a type of sin whose punishment is inevitable. Think of the “Britney Spears Syndrome,” in which American audiences are attracted to pop-stars only if they have some fatal emotional flaw, or the structure of every Hollywood music biopic, in which the musician succumbs to drugs or alcohol halfway through the narrative. All of this is conservative anarchism’s way of saying “No one can live an imaginative life without either being destroyed or becoming jaded.” Stories about artists growing old in the sun, quietly working on their craft till their time on earth is done - these don’t sell well in our culture.
The ancient Taoist writers understood that creativity is not something that can be fit into the categories of “order” or “chaos”. To live creatively is to live a life without these edges. This is why Lao Tzu says, “The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both.”
Tags: american audiences, egg problem, hidden rhythms, hollywood music, mysterious patterns, thomas hobbes
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