The Song in the Dark: Why Culture Flourishes in Chaos

Some birds sing when the sun shines bright, My praise is not for them. But the one who sings in the dead of night, I raise my cup to him. — “I Raise My Cup,” Hadestown

There is a famous Latin adage: “Inter arma enim silent Musae”—when the cannons roar, the muses are silent. It suggests that art is a luxury of peace and that creativity withers under the shadow of violence. Yet, viewed through the lens of history, we see a starkly different picture.

Some of the most foundational texts of Western civilization emerged not from a golden age of peace, but from the depths of devastation.

• Ancient Greece: Much of the era’s defining philosophy and drama was produced during the Peloponnesian War, a conflict that claimed tens of thousands of lives. In the midst of this carnage, Socrates debated the nature of love in the Symposium, and Aristophanes staged the biting anti-war comedy Lysistrata.
• The Black Death: A thousand years later, as the plague decimated Europe, Boccaccio wrote The Decameron, a work that dared to criticize the Church and helped spark the transition out of the Middle Ages.
• Modern Resilience: We see it in the Jewish cultural center of Odessa, which flourished with revolutionary poetry even as it suffered through horrific pogroms. We see it in the Weimar Republic, a brief, fragile moment between the trauma of WWI and the rise of the Nazis, which became a global powerhouse for pioneering art and cinema despite economic collapse.

Why is it that in these dark moments of violence and death, culture doesn’t just survive—it flourishes?

Eros and Thanatos: The Drive to Build

Sigmund Freud proposed that humans are driven by two opposing forces: Eros (the life instinct) and Thanatos (the death drive). Eros is the urge to create, to love, to reproduce, and to build civilizations. Thanatos is the shadow side—the impulse toward destruction, aggression, and chaos.

When we are exposed to mass destruction, we often feel a desperate, subconscious need to balance the scales. This is why we see “baby booms” following major wars; it is a biological assertion of life. But a similar phenomenon happens intellectually and artistically. In the shadow of destruction, scientists and philosophers often abandon the “safe” corners of their work to tackle the “Big Picture”—the “all or nothing” questions of existence.

This is the urge to preserve. During the darkest days of WWII, Stefan Zweig wrote The World of Yesterday, attempting to capture the vivid soul of pre-war European culture in a single volume before it vanished forever. When the world is being dismantled, the act of creation becomes a revolutionary act of defiance.

The Power of Doubt

In ancient Athens, the social order was rigid. Yet, in the heat of the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes used comedy to inject doubt into what was previously unquestionable. In Lysistrata and The Assembly of Women, he imagined women seizing control of the state—a concept that was utterly absurd to his audience.

One of his protagonists argues that putting women in charge was “the only thing we haven’t tried yet.” Through the lens of the absurd, he suggested that any solution, no matter how ridiculous it seemed, was better than continuing a war led by men that was destroying the city.

We saw a similar effect during the Black Death. For centuries, the Church held absolute power through the fear of Hell. But when the plague killed saints and sinners, priests and peasants alike, the “divine justice” of the world was called into question. This cracks the foundation of old institutions, opening the door for the Renaissance. When the “regulators” of culture are weakened by chaos, the thinkers are finally free to experiment.

Our Decision

Frodo: “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” Gandalf: “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” — The Fellowship of the Ring

As we sit here in 2026, with the conflict between Israel, the US, and Iran drawing in the entire Middle East, and after two years of escalating war, I am getting the opportunity to take a closer look at how the people around me and I react to fear and destruction.

Sitting long times in the bomb shelter, I’ve noticed that people react in two distinct ways. Some find comfort in Thanatos—shielding their minds from the fear of destruction by calling for more of it, finding solace in the “destruction of the enemy.”

Others choose Eros. They find comfort in the love of friends, in the art they create, and in the “small” things that make life worth living. We have no control over the geopolitical gears that ground us into this moment. We didn’t choose this war. But we do control our internal response. We can choose to let the destruction into our hearts, or we can rebel against it by asking the big questions, creating new ideas, and choosing to love.

The Peloponnesian War ended with Spartan dominance, a military victory that lasted barely thirty years before it was replaced. But Socrates’ monologue in the Symposium still echoes in our culture 2,500 years later. In the long run, Eros wins.

So, to the ones who sing in the dead of night—let’s raise our cups to them.