“In the Du Boisian universe, art and culture assumed their value from the roles to which they were assigned and eventually played in a given society. Art, rightly applied, provided humanity with the symbols, insight, and vicarious experience necessary to help one person place him- or herself in the shoes of another, and by so doing come to appreciate the commonality of human experience. It also provided the essential tools by which humanity elevated itself from those baser instincts promoting bloodlust and xenophobia to higher inclinations for the sustenance of intellectual and spiritual interaction, cultivation and evolution of the self, and the maintenance of a moral value system that both defined and perpetuated civilized conduct on a large scale.
“Likewise, the beauty of culture came not so much from artifacts as from the ‘little courtesies’ of everyday behavior. It was by the grace of mutual respect and acknowledgment rather than by the rareness of a painting one possessed or the exclusiveness of one’s membership in a club that indicated a refined sensibility. One’s intelligence was indicated by nothing quite so much as one’s ability to recognize and appreciate the activities of divine purpose from within the ‘lowest’ of society’s laboring masses to the ‘highest’ of its dynastic elite.
“Bereft of consciously applied goals, art and culture tended to glorify the potentially worst in any given society or individual. Beauty degenerated to decadence, grace to greed, and freedom to the enslavement of one’s senses to a material world run amok. As a forerunner of and major contributor to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, Du Bois helped shape the sensibilities of a generation of poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and composers to make them wary of art’s alluring pitfalls.
“Even in its weakest form--that of emotional infatuation--love was something superior to both art and culture. In the face of a world where economic hardships often ground the best of the human spirit into the worst, love provided a pathway into hidden chambers of the spirit where nobility and compassion might be salvaged, resurrected, and made stronger. Before the thunderous clamor of political debate or war set loose in the world, love insisted on its promise for the possibility of human unity: between men and women, between blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, haves and have-have-nots, self and self. Its power and its value and its terror lay in its ability to dominate with joy all other aspects of reality. It was the one thing for which all else--political conviction, art, culture, self-respect, even power--might justifiably be sacrificed because it was the one thing capable of transforming chaos into hope.”
--from THE WISDOM OF W.E.B. DU BOIS
(Citadel Press)
Du Bois on Artists:
“...The tools of the artist in times gone by--First of all, he has use of the Truth--not for the sake of truth, not as a scientist seeking truth, but as one upon whom Truth eternally thrusts itself as the highest handmaid of imagination, as the one great vehicle of universal understanding. Again artists have used Goodness--goodness in all it aspects of justice, honor and right--not for sake of an ethical sanction but as the one true method of gaining sympathy and human interest.”
Du Bois On Civilized Behavior:
“The alternative of not dying like hogs is not that of dying or killing like snarling dogs. It is rather, conquering the world by thought and brain and plan; by expression and organized cultural ideals.”
“Goodness and unselfishness; simplicity and honor; tolerance, susceptibility to beauty in form, color and music; courage to look truth in the face; courage to live and suffer in patience and humility, and forgiveness and in hope; eagerness to turn, not simply the other cheek, but the face and the bowed back; capacity to love. In all these mighty things, the greatest things in the world, where do black folk and white folk stand?”
