WE ended last week with the difficulty of maintaining the recognition of the ambivalence of destruction and creation. Epochs, cultures, whole civilizations have come and gone, denying its truth. The eighteenth century is known as the age of the dictionaries and encyclopaedias — the codification and categorisation of language and knowledge. It was also the age of slavery. But maybe the most revealing aspect of the era was that King Lear could only be performed with a tacked-on happy ending. Dr Johnson complained that Shakespeare had neglected “poetic justice”, and a similar incomprehension was David Hume’s, reducing the passion of tragedy to sentiment and its despair to elegy, making the value of art something suitable to the untroubled entertainment of civilised men. Stevie Smith was nearer the mark when she pointed out that “art has nothing to do with civilization” – or at least, a civilization of enlightened order in which it is impossible to imagine that the forces of the uncontrollably destructive in life are engaged by people, and that such engagement might be made willingly.

In the 20th century that recognition has been forced upon us time and time again, as the price of change and the cost of winter has been gauged and understood by its artists. The ending of King Lear is trembling in the aftermath of events and at the prospect of how to continue. Even Edgar’s readiness, adaptability and youthful strength, is deferential and hesitant before what remains of what he calls the “treasury of life”.

At the end of Shostakovich’s eighth symphony, written in the middle of the Second World War, the same trembling sense of what tragedy means, is present. The tensions are unresolved, the suspense is a permanent fact, the tones conclude, but like unrepairable clouds, the difficult questions are still hanging in the air. If there is a prayer for peace in this music, it is no more easily hopeful than the closing moments of Wole Soyinka’s novel Season of Anomy, a version of the Orpheus myth set during the Nigerian Civil War. Through a harrowing landscape of bloody massacres, Ofeyi searches for his kidnapped lover, Iriyise. Ofeyi moves through battlefields and slaughterhouses, through the corruption and exploitation of modern Nigeria, deeper and deeper in a fugue-like descent, through prisons and madhouses, to find his Iriyise virtually entombed and literally comatose. Ofeyi and his friends finally rescue her, and the affirmation comes in the novel’s final sentence: “In the forests, life began to stir.” But this offers no guarantee of renewal, only the promise of possibility. Iriyise is still unconscious when the novel ends. War and winter have taken their toll.

The blending of the Orpheus myth with shocking realism in Season of Anomy is another kind of recognition. The archetypal myth has Orpheus bringing Euridice out of the underworld, leading her, by virtue of his music, back to the surface of the earth. But there is a price: she can stay for a while, but she has to go back underground once a year. It’s the story of the seasons again: Euridice is Spring, as potent and life-renewing as Shakespeare’s Autolocus, in The Winter’s Tale, that “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles” who steals the snow of white sheets from the washing lines of the green hills, baring their greenness again to the world. But in Season of Anomy, as in King Lear, we are closer to understanding the depth of winter, the metaphysics of spring, than we are to the frolicsome marmosets of summer. But that depth is sometimes difficult to reach.

At the end of the 20th century, the laconic cynicism evoked by Michael Moorcock seemed characteristically exhausted when his post-1960s character Jerry Cornelius quipped, “I’m told that the end of the world is nigh, so I’m off home to watch it on the telly.” Or, in the wonderfully entitled novel of fragments, The Entropy Tango (1981), when one of Jerry’s friends remark, balefully, “It’s the beginning of the end…” but then, “It always is…”

This knowing stance may be recognisable, a hundred-year-old echo of Oscar Wilde at the fin-de-siècle, a matter of being “cool”. Yet fashion is never innocent, and the further we go from the sense of the unpredictable and uncontrollable, the more we limit vitality. It’s a matter of propriety, too, of political correctness. Just as Goya depicted in The Sleep of Reason (1797-99), a world of nightmare alive in the unconsciousness of rational and civilised people, so the puritan sense of what is proper, and who has property to protect, is a matter for present concern. If my examples from music, art and literature seem historical, the questions they ask – and answer – belong to us all even now. I remember a massively bowdlerized version of Sergio Leone’s film, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) broadcast on New Zealand television in the late 1980s. In a wonderfully poignant, lyrical moment, the romantic bandit Cheyenne says to the central character, Jill: “You know, Jill, you remind me of my mother. She was the biggest whore in Alameda and the finest woman who ever lived. Whoever my father was, for an hour or for a month, he must have been a happy man.”

WHEN this appeared on NZTV, what we heard was, “You know, Jill, you remind me of my mother…She was the finest woman who ever lived…My father…must have been a happy man.”

The constraints of the censor are always encroaching. The people who make things more or less possible are not only in central governments and local councils but pervasively in newspapers, TV and radio. These professions at some level are populated by people who decide to fill the air with political priorities and choose what to make public, persuasively. And both within and beyond these professions, there are also those who choose to be slaves, to have the impositions put upon them by others. The great encouragement needs to be to resist the impositions of the establishment, to ask the awkward questions. That’s surely one answer to the question, “What good are the arts?”

The conclusion that the cultural revolutionaries succeeded is borne out by history, but more important is the clarity with which the central conflict is defined in any era. For example, in the 1920s, specific examples of works of art, were being created, read, seen or listened to, comprehended one way or another by a relatively small percentage of the population, at the same time as there was a vast increase in appetite for, and manufacturing of, mass culture. Commercial imperatives create divisions of their own. Cognate with these are the inhibitions of caricatures and clichés severely delimiting meanings of any kind, most obviously in national caricatures. Yet disdain of the “popular” is as useless as contempt for the “highbrow”: all are connected. “Culture” is what is produced by everyone, for better and for worse.

With this in mind, we might propose that there are only two reasons for the state to make laws. One is to protect the vulnerable. The other is to enhance human potential.

Everything else, all legal structures and formalities, all the jargon of legislation and the state, all government, in any purpose of self-conscious moral responsibility and social authority, must serve these imperatives, and not be fudged.

They are balanced against each other for good reason. Keep them both in mind and they complement each other, at best. All good laws rise from them. Take them to extremes and they start to break each other down. For freedom, you need regulation.

The question is, what sort of regulation would you like?