This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Arts Without Mystery, given by Dennis Donahoo, was originally

broadcast in 1982.

If you wanted to neutralise the arts and remove their mystery, the best strategy would be to reduce

them to psychology and politics and then apply to them the secular techniques of management,

to show that they are at least in that respect, like any other activity.

This is exactly what has happened.

But I shouldn't make it sound too sinister.

Michel Foucault and other critics have interpreted this sentiment as in every way reprehensible.

They see in modern societies a determination to constrain every human impulse,

and they allege that the most typical institutions of society are the law courts, the prisons, insane asylums and bureaucracy,

rather than the Red Cross.

I prefer to think that modern societies insist on understanding every impulse,

if necessary by procedures extremely reductive,

but that they are not obsessed by images of constraint.

Foucault's argument is too global to be convincing.

But I have to concede that modern societies have a surprising interest in assimilating the arts.

You would have thought that the arts could safely be allowed to go their own way.

In a sense, of course, they are.

But saying this reminds me of the anger young people in the 60s felt toward benevolent paternalism.

Fathers were kind, warm-hearted, generous enough to subsidize a social revolution, but their motives were suspect.

They were especially tender in the hope that their children would not strike them.

...