Poetry and the Common Good

by Zach Terrell

Ethan and Levi were born too early. For whatever reason, their mother’s womb had decided the thirty-week old twins stood a better chance on the outside than on the inside. They weighed in at 2.6 and 2.8 pounds. Whatever it was they looked like, it wasn’t babies—tiny bodies, big heads, too much extra skin. Benjamin Button came to mind as I peered from behind the plastic caging of their isolettes and watched the wrinkles on their sides disappear with every CPAP-assisted breath. The odds were against them, as they were with the dozen other preemies in the NICU that day.

And yet, they survived.

It was my first real encounter with the blessing of modern biomedical technology, and I soon realized how much we had to be thankful for. An existential pride swelled up in me for mankind and the astonishing progress we have made in medicine. I wanted to shake the hand of each individual responsible for the survival of my nephews and say “Thank you!” until they knew I meant it. It was in the months to follow while watching Ethan and Levi grow that I realized the premises of scientific inquiry were important to praise and defend.

Still, if history tells us anything, it tells us such praise is Janus-faced, and can pose a threat to the vitality of culture by resisting to draw from the opulent wells of poetry’s wisdom. A curious narrative has taken shape in our culture. What began as the defense of science in certain quarters has become corrupted into a defense of scientism. It was an ideological anomaly then, but has now ferociously gathered snow. It sounds something like this:

"Given what we know from the sciences, the answers are all pretty obvious. Is there a god? No. What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is. Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don’t like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory? Anything goes." [1]

While it may be beneficial on some level, it’s not exceptionally difficult to pare down the problems with these statements. They are attempting to answer questions outside the scope of the scientific method, and in a language of such strong certitude as to rule out any other possible way. They are fine examples of how the “religion of science” can turn intelligent men into fools. [2]

Inherent, too, in this brave, all-encompassing application of science to life is a pernicious recoloring of knowledge:

“There is only one way to acquire knowledge, and science’s way is it.” [3]

What this kind of statement tacitly assumes about the nature of knowledge may be even more pressing than what the first statement proposes about physical reality. When we recolor the nature of knowledge, the empiricist will agree, we recolor the nature of the human person.

The bottom line is this: the most fundamental challenge posed by this new understanding of the acquisition of knowledge is that it sees the whole human organism as one part: its rational component. A culture instructed about life by a science that sees the whole human organism only in terms of its rational component will pay no respect the dignity we have as loving, desiring, affective creatures. [4] It will confine the bounds of knowledge to focal awareness and reject that salient feature of man to consider possibilities—out of which the sciences were first born. It will supplant logos with will, giving individuals the feeling of great power and control, but offering no standards to guide its use. By reducing value it will order all aspects of its world toward efficiency, ease, and the maximization of utility.

And finally, and most importantly for our purposes, it will dismiss imagination to the sidelines of culture.

What could the absence of poetry from the everyday, or the every-other day, tell us? Maybe not that imagination is on the decline, but at the very least, that we have forgotten where best to cultivate it.

Learning to love poetry could prove a valuable counter-practice to scientism’s language of certainty and its assault on the wholeness of the human. Truth, whether scientific or other, needs beauty to keep it from becoming harsh and dogmatic. There is a mysterious depth to the art of poetry that is designed to pierce the illusion that we see the world directly, and it does so by sinking into the deepest depths of consciousness, into the kardia of our being, showing us how imprecise our certainty can become.

So if we are in need of poetry, it isn’t because we need to be a bit more “cultured,” or so we can talk about Philip Levine’s latest appearance in The New Yorker. That would have us become just as supercilious as the arbiters of scientism. If we are in need of poetry, it’s because we need to be a bit more human. For poetry

"expands the mind by giving freedom to the imagination. … It invigorates the mind by letting it feel its faculty—free, spontaneous, and independent of nature—of regarding and estimating nature as phenomenon in the light of aspects which nature of itself does not afford us in experience." [5]

Kant’s point is the same as mine: without the terms of imagination which poetry employs, fundamental things cannot be said. The terms of science alone cannot provide a unified answer for knowledge and life.

Here we have come to our final question: what can poetry mean for the good society?

David Brooks suggested, and I believe rightly, that poetry is a tool that pierces “the illusion that we see the world directly.”[6] It’s a healthy practice to pause and appreciate how tenuous our grip on reality actually is. We need poetry to understand that we don’t understand. What it can help achieve for us, then, if nothing else, is a winsome self-awareness of the weakness of our understanding, hopefully before “certainty,” like that in the statements above, turns to tragedy.

“When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgment. The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state.” – JFK

Last year in China, poet Zhu Yufu published a 76-word poem entitled “It’s Time” in which he calls the people of China to “voice the song of their heart” and “choose what China shall be.” For this he was charged with “inciting subversion of state power” and has been sentenced to seven years in prison.

Another Chinese poet, Liu Xiaobo, is currently in his third year of an eleven-year sentence for the same offense as Yufu. On April 10th, a 292-page volume of the poetry that got Xiabo in trouble will be published in the United States. The collection is inspired by the events of the Tianaman Square protests.

“In our country,” says American poet Aaron Belz, “it has become a rare notion that poetry might change a civilization’s direction, but the authorities in China and Saudi Arabia are right to assume that every 72-word or 140-character text stands a chance to affect political realities.”[7]

Don’t misunderstand what I’m trying to say. Poetry can’t save us. But it can increase the common good by giving us recourse to what absolute rationality rejects: our imaginations.

The first function of poetry, then, is to show us there is a glass lens through which we peer into our world, and that we see through it darkly. A culture instructed about life by this function will be more human. It will grow comfortable with the tension between understanding and uncertainty—the mystery, wonder and complexity of life together. It will drive out our terror at the complexity of things and help us begin to “recognize patterns, blend patterns, apprehend the relationships and pursue unexpected likenesses.”[8] With practice, it could be living more poetically. It could be culture in which Ethan and Levi are no longer just surviving, but flourishing.

Have you seen scientism and a desire for the certainty of empirical knowledge creep in your church?
What are your favorite poems and why?

[1] Leon Wieseltier’s summary of Alex Rosenburg’s book The Atheist’s Guide To Reality as found in his article “The Answers,” The New Republic, December, 14, 2011.
[2] Leon Wieseltier, ibid.
[3] Alex Rosenburg, The Atheist’s Guide To Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 58
[4] For the most important discussion on this topic in the last decade or so, see James K.A. Smith’s Desiring The Kingdom
[5] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, §53
[6] David Brooks, “Poetry For Everyday Life”, The New York Times, April 11, 2011
[7] I am entirely indebted to American poet Aaron Belz for bringing these stories to attention and for displaying their significance in a wonderful recent article of his in Capital Commentary called “Terrifying Sentences”
[8] David Brooks, ibid.

Editor's Note: This image was found here.

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