The Lead

Historic Schiller Conference: Ideas Have Legs, Beauty Trumps Ugliness

by David Shavin (EIRNS) — Dec. 08, 2024

The message from the historic weekend Schiller Institute conference, “In the Spirit of Schiller and Beethoven: All Men Become Brethren!” was loud and clear. The world is at a “punctum saliens”’ where hard work over the Institute’s forty years has created a real breakout possibility for the world to break the cycle of underdevelopment, poverty and constant warfare. Today’s third panel, “The Science Drivers of Physical Economy”, laid out the very real development projects and method of thinking for the way forward. (The transcripts of Panel 3’s speeches are in this briefing in Documentation.) And the fourth panel, “The Beauty of the Cultures of the World: A Dialogue Among Civilizations”, posed the thoroughgoing classical statecraft of Lyndon LaRouche, the motor behind the developments that make for a pathway out of war and genocide.

What makes the “classical” method work? It is not just going back to pretty music, under 100 decibels, stripped of vulgar lyrics. Classical is idea-driven, with all the rigor of a scientific breakthrough and all the consequent beauty and joy of the birth of a new world. As Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche posed, and the other dialogue participants developed, the idea poses a paradox, which challenges the listener to work the problem through to the end, coming to a solution on a higher level only dreamed of before. “Classical” works in a world where there is a coherence and a causal connection between the world’s “objective” requirements and the “subjective” world of the mind. So, an opening theme, rich though not yet fully grasped, engages the listener, allowing the beauty of the idea to drive the listener through the lawful development of the untapped riches implicit in the opening; so as to change the listener into a version of a capable statesman.

Friedrich Schiller refused to let go of a critical scientific paradox, whereby the American Revolution had proven that the imperial, hegemonic mode of the British Empire could be superseded, yet the French Revolution demonstrated a cultural backwardness that substituted for the required passion for justice, an animalistic and impotent rage. Schiller knew that humanity was born for something better and fought for a Classical method—in poetry, in music, in historiography and statecraft—so that a great moment in history, a punctum saliens, might not find a small-minded population.

Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister, admitted yesterday at the Doha Forum that Russia had invested a lot of effort over the last decade to keep Syria alive as a sovereign country, to not allow the Western treatment of Libya and Iraq be repeated in Syria. So, the turmoil this weekend is undeniably disappointing, and Russia is “very much sorry for the Syrian people who became a subject of another geopolitical experiment….” But, he continued, the reality is that the clash of a decadent, dying West and the rising Global Majority of the South and East, “one phasing out and another one emerging, is not going without clashes.… All this is the repetition of the old, very old habit to create some havoc, some mess, and then to fish in the muddy waters.”

And right on cue, today the collective Biden has begun a bombing campaign in Syria, amplifying Israel’s efforts, creating more deaths, more cruelty, more ugliness—and more instability. Ugly, but Lavrov yesterday called it “a reflection of attempts not to allow the hegemony to phase out. But this is a fight against history.”

The fourth panel was challenged, must Classical music simply turn its head away from such ugly developments, only allowing itself to beautiful and inspiring images? Ugliness, and outright evil, must not be presented simply to shock or to indulge one’s desire to have an excuse to do nothing—but only as part of a process to arouse righteous anger. As the poet-statesman Abraham Lincoln put it, as the slaughter of the American civil war neared an end:

“The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Four years of slaughter, or even 250 years—do not question whether this world bends toward justice or not. We needn’t know everything, to know what we must do—but we must listen to the better angels of our nature—and the Schiller Institute has proven that method to work.