Mark Van Doren on the artist's duty to society

    To Mark Van Doren, the artist’s duty is to make society better at its core:

Society continues to change, and there are those who say it is already the monster we have feared. Whatever in truth it is, the artist ought to be one of the first to understand it, to sympathize with its predicament, and to start making it better at the core. He might even become a philosopher or a politician in order to do this well; but short of that, he can think more deeply and feelingly than he has done about the courage it now takes to be the sort of individual whose dignity matters more than wars and revolutions, more than welfare and the sovereignties of states. Such dignity is given to no one. It has to be created in the mind, by slow and painful stages, amid the total darkness of other men’s refusal to make the attempt at all. But once it is created, it proves everything. And once it is created in an artist whose ambition is otherwise unbounded - and whose skill - it becomes the final excellence of which the rest of us had dreamed. It could even change again the changing world. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 334.)
                          *        *        *
    For a brief biography of Mark Van Doren, click here.