ARE the arts a guarantee of anything? WH Auden told us that poetry makes nothing happen and there are cautionary tales of Hitler’s love of opera (not only Wagner’s hymns of power in the cycle of The Ring but also Beethoven’s praise of freedom in Fidelio). Politicians often cut funding to them because they’re the easiest victims in the world. I’ve heard it said that the arts don’t make you a better person and they can’t protect us from evil monsters.

This is wrong. These cautions are clichés and misdirections. To put it bluntly, they are bum steers. The arts can indeed make better people of us all, and it’s worth saying straightforwardly how that might happen.

We’ve said before in these columns that the purpose of the arts is to help people to live. So how can they help? How, practically, literally, can they help?

In this new series of essays I’m going to explore a number of ideas and examples that give answers to these questions, in four ways.

The first is a simple metaphor: the arts are maps, old maps and new, charts of human life that have been made across centuries and continents and countries, and reading the maps can help us understand what people are capable of, both in our best and worst potential.

Then there is the way in which they help us understand the truths of nature, most immediately with regard to the seasons, the annual cycle of change that is a given on this earth, and that offers an elementary metaphor for human life: birth, youth, maturity, old age, death and regeneration, a cycle that turns once in any one person’s life, but that intersects with other cycles in multiplicities of ways. We might call this the “metaphysics of spring”: what the seasons, in their complex purpose of rejuvenation, mean.

Third, there is the metaphor of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods to give to human beings something we otherwise would lack: call it spirit, essence, the aspiration, that for which the clay grew tall. It is not an unmixed blessing: fire can rise, rage, burn all before it. Dionysus intoxicates, lifts, elates, but can also ruin, destroy, kill. The gift of Prometheus carries a destructive, as well as a creative, potential.

And understanding that will lead us to the fourth way in which the arts can help us to live: the understanding of tragedy.

I’m going to address these four themes in various ways, with a range of examples, in the next series of essays. Let’s start with the maps.

These are the words with which Alasdair Gray begins to bring his novel Lanark to a close:

I started making maps when I was small
Showing place, resources, where the enemy
And where love lay. I did not know
Time adds to land. Events drift continually down,
Effacing landmarks, raising the level, like snow.

These maps are like the arts: they show us the terrain of life, contours, cliffs and coasts. They chart our deepest oceans and their rivers run like arteries across arid plains. But Gray’s words are also a warning: the maps tell us that human landscapes are always changing, and they require a special understanding, a training in how best they might be read. In answer to a question about the nature of art, the American novelist Robert Penn Warren once said: “Ah believe it’s just gettin’ yore reality shaped a little better.” We have to learn how to make reality shapely.

But in an age of crass commercialism, the arts are disadvantaged, partly because the training that is needed to help us comprehend them is so vulnerable. The vanity of rampant managers and the strafing heartlessness of advertising clog up the channels of contemplation. The Irish novelist Flann O’Brien is only mildly exaggerating a popular philistinism when he declares: “There is no excuse for poetry. Poetry gives no adequate return in money, is expensive to print by reason of the waste of space occasioned by its form, and most of it is bad. Nobody is going to manufacture a thousand tons of jam in the expectation that five tons may be eatable.”

He has a point. You can imagine certain government ministers of education trying the thing on without a trace of irony, and getting knighthoods for the damage they do to generations.

THE arts look after themselves. The creative force that produces them is so essential, so profoundly necessary, that they are as inevitable in human life as the desire for shelter, food and procreation.

The arts – all the arts – are as inseparable from being human as the dance is from the dancer in Yeats’s poem “Among School Children”. But as the American critic Guy Davenport points out, if the purpose of journalism is to inform and disseminate, it isn’t doing its job: “Thirty years of liberal twiddling with the lines of communication have made it almost impossible to broadcast anything but received propaganda.” And what is happening in the minds that keep other minds alive and give us the courage to live is reported, if at all, in a dangerously denatured and official trickle of news. When the arts are neglected or obscured, people suffer from dullness and ignorance.

It was not always thus. It’s perfectly easy to imagine a condition in which the arts are fundamentally integrated in the social economy, but it comes at a cost. In traditional pastoral societies, a familiar sound might be the song of a woman milking a cow by hand into a pail. The regular rhythm measured in the percussive beat that accompanies the woman’s voice would be the sound of milk jetting from a cow’s udder into the bucket: the song keeps its measure by the regularity of the act of milking, and as it keeps its measure, it soothes and calms the cow and the singer. The milk is fresh and good and the cheese that will come from it will be wholesome.

In traditional societies and oral cultures, the arts are frequently related to daily life in exactly this way. Cradle songs or lullabies, laments, praise-songs and festive dancing, music and poetry all have practical applications and connect with the wellbeing of people. And maybe because our hypersophisticated modern world might seem a long way from such conservatism, we often need reminding that the arts are to do with wellbeing. As we noted, their purpose is to help people to live.

Matthew Arnold’s famous, or notorious, phrase, from Culture and Anarchy (1869), that our business in the arts is to get to know “the best that has been thought and said in the world” begs the question, who has the right to be the judge? Yet without a sense of value we are doomed to endless pluralism, like the “real TV” shows which collapse all purpose into inane babble. In any case, there is a simple answer: “I will be the judge.” But you have to ask, what authority do you have? So I’ll have to show you why I’m capable of judging. Sylvester Stallone in the film Judge Dredd (1995) plays a character who thinks nothing of announcing to criminals “I AM DUH LAW!”, and there is an undeniable attraction in the thought that one might resolve an argument as thoroughly as Judge Dredd, with a short burst of machine-gun fire, after which there is no-one left to contradict the Judge, who comments: “THIS ROOM HAS BEEN PACIFIED!”

But that would be altogether too unencumbered. We should be a little more Socratic in our method.

Metaphor helps. We’ll pick that idea up next week.