The Jester and the Prophet: Modern Western Art

In the late 1990s, when Bill Buckley still had his Firing Line interview show on the PBS television network, one of his guests was the actor Charlton Heston, known for being a rare bird in Hollywood because of his right-wing views. The main topic on that show was an interesting one: Why are so many actors of the Leftist and anti-Western persuasion? Heston had some theories, but in my estimation, they were not sufficiently substantive. And furthermore, that question needs to be expanded considerably: Why are Western artists in general of the Leftist and anti-Western persuasion? Of course, this question pertains only, or mainly, to Late Modern and ‘Post-Modern’ Art, not to the entirety of the long arc of Western Art spanning the three epochs of the West—Classical Greece & Rome; Christendom; and the early Modern period (post-Renaissance).

The broadest cause for the anti-Western Leftist pathos of modern Western artists lies in the closely related functions of ‘jester’ and ‘prophet’ which have become part of the essential role of an artist as it has evolved in the modern West out of the generally liturgical capacity which Art exemplified in pre-modern Christendom. (Of course, as with any major phenomenon, there were roots and precursors to modernity—to wit, Cervantes, Dante and Shakespeare.)

As ‘jester’, the artist—to extend the metaphor simplistically—makes fun of the King. As ‘prophet’, the artist expresses a vision of disorder and injustice in this world in the light of the true order and justice of the eschatological future. These two rôles, respectively, pertain to Comedy and Tragedy. They are closely intertwined on one level—the level of the light of the eschaton which either reveals the empty silliness and pomposity of power in this life (the jester’s rôle), or condemns and challenges the fallible corruption of power in this life (the prophet’s rôle). Let us play with the jester metaphor at some length, as it will serve to illustrate nicely some of the paradoxes, and hypocrisies, of the modern artist.

First, the jester is part of the King’s court, and more pertinently, he is part of the King’s reign and is supported by its infrastructure and ideology, insofar as he makes his livelihood within its ambit. This fact of the jester’s existence colors all his lampoonery against the King. Even if a King has a catholic sense of humor and doesn’t mind being savaged with a sarcastic tongue, and he therefore allows his jester full latitude to push the envelope of his satire against not only His Highness, but also his Court and the entire Kingdom, the jester is still part of the ‘System’.

The medieval basis for this paradoxical relationship between jester and King was eschatological, by which the basileia of the earthly King is revealed, or reminded, to occupy a dual reality: his power is finite in the light of the eternal basileia of Jesus Christ, the ‘King of Kings’, and its moral substance is dependant upon the Gospel; yet at the same time, he derives, and possesses, a real earthly power through his Christian consecration. The real earthly power the King possesses enables him to have a realm and exert his varied influences, among which are the support of the arts and entertainment; yet at the same time, because he too is a fallible man, since all men—save for the King of Kings—have sinned, both his rule and his person will inevitably involve flaws. According to the genius of Christianity (the same genius which inspired Shakespeare’s artistic vision of kings and kingship), the same Christ who endows earthly Kings with their power also reminds them of the virtue of humility for their human fallibility. And the jester became, for the latter part of the paradox, a lighthearted emissary of Christ. Of course, not all Christian Kings were liberal-minded courters of their own humbling lampoons; and that, too, is part of the rich pageant of human fallibility. The principle was there, nonetheless, and those who failed it, or betrayed it, also contributed to its ongoing revelation.

Just as the medieval King had an existential balance to maintain in his relationship with his jester, so too did the jester himself: his material well-being, and his ability to continue to enjoy his rôle as a jester, are not only dependent upon the King’s power and pleasure, they cannot avoid being a statement of moral support for the King. This moral support becomes more acutely paradoxical and problematic, of course, to the degree that the King’s flaws are more morally glaring, and to the degree that the jester’s moral center is offended by them. There is always the potential for the relationship between jester and King—just as the one between prophet and King—to become so strained, it breaks into outright rebellion: the jest becomes the lese-majesté. (And we are assuming, needless to say, that the prototypical jester—as well as the prototypical prophet—has, or is supposed to have, a moral center that participates in the same transcendent Good that is the substance of the basileia of the King in question.)

The modern (and ‘post-modern’) Western artist, for the most part, has assumed—or resumed—the rôle as a jester or as prophet (or, as is often the case, some sort of a mélange of the two); but he has, for the most part, lost the balance of the paradoxical relationship to the King. The ‘King’ in the context of the modern (and ‘post-modern’) Western artist is the new transmogrified King: the ‘System’, the centers of power of the West—whether those are perceived to be the leaders in representative democractic governments and their influential supporters, or some more sinister cabal pulling all the strings behind closed doors.

The paradoxical balance that has been lost is the modern artist’s consciousness of dependency upon the ‘System’, and of his unavoidable moral support for that ‘System’ not only through his mere existence as a citizen and fellow sinner, but also in his rôle as an artist. The modern artist more or less continues to perform his lampoonery in the same way as the jester of old—in some cases, he may be much better than his predecessor—but he has lost touch with his dependency on, and at least his tacit support for, the ‘System’ he is lampooning. He has created a kind of personal ‘bubble-reality’ (or as Voegelin terms it, a ‘Second Reality’) wherein all truth, justice and wit exist exclusively, and part of the dynamics of this ‘bubble-reality’ is an adversarial relationship with a strangely proximate—even deeply intimate—enemy: the insidious and powerful ‘System’ that constantly, if vaguely, threatens his ‘bubble-reality’. The supreme irony here, however, is that the post-modern artist has become oblivious to the dependence his ‘bubble-reality’ has upon the very same ‘System’ he so profoundly and corrosively disdains and affects to reject: In fact, the ‘System’ enables the post-modern artist: In fact, the ‘System’ supports his ‘bubble-reality’ no less directly and substantively than a married man with a mistress supports her by paying for her apartment and groceries  (even if she deludes herself into believing she is not a kept woman, indeed equivalent to a whore). With this blindness to his own material and existential situation, the post-modern artist’s mockery of various aspects of the ‘System’ ring hollow, and those rings become a comic-tragic cacophony echoing back upon him, to judge him as the unwitting, and witless, object of ridicule. It would be as though, to advert to our analogy of the married man and his kept mistress, that mistress fancied herself as free and independent of the married man and, furthermore, as completely absolved ethically.  It would be as though, for example, Lenny Bruce and George Carlin (two particularly juicy exemplars in this regard) were not aware that they were, in fact, whores of the lucrative john and pimp supporting their wealthy remuneration—the same john and pimp they excoriate as though they were free of dependence upon them. And, in fact, sadly they seemed to be that oblivious to the pathetic bathos of their own jokes—jokes that were ultimately on them.

If this ultimately parasitical ‘bubble-reality’ were just the personal fixation of one or two individual artists, we could chalk this up to an extremely rare eccentricity that might even have some value because of its fantastic antagonism against reality. But this fixation has grown over the past century to massive proportions; it is now positively de rigueur and fashionable for the artist to operate from within his ‘bubble-reality’. Thus, we have a sociocultural situation of a prevalent field of ‘bubble-realities’, or one giant ‘bubble-reality’ in which the wider community of artists share their quasi-Gnostic animus against the ‘System’ (which, as we have argued in previous essays on this blog, is in certain respects equivalent to the Cosmos itself). The hypocrisy of this animus, incidentally, is not really lessened or absolved if the counter-culture artist becomes Yuppified and in effect sells out in exchange for a comfortably bourgeois lifestyle, as seems to have become acutely fashionable for artists of all stripes—painters, poets, musicians, actors—in the past couple of decades; it only becomes all the more ludicrous and incoherent.  

The medieval jester and prophet could subject the King and the authorities of this world to savage critiques, but they rarely went so far as to forget that they, too, were just as much sinners as the King and those authorities, and that they, too, were unavoidable participants in the same ‘System’—unavoidable because their noetic culture was sufficiently healthy to cultivate the awareness that there is no ‘bubble-reality’, no Second Reality, to be in: there is only one Reality, and its tension with its mysterious transfiguration in some eschatological future is an existential tension the jester and prophet share in common with the King. When prophets or mystics of the Middle Ages did make the psychological break against the ‘System’ and its authorities, they broke with the Tension of existence itself and thereby created a Gnostic Second Reality; and those types of prophets or mystics were rightly termed ‘heretics’.

Why Art and artists have evolved (or devolved) this way in the modern West, of course, has to do with the broader movement of modern Gnosticism. But why should most Western artists gravitate to the Gnostic penumbra with such alacrity? Perhaps it is merely due to the structural dynamic of the jester-King (and prophet-King) relationship being inherently susceptible and vulnerable to the pressures of the Gnostic pathos, once that pathos gains sociocultural dominance, as it has in the modern West. The inherent susceptibility and vulnerability of the jester-King relationship to the Gnostic pathos lies in the delicate balance of the paradox in the jester’s lampoonery with an eye to the light of the eschaton that entertains the spiritual superiority of the next world and palls the value of this world, in effect putting the King in his place as a servant to the King of Kings, and his realm as but a shadow of the true reality of the eschatological basileia pertaining to Christ’s Second Coming. This balance has to do with humility: the jester (or prophet) is self-aware of being a conduit or ‘channeler’ of the authority of transcendence, but he does not go so far as to think he himself is free of the mysterious imperfections of human being, by which he will, through his own failings, inevitably fail his vision of perfection. Nor will the jester (or prophet (or true artist)) forget that his failings ultimately bind him in a moral dependency to the realm he is lampooning or exposing—a moral dependency that carries a moral responsibility, and reflects a psychological health, whereby a ‘Second Reality’ is simply not an option.

When the wider sociopolitical culture around the jester—or artist—succumbs to significant degrees of Gnostic deformation, the artistic dynamic of jestering lampoonery offers an ideal vehicle for the Gnostic pathos. When we characterize all art as ‘lampoonery’ we do not mean to imply that all art is comical, only that all art has a critical relationship with the authoritative powers of the Cosmos (the ‘System’ in the modern West). Indeed, it has become a rather common feature of the modern (and ‘post-modern’) Western artist to arrogate to himself more the rôle of prophet than jester (or to imbue his jestering buffoonery with a self-righteous aura of serious and ‘sincere’ antagonism against the ‘System’), as the subculture of modern (and ‘post-modern’) Western Art cultivates, more and more, a self-righteous activist stance in defiance of the ‘System’, even if that activism is largely merely agit-prop—or, insofar as the subculture of Art has really become a superculture of an entertainment machine of agit-pop myopic to its own staggering hypocrisy of making billions in dependence on the very System it is denigrating and attacking.

The truer artist, of course, will not succumb to the Gnostic pathos, but will take advantage of the seductive powers of that pathos, as it exerts its pull through its increasing influence and prevalence in his society, to allow the inherent paradox of his Art to become more acute, thereby sharpening his artistic vision of the paradox of human being in general—the existential paradox of being in tension between this world and the next world. Precious few modern Western artists have cultivated this truer Art, and that may just be because of human fallibility, by which excellence under extraordinarily difficult circumstances is rare.  

It also may have something to do with a curious "double-helix" paradox typical of the modern Western artist, whereby they have elaborately deluded themselves into thinking their very "counter-cultural" antagonism to the System is not what it really is—a very comfortable and incestuous relationship with those who support them, either directly financially, or indirectly through the sociopolitical freedom, health and infrastructure made possible by the very same System (modern Western democracy) routinely and irresponsibly (not to mention ridiculously) excoriated by the artist.  In this approximate regard, Norman Rockwell at least had the decency—not to mention the minimal (and what should be unremarkable) perspicacity—to dismiss the phenomenon of a Mick Jagger and his hip-cockingly smug "rebellion" as nothing more than a teenage twat raised in an upper-class family overturning the dinner table to announce that he rejects Daddy's "hypocrisy"—meanwhile finding no qualms or moral dissonance in continuing, all the same, to take Daddy's money.