There is perhaps no more reliable measure of the health of a political order than the degree of autonomy that culture enjoys within it. Culture, high and low, may be construed as the sum total of the feelings and the values of a society as they are expressed by means of beauty (or by their opposite, if that too is an aesthetic ambition) — the spiritual life of humanity as it submits to form. Breakthroughs in culture, including strictly formal breakthroughs, have been breakthroughs in human freedom. That is not because anything and everything needs to be said and shown, though a case can be made for such wanton laissez-créer, but because the decision by artists to exert their skills upon inner and outer materials that have not yet been the subject of such exertions multiplies the evidence of what human spirits can accomplish when they are unfettered and their powers of creation are left alone. Even people who cannot hear the structure of a Coltrane solo can hear the freedom in it (and learn from it that there is no contradiction between freedom and structure).
Kulturkampf on the Potomac
