It is dispiriting when two groups of people whom you respect can't get on. I spend a lot of time talking to politicians and a lot of time talking to people in the arts. I am fascinated by both, by what they both do, and by the moral seriousness of most of those who are involved in them -- a moral seriousness that the media rarely matches, by the way. I have little trouble seeing the world from both of the political and the artistic point of view. But as this week's debate has shown, a lot of those who inhabit one of the two worlds all too often see the other as hopeless and even contemptible.
Someone in Monday night's discussion compared it with CP Snow's two cultures argument about the arts and the sciences from the early 1960s - and I think that's right, though maybe not visceral enough. Neither side talks the other's language. It's a bit like a cold war divide.
Yet I would make two points in favour of mealy-mouthed compromise and tolerance. First, and I think most important, it ought to be possible for the two cultures to recognise that neither of them has a monopoly of understanding of the human spirit or the human world. It is not hard, at least for me, to take politics, the art of the possible and, occasionally, the impossible, seriously while also accepting that the artistic imagination is not just an add-on but is integral to the human spirit and to human aspirations. Politicians talk about aspiration as though it was an entirely material phenomenon. But the arts are the embodiment of a different but no less valid or widely shared aspiration too.
Second, both sides need to resist the lazy smugness of self-righteous sniping. There were some truly awful examples of it in Monday's discussion at the Guardian - I found it hard to decide whether Penny Woolcock's initial contribution or her later failure to respond was the more disreputable. But it is no more true that all politicians are unprincipled scoundrels than that all artists are unworldly fools. In reality both "sides" have their fair share of scoundrels and fools alike. There is no inherent reason why the two cultures cannot talk to each other - disagree and criticise each other - for their mutual illumination and benefit. And the truth, as ever, is less simple than the oppositional view supposes. The world is full of artists who understand politics extremely well and politicians who understand artists very deeply - and the world is the better for it.
I happen to think modern Britain has pretty good politics, which are mostly based on a serious understanding of the role of government in the changing modern world. It doesn't worry me one bit that politics are less ideological or confrontational than they were (or are romantically believed to have been) in the past. But I also think that modern Britain is one of the most creative and spiritually liberated societies I know - and certainly more so than Britain used to be.
That doesn't mean we have either politics or an artistic world that is beyond criticism or that does not regularly need a blast of fresh air to move things on. Both the arts and politics produce rubbish some of the time. But an inherently antagonistic relationship in which one or other has the monopoly of virtue? I think not. Just two different parts of a human spirit that is always more ambitious and complex than we think.
