The late James Blish wrote a very great and very true thing, in one of the essays collected after his death in The Tale That Wags The God, published by Advent.
He said "There is no such thing as progress in the arts."
And there isn't. That's why, for those whose taste runs that way and who take the trouble to listen, music composed hundreds or even thousands of years ago is still good. That's why we can still look at paintings from the Renaissance or even earlier and derive pleasure from them. The technology progresses--we discover new techniques, new instruments, new ways of making music or painting--but the art itself remains exactly the same. He goes on to suggest that Beethoven, despite the greater musical compass available to him, was actually not as good a composer as Mozart, and I'm not sure I can follow him that far, but his general point is sound. That's why the various kinds of "modern music" that sprang up in the early part of the twentieth century never found widespread approval, why the songs that are popular today still mostly use the rules of harmony and counterpoint developed centuries ago. That's why "modern art," in its various forms, still excites frequent derision among the majority of people. It's not because the majority of people are stupid, or lack perception, or are behind the times. It's because artists and musicians, in a doomed quest for unending innovation, are trying to force progress where none can be.
And that's why Gestalt, living and writing six thousand years in the future, are still writing songs that fall into idioms that are recognisable to us; because there's no new scale, no undiscovered form of harmony, that will speak to the human heart any more clearly than the ones we've always had. People's tastes will differ; some people will find beauty in the works of Mondrian or Malyevich, Stockhausen or John Cage, or even stranger things. But there will always be people who love Mozart, and Raphael, and Sibelius, and Magritte, and who like to get boogieing to a good old rock'n'roll tune. Always.
There are two areas in which human beings can progress; technology, and social dynamics. Technology is progressing a lot faster than many people are comfortable with, and social dynamics are hardly progressing at all, because powerful people have a vested interest in them not doing so. This if nothing else should bring home to anyone the major truth that underlies my stories of very familiar-looking futures; that progress of any sort is optional. We are driving the bus. We can determine the direction and the speed, and if we want to we can stop.
In my future, social progress has gone forwards and backwards a bit and ended up quite a bit further forward than we are and (for the moment) steadily advancing. Technological progress has all but stopped, because we don't need it any more; we have technologies that can do just about anything we want technologies to do. And strangely enough,
we haven't died. We haven't pushed forward into some unimaginable Singularity in which humanity has been transformed into something half-machine and half-god that a single power cut could wipe out. We haven't been conquered by some alien race more advanced than we are. We go on, moving slowly and steadily towards Mindfulness and a real, rather than a merely technological, paradigm shift.
Some things have been lost, as always with progress, and some things have survived that perhaps should not have. Humanity is not perfect, and people are still flawed. But my future humans, on some level, have absorbed the knowledge that the path to perfection is not to transform ourselves into something other than human, but (and I've said this before) to be the best humans they can be.
While still getting down and boogieing to a good old rock'n'roll tune, of course.
Originally posted on
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