On Politics and Art, A Running Theme of This Blog

"The last corruption that can visit a society is a corruption of its consciousness, and from this the politically active cannot protect it. If a society is to be saved from a corrupt consciousness it will be saved not be having its values and its civilization protected, but by knowing itself and having its values recreated. Indeed, political activity involves a corruption of consciousness from which a society has continuously to be saved. To ask the poet and the artist to provide a programme for political or other social action, or an incentive or an inspiration for such action, is to require them to be false to their own genius and to deprive society of a necessary service. What they provide is action itself, but in another and deeper sphere of consciousness. It is not their business to suggest a political remedy for political defects, but to provide an actual remedy for more fundamental defects by making a society conscious of its own character. The emotional and intellectual integrity and insight for which they stand is something foreign to the political world, foreign not merely in fact, but in essence. This integrity and insight cannot be introduced into that world without changing their character; and to attempt to introduce them makes a chaos of what is otherwise a restricted but nevertheless ordered view. It is not their business to come out of a retreat, bringing with them some superior wisdom, and enter the world of political activity, but to stay where they are, remain true to their genius, which is to mitigate a little their society's ignorance of itself. This is the truth of the neglected half-truth that the artist and the poet and the philosopher are and should remain separated from 'the world'; not because they have no part in the promotion of the communal interests of mankind, but because to be free from the world is the condition of their contribution. Societies, in fact, are led from behind, and for those capable of leadership to give themselves up to political activity is to break away from their true genius. And a society in which this becomes common will, in a short while, be a society without leaders, a society ignorant of itself and without the true power of recreating itself. And this is true not less in times of political crisis than in others. Culture, it is true, is indebted most to the politically weakened periods of history; but in a society which circumstances encourage to embrace an exclusively political view, it has still its part and its friends their duty."

--Michael Oakeshott, Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, 96