Art, Fiction and their influence on Culture and Society

Or not...

Taking broad strokes, art and fiction can fulfil one or more of the following:

1. confirm or reinforce the current society and culture, including biases and prejudices.

2. challenge the norms of the current culture and society, by presenting alternatives.

3. appear to lead culture and society by reflecting emerging trends and attitudes

4. present a future to which the current culture and society is not yet aware it is heading

How then does say fiction, a novel or a film, influence society?

Speaking from my own experience, in 1968-9 a number of fictions coincided to produce what could be called the indoctrination of a generation with a particular attitude and acceptance of certain human behaviours.

A still from the film Lord of the Flies. Uh oh, cultural norms and bias about to be reinforced.

As a thirteen year old, I and many of my peer group, pretty much throughout Britain, were set William Golding's The Lord of the Flies to read and study for the GCSE O Level examination. The novel, first published in 1954, deals with a group of young boys, shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and their attempts to survive and recreate an ordered society which then go horribly wrong. In a nutshell, if putting it rather crudely, the main argument here is that without the framework of law and order, civilised humans will descend or revert to a previous state of savagery or barbarism and end up killing each other. The book was a direct and deliberate contrast to Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss,first published in 1812, where the shipwrecked family create an idyllic lifestyle on the island, (despite those timber-shivering pirates).

More or less coincident with this, the Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clark film 2001 A Space Odyssey was released. My father took our family to see it in Leeds on a huge screen. The opening act of the film depicts early hominids (presented as “ape-men”) cowering in the dark, terrified of dangerous carnivorous animals, barely scratching a living in an arid landscape.

The key transformation (triggered by the appearance of the mysterious monolith) is when the hominids realise the potential of the tool as weapon, leading to the first murder. Later scenes show the ape-men feasting on animals they have killed and the act culminates with an ape-man using a bone as a weapon to destroy skeletons, in glorious technicolour and slow motion which then cuts to spacecraft rotating to the strains of a Waltz, the Blue Danube; the connections between tool as weapon and space flight are obvious.

There is so much being told here, explicitly, about the origin of humanity and implicitly, that violence is what sets us apart from other animals and ultimately leads us to science and the stars (or, in the movie at least, to Jupiter...).

Looking back now, we could say that getting young folk to read The Lord of the Flies without anything to balance or refute its bleak presentation of humanity was a serious, cultural error. Similarly with 2001. To my young mind, they both seemed to be saying similar things about humans in a very believable way and so, as a youngster, I just believed it.

Of course, this had been the prevalent believe for a long while, that we, the civilised ones, had evolved from savagery. When the Lascaux cave paintings were first discovered in 1940, they were thought to be a modern hoax because the then current mind-set could not conceive of ancient humans, ("cave men"), being capable of anything so “civilised” as art. Looking back now, thinking of my generation growing up with those sort of beliefs laid into us as children or young people, without any alternative perspective, what are the consequences? Perhaps what we see around us today.

So we could say the The Lord of the Flies and the first act of 2001 fit the first definition above in that they confirmed or reinforced the current society's biases and prejudices.

For myself I was both lucky and privileged in that my parents, both teachers, had books¹ and on their shelves I found Eric Fromm's Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), a more objective examination of human behaviour which presents a very different view of our early evolution. Since then further studies and the stories from the mouths of indigenous folk themselves, have reinforced the idea that we spent very long periods of time in extremely stable, relatively peaceful, hunter-gatherer (so-called² societies, upwards of 200,000 years or 20 times longer than the entire historical period which culminates in where we are now.

The other consequence of 2001 A Space Odyssey followed from the successful presentation of apparently realistic spacecraft on film, more or less for the first time. The movie came out the year before Neil Armstrong took that first step on the moon and it seemed entirely plausible that, like the film, we should go on to Jupiter within the given time scale, by 2001. In 1969, as a thirteen year old, 2001 seemed a lifetime away...How wrong that was. However, there's no doubt that the movie sparked an interest in space in many youngsters who grew up to enter that industry and today, spacecraft have been sent much further than Jupiter, just without people in them. It would be interesting to ask the current wave of billionaire space flight enthusiasts what inspired them in their youth- Star Wars?

Star wars: who would have thought rebellion could be such fun?

We could say here that these sections of the film fit the third definition in that they appear to lead culture and society by reflecting an emerging trend and attitude towards space and space travel.

Back to the movie 2001, the computer graphics that appear on the spacecrafts' screens were, at the time, revolutionary, yet by 1984 I was replicating similar wire frame graphics on a ”home computer”, as they were then called (an Acorn Electron with just 32kb memory) and by 2001 computer graphics were far more advance than those depicted in the movie.

But AI....well, that's another story. The AI HAL³ that runs the spaceship and becomes psychotic, murdering most of the crew, is still a long way ahead of us, if achievable at all. Coupled with films such as The Terminator, they introduced a much darker side of AI into our culture.

HAL: uh oh, this science stuff not all good then?

Back to the 1960's, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings (1954-5) first became popular with the appearance of the paperback edition in three volumes. Again, this had a big influence on my generation; I remember being very disappointed that at the time there were no toys available that related to the story, no models of dragons, dwarves or orcs. Twenty years on, when my generation were into working age and suddenly Warhammer and other companies appear and the market begins to fill up with models (toys) of dragons, dwarves, orcs and all the variants. Depictions on film had to wait until computer graphics got good enough and budgets grew large enough to do justice to the story but when they did, they kicked off another wave of toys, games and other spin-offs.

Moving forward from the 1960's, my son was of the “Star Wars Generation”. Interestingly here, the empire is clearly a bad thing and the rebels are the goodies which could be seen as a useful meme to lay into young people's heads. Also, here the concept of fiction as a franchise, in the service of capitalism, becomes very clear in the growing number of films, the figures, models, games, costumes, conventions and other spin-offs. Its interesting to speculate on the consequences of the "Harry Potter Generation" or similarly of The Hunger Games, where a young woman is the main protagonist, hence challenging at least some aspects of cultural bias.

At least its a woman carrying out the violence…

Its strange now to think that back in the 1960's that they're would only be a handful of films released each year and if you didn't get to the cinema to see one, you would have to wait at least four years before there was even a chance of it appearing on the television; for films classified at 18, it was much longer, if at all. The plethora of options available today, particularly when you add in the myriad narratives available via social media and the ability to watch on a range of devices, more or less when and where you like, means that folk can pick and choose from a huge range of narratives, styles, genres, characters, plot lines, goodies and baddies, so that in a sense we can choose our own cultural conditioning. As an example, the so-called Marvel Universe contains a very broad range of characters that individuals can choose to identify with, from straight through LGBQT, neurologically diverse, of various races, skin colours, shapes and sizes (have I got them all there?) and so reflecting emerging trends and attitudes.

Sadly, the underlying themes of these modern hero and heroine tales remains much the same, reinforcing simplistic cultural norms and biases, that there are goodies and baddies and the best way to sort out challenges (seen as threats) is through violence (and on top of that, make vast amounts of money on the way for a very limited number of corporations and individuals).

Its worth noting that the hero tales of the deeper past, of the warrior as hero, such as Cú Chulainn⁴ in the Irish mythology, were always tragedies; the hero is short lived and ends up killing or otherwise losing everyone they ever loved in a sort of awful karmic response to their choice of violence.

Way back on the first permaculture design course I attended, the teacher Andy Langford pointed out the need for stories, songs, poems, nursery rhymes and the like to reflect generally a sustainable, regenerative, positive culture and more specifically, to encapsulate permaculture ethics, principles and design tools in memorable ways that were easy to remember. There are appropriate stories out there for all age groups but it can be a challenge to find them.

Off we go then!

Thanks for reading and welcome to new subscribers. As always, comments appreciated. All examples given above reflect my personal cultural bias, of course! I’ve not got round to mentioning Dystopias, which have gone relatively rapidly from being no.2, a challenge to the norms of the current culture and society (whoich used to be everything’s fine!) to no. 1, confirming and reinforcing current biases (now more like everything’s going down the pan!). I’ve also not presented a fiction that fits no.4- can you come up with one?

Pics are scavenged off the net. Links are all to Wikipedia.

Till next time (another episode of Konsk coming up very shortly), hwyl! Chris.

1. My father also told me about a French ship carrying passengers which included a children's choir, that ran aground and sank off an island, killing all the adults but the children survived. In this real instance of Lord of the Flies, the young folk did not descend into barbarism and no one was murdered. They survived by replicating a form of order based upon what they already knew. I have since failed to find a reference for this. Anyone know?

2. Misrule suggested to me several decades ago, that a more appropriate term might be scavengers, which is related to the verb, to enquire, as in, we observe or find something and wonder how we might make use of it.

3. Incidentally, HAL is the most interesting and developed character in the film. The acronym comes from IBM, Arthur Clark wanting to make HAL one step (letter) ahead of the corporation...

4. The Hound of Ulster by Rosemary Sutcliffe is one of the great re-tellings of this remarkable hero story. Lady Gregory offers an earlier version in her magnum opus, Lady gregory’s Complete Irish Mythology. Her use of language is absolutely beautiful but sadly she thought fit to cut out all of Cú Chulainn’s remarkable transformations which to my mind, greatly reduces the awsome power of this tale. Yeats apparently agreed with her, not me…There’s also a worthy version in Cymraeg, Cwchwlin by Ivor Owen, which draws heavily on Rosemary’s re-telling.