Eric Kaufmann: belief

Transcript context

…If we’re in the middle of the 19th century, and the French are debating whether to put up that spire at Notre Dame, are you for that or against it? I think I probably would be against it. So perhaps that does suggest a certain leaning, that things of beauty that have a long provenance — I tend to want to preserve them. This brings up this other issue about preservation versus change. You have to have some change and some preservation, and then people are oriented differently towards both. Actually, if you’re consistent, if you want local communities and historic buildings and things which are associated typically with progressivism, then that’s also, actually, consistently associated with things like preservation of existing ethnic compositions or histories, which is a more populist-right thing. Some people suggest the age of modernism in the Western world was a kind of aesthetic peak. Take the 1920s. You have Picasso, you have Thomas Mann, you have Proust, you have Rilke. You have so much in art. Classical music is still quite a live tradition, though coming to an end. And after that, something weird happens, and we never somehow got on track. What’s your take on that view? Is it correct?…

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