The arts and society: A question of values

Four of the contributions to the spring 2024 issue of Studies are drawn from the work of people involved in teaching on an elective module offered to students at Trinity College Dublin. The module is called ‘Music-making, the Arts and Society’, and it is provided jointly by the Royal Irish Academic of Music and the Department of Education in Trinity. It concerns the transformative power of the arts. According to the module descriptor, it ‘examines the way in which the arts – music in particular – can address contemporary challenges such as climate change, mass migration, civil unrest, social exclusion, and navigating power relations’. Prospective attendants are told that they will ‘explore ways in which citizens can engage in the arts to engender social change’ and ‘question whether artists have an obligation to serve communities and how they might do this’. Special thanks are due to John O’Hagan, Professor Emeritus of Economics, TCD, who teaches on the module, for bringing these essays together.

The economics of the arts has been a specialist research area for Dr O’Hagan in recent years, but, as he makes apparent in his own essay here, his interest in the role of the arts in society extends well beyond checking the balance sheet. In ‘“The Subsidised Muse”: The Case for State Funding of the Arts’, he argues that large direct public funding is justified not primarily because of the undeniable personal benefits it generates, but because it brings a range of substantial societal benefits. He notes that the arts help to protect the identity and enhance the prestige of nations and regions, which has the effect of creating stability and cohesion. And more: this cohesion is enhanced by the ‘on-going social criticism function of the arts’ by which it contributes ‘in a special way to a functioning democratic liberal society’.

The other papers in this series also concern the wide-ranging personal and societal benefits of the arts. In her ‘Reflections from a 21st Century Conservatoire Leader’, Deborah Kelleher, Director of the Royal Irish Academy of Music, describes the RIAM’s commitment to promoting access and inclusion in music education and participation, particularly in relation to young people and adults with disabilities. She notes that access and inclusion have been objectives of the RIAM since its foundation in 1848. In ‘Trinity College Chapel Choir: Profiling Chorister Perceptions’, Kerry Houston and Marita Kerin trace the history of Chapel music in TCD, right back to the early years of the college, which was founded in 1592. But the substantial theme of their essay is the findings from a study that investigates how current students view the musical, spiritual, and social aspects of their experience as choristers. Most of the survey respondents were in agreement that the Chapel Choir played an important role in creating social cohesion on campus, helping the students to make cross-disciplinary connections and friendships and building strong bonds of collegiality.

In the last of the essays in this series, ‘The Prison Service and the Arts: Impact and Emerging Debates’, Sarah Doxat-Pratt evaluates the impact of externally organized, participatory arts projects, particularly relating to music and drama, in prisons and community justice settings. One key purpose of this activity, she writes, is ‘to go some way to mitigating the pains and harms of imprisonment’. The projects bring many benefits. These include providing the participants with purposeful ‘occupied time’, fostering a positive attitude, creating a space for their emotional expression, and helping them to develop personal skills and capacities. Dr Doxat-Pratt also notes that some arts projects in prisons use their work to highlight inadequacies and inequalities in the prison system and to help train frontline staff.

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The remaining essays in this issue cover diverse themes. In a lengthy paper on John Henry Newman’s ‘campaign in Ireland’ to establish the Catholic University, Paul Shrimpton reviews the evidence provided in Newman’s voluminous personal papers from his time as Rector. He argues that they serve to undermine various negative portraits of Newman, by recent as well as older scholars, in relation to the university, and especially with regard to Newman’s relations with Archbishop Paul Cullen. Newman’s papers also serve to show him, contrary to a common caricature, as a ‘man of action’. They demonstrate, Dr Shrimpton says, Newman’s ‘psychological toughness as he set up and then ran a university almost singlehandedly’ and sought to navigate a path through the political and social complexities of Ireland.

In another lengthy essay, Suzanne Mulligan addresses the subject of sexual violence against women. Her premise is that ‘we cannot understand the underpinnings of gender-based violence without first considering the values that shape the world we inhabit. Thus, she proposes a virtue-ethics approach to questions of Catholic sexual ethics. How we frame our social narratives affects deeply our understanding of personhood and human dignity. Prevailing social narratives and the value system that underpins them need to be thoroughly re-examined.

In ‘On Retreat with the Jesuit Pope’, journalist and papal biographer Austen Ivereigh portrays his various collaborations with Pope Francis and provides the background to a set of talks he delivered for an eight-day Spiritual Exercises retreat of the British Jesuit Province. He followed closely the themes which the pope has made the leitmotifs of his pontificate, asking himself as he prepared the talks, ‘how does [Francis’s] pontificate express the journey through the Four Weeks of the Exercises? How do the Exercises illuminate the pontificate, and vice-versa?’

Also on the theme of Pope Francis’s vision is Gerry O’Hanlon SJ’s ‘The Synodal Pathway of the Catholic Church: Progress and Challenges’. He asserts that for the pope synodality is much more than a mere ‘system of governance’; it is a way of being Church. He then takes stock of where things lie on the synodal pathway and judges it too soon to assert that it will mark a decisive paradigm shift.

In the first part of a two-part essay, Peadar Kirby argues against the tendency to condemn and dismiss the far-right without attempting to understand them. Examining neoliberalism’s ‘reconfiguration of power’, he argues, ‘offers a more substantial way to understand the reasons for the rise of the far-right as well as prescriptions to address it’. He endorses Pope Francis’s insistence, in Fratelli Tutti, that what is needed is the forging of ‘a common project for the human family, now and in the future’.

This issue of Studies also carries the work of two Irish poets, one poem by Desmond Egan and a set of four poems by Fred Johnston.