DARK NATIONALIST FEELINGS

How galleries cause crime; art, attitudes and apocrypha

No voiceover on this one yet, I fear. Your favourite Crime & Psychology correspondent has gone and got bronchitis. You really don’t want to tune in and hear me coughing for 11 minutes. So I’m going to leave it to you to imagine me reading, in my usual musical manner… Dark Nationalist Feelings!

Tired of reading about politics, squabbles, and political squabbles? Stressed and frustrated by the demands of your employer, your employer’s employers, and the government? Worried about the direction the world is taking? Just for an hour or two, would you like a short break from the agitations of this difficult postmodern world? Would you like to step back into simpler, more timeless pleasures? If so, your first thought will doubtless be this: ‘Why don’t I go and enjoy some landscape paintings? A gallery filled to the brim with gentle representations of the rural idyll, rendered by some master in naturalistic oil colours, will doubtless restore me to a sense of cool equanimity in this febrile world’.

Not so fast! It turns out that landscape paintings are less apolitical than you might have guessed. Indeed, your desire to enjoy a lushly evocative rendering of, say, a flock of sheep standing by a fence may well be a symptom of disturbing reactionary tendencies. Sounds like you’re probably the kind of dissident the Party should be keeping an eye on. And even if you’re not, they’d better do it anyway, just in case.

Here are a few lines from a journal called The European Conservative (no, me neither):

‘A British museum, run under the aegis of Cambridge University, has overhauled the signage for its historical paintings, one of which says those depicting the British countryside can trigger “dark nationalist feelings” in whoever may glance at them. 

A sign for the new “Nature” section reads:

Landscape paintings were also always entangled with national identity. The countryside was seen as a direct link to the past, and therefore a true reflection of the essence of a nation.

[…] the plaque goes on to note, seemingly disapprovingly, that “paintings showing rolling English hills or lush French fields reinforced loyalty and pride towards a homeland.” 

The sign for “Hampstead Heath,” one of romantic realist painter John Constable’s many oil sketches of the area (which he came to adore and would later be buried in) takes it one step further. 

It alleges a “dark side” to the patriotism the work might evoke, carrying the “implication that only those with a historical tie to the land have a right to belong.” ‘

Oh, well, is that all? I mean, we all knew that, didn’t we? Among art historians, it’s a well-established fact that the British National Party used to be known as the Postmodern Progressives until they organised a visit to a Turner exhibition. That famous English landscape, ‘The Haywain’ by John Constable (who died in 1837) is universally recognised as a thinly veiled allegory of unwelcome EU meddling in domestic British politics. The Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, naturally traces his right-wing heritage back to the landscapes of Jacob van Ruisdael. And don’t even get me started on the connection between those French trouble-makers, the Le Pens, and Poussin. We’ll be here all night.

One really does have to wonder whether the curators of The Fitzwilliam’s Museum misunderstood the meaning of the word ‘culture’ in the phrase ‘culture wars’. Or were they just feeling left out? ‘I see South Park hasn’t satirised our Museum yet. Whyever not? Best do something about it quick!’

This is where we come in. The curators’ claim is, of course, a claim about Psychology. It implies that looking at a certain kind of painting can evoke a certain psychological state. We’ll take just a few paragraphs to pick the claim apart. I shan’t delay you long, I promise.

One step at a time. First, let’s ask exactly what kind of claim we are looking at here. Let’s refresh our memories:

‘[paintings] depicting the British countryside can trigger “dark nationalist feelings” in whoever may glance at them’.

Ah yes. That makes sense, as anyone can attest who has rushed off to join the English Defence League after hanging a picture in the living-room. The curators seem to be identifying a causal relationship between viewing landscape paintings and experiencing ‘dark nationalist feelings’. In other words, viewing the paintings is the cause, of which those feelings are the effect.

You may know that there is only one way to establish causal relationships of this sort. You have to conduct a laboratory (or ‘true’) experiment. No other research method will do the job. Surveys, questionnaires, interviews, observations – forget about it. Ethnography?: outta my office.  Only an experiment can establish cause and effect. Nothing else.

If you’d like to read an in-depth account of this matter, please check out my newsletter called The Causes of Crime. You can find it right here. You’ll love it, and, if not, you get your money back.

Now, what do I mean by ‘a laboratory experiment’ (hereafter, just ‘an experiment’)? A summary is easy to provide: An experiment is when you change one thing and measure something else. We call those things ‘variables’. If you change one variable, and only one variable, and as a consequence a second variable also changes, ou know you’ve found a cause-and-effect relationship between the two. The variable you change is known as the independent variable (or IV). The one you measure is known as the dependent variable (or DV).

An experiment, then, is designed to test a causal relationship between an IV and a DV - in this case, between ‘looking at landscape paintings’ and ‘dark nationalist feelings’. Do you reckon the curators of The Fitzwilliam’s Museum have done an experiment like that? I know which way I’m betting.

Let’s see how one might go about conducting such an experiment. We’d have to expose a small section of the British populace to some dangerous landscape paintings and see whether they suddenly started feeling ‘dark nationalist’ things.

Of course, we’d need a control group.

Why is that? Well, if we have just a single group (which one calls the ‘experimental group’), expose them to dangerous landscape paintings, and find out that they start to experience ‘dark nationalist feelings’, a sceptic might raise an objection. (You’d be surprised: scientists are a sceptical lot.) They might argue that the effect you observed might be nothing more than a response to ‘art’ in genral rather than ‘dangerous landscape art’ in particular. A control group would cover that possibility.

So we shall have to expose our experimental group to ‘dangerous landscape paintings’ and our control group to, let’s say, I dunno, some nice Italian Renaissance altarpieces. That ought to work. We’d expect the first group to emerge from the laboratory with ‘dark nationalist feelings’, and the second…well, not to.

There we have the the basics of our experiment. It looks reasonably solid (‘well-designed’, as scientists like to say). Nevertheless, you may have spotted a flaw. (You may have spotted several.)

We need to have an objective measure of ‘dark nationalist feelings’. Unless we do, it will be impossible to tell whether the dangerous landscape pictures have evoked them.

Damn, that’s going to be a problem.

Well, we could, I suppose, just approach our participants after they’ve seen the paintings, and ask them, ‘Are you currently experiencing dark, nationalist feelings?’

We’d hope (at least, the curators of The Fitzwilliam’s Museum might hope) that the experimental group would say ‘Yes, I am’, while the control group said ‘No, I’m not’. But I don’t think that would work, do you? No one willingly admits to ‘dark nationalist feelings’ - do they? - even if they are currrently wading knee-deep in the things. You can imagine both groups waving their hands dismissively in the air and saying ‘Nope, no dark nationalist feelings here’, whatever they really felt. Hence, even if the dangerous landscape paintings did have an effect, we might fail to uncover it.

Designing a measure for ‘dark, nationalist feelings’ is hardly an easy task. ‘Feelings’ are not easy to observe, ‘dark’ ones least of all, especially if it happens to be a bit shadowy in your laboratory, when they naturally tend to blend it a bit. (And how are we to distinguish ‘dark’ nationalist feelings from ‘lighter-coloured’ ones, or even mid-tones? What about ‘dusky’ nationalist feelings?)

I suppose we could count how many members of each group hasten off to Dover to turn back migrant boats, or buy a Union Jack hat on the way home, but those would simply be what scientists call ‘proxy measures’. They might not be terribly convincing.

Psychologists’ solution to conundrums like this is usually to design a scale. Psychologists who were interested in intelligence, for instance, ran into a similar problem. Their solution was the famous IQ scale. It was the same story with that equally unobservable phenomenon, ‘personality’. You may have heard, for instance, of a scale called the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator. There are lots of others.

In its final form, our ‘Dark Nationalist Feelings’ scale will probably consist of a set of questions, arranged in some more or less meaningful order, the answers to which participants can provide on the range of, say, 1 to 7 (we call this a ‘Likert scale’ – yet another scale to worry about!) ‘1’ usually means something like ‘Not at all’ or ‘Never’ or maybe even ‘Sunny yellow nationalist feelings’: ‘7’ usually means something like ‘Lots and lots’ or ‘Always’ or ‘Terribly terribly dark nationalist feelings’.

Not that we can just prance into the gallery willy-nilly waving around some scale that we happened to invent twenty minutes earlier, mind you. Every question on the scale (the jargon word is ‘item’) has to be there for a reason. Every single one must have to do a job. If it doesn’t, we need to get rid of it. How will we know? The same way you’ll know whether the scale is reliable and valid.

These are two more jargon words, which refer to certain non-negotiable qualities that a proper scale has to have. ‘Reliability’ is the extent to which the scale tends to give us the same measurement, each time we use it. ‘Reliable’ bathroom scales may tell you that you weigh exactly 8 stones every time you step on them. Of course, your true weight may be more than that, or less, or it may fluctuate. Whether or not the scales are telling the truth is a matter of their ’validity’ – that is, whether or not they measure what they purport to measure.

A useful scale needs to be both reliable and valid. We can assess both qualities, but it takes time, patience, and a good knowledge of some complicated statistical procedures which I shan’t go into here. It’s a long-winded and often frustrating procedure that is not easily carried out. Too often, the result is some shiny brand-new scale flying out of a psychologist’s office window, followed by words like ‘Why didn’t I become a lawyer instead?’

Let’s imagine we are at the point where we have designed both our experiment and our scale. Nothing remains but to collect some data and see whether there is a difference in the level of Dark Nationalist Feelings experienced by our two groups. At least…nothing should remain. Should it?

Terrifyingly, there is yet more. Einstein reportedly said that Psychology was more difficult than Physics. I can’t find the quote anywhere, though, so perhaps he didn’t. He should have.

To see why there is yet another step, let’s go back to our scale and see how it works. You’ll remember that it incorporated a number of items, each scored on a Likert scale of 1 – 7. On our scale, 1 meant ‘least’ and 7 meant ‘most’. Let’s say, for the sake or argument, there were 40 items on the scale. That means a minimum score of 40 on the scale (40 x 1 for each of the 40 items) and a maximum of 280 (40 x 7). Participants’ scores could lie anywhere between these two extremes.

Now, let’s imagine that the mean score for the group exposed to Italian Renaissance altarpieces was, I dunno, 120, and the mean score for the group exposed to dangerous landscape art was 150. The second group evidently scored higher, thus confirming our hypothesis.

Or did they? Might the difference just be chance? After all, the absolute difference between the group means is just 30. That doesn’t seem an awfully big difference on a scale that goes all the way up to 280. Perhaps our findings were nothing more chance. Perhaps if we were to repeat our experiment, we’d find the exact opposite results. Who knows?

Well, we can never be sure that our results are not just chance. There’s simply no way to be 100% confident. Numbers don’t work that way. The universe doesn’t work that way. Scientists do not not pretend otherwise. We are never going to be able to assert with waterproof confidence that ‘dangerous landscape paintings’ evoke ‘dark nationalist feelings’. What we can do is this: calculate exactly how confident we are.

At this point, you may be worried that such a process will involve even more statistics. You’d be right. It does - an unrelated t-test, since you ask. But today is your lucky day: I’m not going to tell you about it. What I will tell you, though, is that before a psychologist starts insisting that ‘dangerous landscape paintings’ evoke ‘dark nationalist feelings’, they would need to be more than 95% confident that they were right. The point of that t-test is to tell tell them whether or not they have reached that threshold.

Place your bets. Dangerous landscape paintings: do they or do they not evoke ‘dark nationalist feelings’? How confident do you feel? I know how confident I feel. I’m not even going to apply for funding.

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Pictures courtesy of WikiMedia Commons.