There was a time when a crucifix photographed in urine provoked outrage and protests, even if the final photo was described as "art" and placed in a museum at public expense. Before I am attacked for suggesting (which I am not) that artists should be censored -- probably by the same people obstructing and destroying my writings in this blog -- I should make it clear that I regard such a photograph as indeed a kind of art, which should not be suppressed or ignored. I think it is very bad (if also revealing) art, even such a photo enjoys First Amendment protection.
This aesthetic judgment has nothing to do with the possible anti-Christian sentiment which the image communicates (to the extent that it communicates anything), but is a result of the wasted offensiveness in the image of a crucifix in urine. If a Nazi flag bearing a swastika were photographed in urine, then I agree that the sentiment of revulsion produced by the image is appropriate as one response to atrocity. There are no subtle redeeming considerations associated with what the swastika symbolizes in the Western world after the Holocaust. Such a view is based on acceptance of human dignity as a moral and jurisprudential value.
Christianity -- fair-minded critics must allow -- merits a more subtle and nuanced evaluation than is conveyed by a photo of a crucifix dipped in urine. An evaluation of Christianity must take into account both the Borgias and St. Francis of Assissi, Pope Julius II and St. Thomas Aquinas, the Inquisition along with G.W.F. Hegel and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Such an evaluation would be a multivolume work, requiring several lifetimes and contributions by many scholars. Admittedly, it is unwise to expect a victim of the Inquisition to offer a fair and balanced assessment of the Catholic Church. Slaves and their heirs are not likely to be dispassionate about the Confederacy. I am not the person to offer a defense of New Jersey's mafia-saturated legal system. ("Corrupt Law Firms, Senator Bob, and New Jersey Ethics" and "Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?")
We live in a time when lofty aesthetic or ethical ideals are laughable. Humanism seems naive or unsophisticated to persons who own I-Pods. To be "enlightened" in this scientific age is to take a dismissive or "unromantic" view of humans as animals and nothing more. It is to discard the glories of Western civilization (yes, there are also evils in our history) as unworthy of emulation or admiration, like an old automobile that is made obsolete by the progress of technology, however beautiful that old car may be. Consider how almost absurd this poem seems to many young readers today:
"When I have fears that I may cease to be"
by
John Keats
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teaming brain,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love; then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
The most popular reaction among young and not-so-young people that I have heard applied to everything from Verdi's Otello to Shakespeare's Hamlet is "corny." This is usually the judgment of adults admiring, as roughly equal to those art works of the past, the Hollywood opus Napoleon Dynamite. I call this death of affect the "Colbert Report" response. This admiration for Napoleon Dynamite over ephemera like Citizen Kane is an opinion which should be expressed on one's laptop at a local Starbucks between sips of a tall "Mocha Frapuccino." Feministing, duh! Elizabeth Kolbert? Young people are being indoctrinated into this dreadful ideology which involves determining that many things and persons are "dysfunctional." Furthermore, many of us stalwarts are "in denial" about being "dysfunctional." "Denial" is no longer merely a river in Egypt. Denial is any refusal to be enraptured by the unmatched wisdom of Dr. Phil. Are you my "co-enabler," Rachel Maddow?
Today's newspaper features an article by one "David Brooks" (Manohla Dargis?) informing us that Mozart was nothing special. There were lots of other musicians, probably, who were just as good -- or who might have been just as good -- if they were encouraged in the right way. This is an interesting suggestion. There are certainly many persons whose talents are unrecognized or denied for absurd or evil reasons. However, this allegedly democratic and scientific view of persons being all "the same" and "genius" being "nothing special" seems a tad absurd to me. No claim of mystical, spiritual, or divine spark is involved in recognizing that Mozart or Luis Armstrong are what I call "geniuses." David Brooks, "Genius: The Modern View," in The New York Times, May 23, 2009, at p. A23. (According to this journalist, genius is just the result of lots of "practice.")
Sam Dillon, "Many Nations Passing U.S., In Education, Experts Say," in The New York Times, March 10, 2010, at p. A21. (" ... many other countries [are] surpassing the United States in educational attainment ... ")
In December of 2010, American students are ranked 17th in math skills and 25th in knowledge of science among First World nations.
I think that some people -- Mr. Brooks, perhaps -- are offended by the idea of excellence in the arts or in terms of intellectual achievement. Elitism? This extraordinary quality of some minds is experienced as "unfairness" to normal persons -- "superiority," maybe. Shakespeare, Da Vinci, or -- let us say, Kate Winslet -- is somehow "cheating" by being a genius. I suspect that some people hate genius, while most of us celebrate and rejoice in the great gifts of our fellow human beings. Envy? Mr. Brooks should meet "Patricia Cohen." Does this explain the hostility of Manohla Dargis to quality films and fine acting? Or is Ms. Dargis merely an imbecile? A little of both, probably. ("The Heidegger Controversy" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
I am among those who celebrate genius, wherever it is found. I don't wish to prevent others from creating their work. I wish to disseminate what (I think) is great as widely as possible. I prefer to review works of art that I think are good or great in order to communicate that passion to others. It is easy to tear apart second-rate material, but this is much less interesting than to admire and seek to live-up to great art.
Many annoying phone calls this afternoon are distracting when I struggle to write. I wonder why I receive so many junk calls?
Any idealism or hopefulness about human nature is likewise a category of guilt and even (weirdly) infuriating to some social scientists and self-proclaimed "scientific" psychologists or pop-sociologists. People are like rats or chimps. Nothing more. By studying such rodents and animals, we can learn all we need to know about our neighbors -- though rarely about ourselves, say the scientists conducting such research. "All persons are animals and equal," but it seems that some persons (scientists especially) are "more equal than others." Jennifer Velez? ("'I am Legend': A Movie Review" and "The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
The difference between a car or any mere appliance and genuine art -- or you, for that matter -- is that art and persons do not have simple instrumental purposes whereas machines usually do. To the extent that a car becomes an object of aesthetic appreciation then it is no longer merely a car meant to transport people. Such a perspective on a car makes it into art, an "object" whose purpose is "to be itself" and therefore beautiful, like anyone you love, whose nature and purpose are one -- "to be." Marxist humanism is highly relevant to these arguments. Terry Eagleton's aesthetic writings are enthusiastically recommended. Compare Terry Eagleton, "Marx," in The Great Philosophers (London: Routledge, 2000), at pp. 223-257 with Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic (New York: Free Press, 1986), pp. 231-235 ("erotic love").
I am afraid that another defacement of this essay was encountered as I reviewed the work after only a few months from my previous review of this essay. There is something so sick and disgusting in the need of hackers to alter and destroy what must remain beyond their grasp. I am saddened more than angered to realize that immersion in mediocrity is chosen by persons frightened of human aspiration and beauty. The more ominous realization is that this public censorship and torture is permitted to take place in America. ("How Censorship Works in America" and "What is it like to be censored in America?")
Tracey Emin, to provide only one example, is an artist specializing in such things as placing a soiled bedsheet in a canvas and calling it art. This is defended as alluding to our soiled and "fallen" condition. How can one "fall" if one is only an animal? Does beauty not enter into art? No answer is forthcoming from such "artists." It is true that, like all other animals, humans eat and excrete. Nevertheless, an image of a person defecating placed alongside the "Mona Lisa" or "The Creation of Adam," is a lesser "artistic" achievement than either of those works because it reveals a far more inadequate understanding than Da Vinci's or Michelangelo's concerning what persons are and always will be. These outrageous opinions have been described in New Jersey as "elitism." I am informed that I am "retarded." Now I know. If these allegations are true, then I must be the only "elitist retarded person" in the world.
Worse, it is easier to destroy or torture a "creature" who is seen only as an animal that defecates -- so as to be defined by that act -- than as a creature who also composes the 9th symphony, writes the Critique of Pure Reason, or Hamlet, drafts the Constitution of the United States of America, discovers radium, or is able to appreciate such achievements. Part of what is appalling in the experience of human evil is a loss on the part of evil-doers of that special fire and moral brilliance that is central to humanity's aspirations and hopes.
Malignant persons are usually "blissfully" unaware of their misfortune, even as they feel trapped in unhappiness and rage. I have known a few such people. They always live in hell. Sometimes, they are even aware of it, but have no clue about how to become happier. Alex Booth? Pity is among the emotions conjured in a morally healthy person by evil. So is revulsion. The evil person is missing an essential ingredient of humanity. Even at Auschwitz there was love and self-sacrifice, there were acts of kindness and humility or compassion, goodness was visible. Primo Levi said: "There were men" -- and, I am sure, women also -- "who gave their last piece of bread to a child." ("'Drawing Room Comedy': A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
It is a final defeat of evil that, even as we are escorted to the gas chamber, we may choose to smile and affirm our humanity. We turn to a person we love or see her with our eyes closed and shout: "I love you." We can and should choose to share a concentration camp with our Jewish friends rather than the company of Nazis in the most luxurious surroundings. In the "sophisticated" view of these times, however, such an attitude makes one a fool. You are "impractical, naive, a failure," if you believe such things. I have been called all of those things in response to statements such as these. Incidentally, Jews are the last persons who should apply for a position as concentration camp guards or as physician-torturers. For Jews to despise genius is like Catholics hating bingo and communion wafers. The only reason that these obvious statements seem insincere to you in New Jersey's corridors of power is that you are assuming that everyone relishes the prospect of wallowing in shit as you do. This is not the case. Most people aspire to be elevated by aesthetic experiences.
There is no difficulty, conceptually, in choosing between Nazis and their victims. We are on the side of their victims because not to be on their side, is not to be persons. However, it may be very difficult to act on that moral imperative, as we should, because most people "want to go along so they can get along." To live as a man or woman means, if necessary, to be willing to die as a person. There are things that I will not do. No matter what. There are things that I believe no matter the consequences. There are a few people that I love, contra mundus. I am sure that you can say the same. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")
Notice that name-calling is not a refutation of these philosophical opinions. I am sure that there is a greater failure in not believing in the possibility of human goodness. The worst possible accusation made against anyone in America today is something like this: he or she is a "dreamer." ("'The Prisoner': A Review of an AMC Television Series.") I am reminded of the much-quoted conversation between Henry Ford and George Santayana:
"How many persons live in Spain?" Ford asked.
"About 50 million," Santayana answered at the time.
"We must sell more automobiles there." For Henry Ford, Spain was a number of potential purchasers of cars. This was not necessarily a mistake, as far as it went, but there was and is a little more to Spain (or any country) than that.
People who dismiss the United States of America today as only "the oil industry" or "militarism" are missing most of what the United States is about, which is the struggle of ordinary, decent and kind people to live their lives with some dignity and love. Americans are concerned and generous when informed of suffering anywhere. Terrorist acts aimed at them -- or at any of us -- are self-defeating examples of the absurdity and stupidity of evil, no matter who is responsible for them. It is very likely that a car bomb placed on a street near a Synagogue in New York will kill someone like me or my child -- probably a Muslim -- who happens to be walking by as an explosion takes place. The pointlessness of terrorism enhances the unspeakable and absurd evil in such actions whoever may be the intended victims of terrorist acts. To censor me is to violate the rights of every potential reader of my words. For the nihilist the meaninglessness of evil is immaterial because everything is meaningless. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
There are many kinds of failure in life. The worst is moral failure. It may cost us a great deal, in wordly terms, to retain or rescue our humanity -- humanity alone makes real art possible -- but it is preferable to all the gold in the world, to power and fame, simply to remain a person. By remaining persons we can never be reduced to the moral status of torturers and terrorists. We avoid becoming cruel individuals poisoned by hatred for whom others are only "things" to be "corrected for their own good." ("What is it like to be tortured?" and, soon, "What is it like to be raped?")
Humans, for Emin, are soiled creatures who can only be understood in terms of pain, damage and degradation. There is no room in Emin's world, or in her bed, for human aspiration. The human world can only be grasped through the detritus of life, the people and the things for which she no longer has any use: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/ Or what's a heaven for?" wrote Robert Browning. Today's artists take their cue rather from the leading American sculptor Mike Kelly, whose "dirty aesthetic" has been hugely influential. "I am not interested in things that rise above," he claims, "but rather in things that sink below." ("Is it Art?")
I insist on Mr. Kelly's right to create art and show it. After all, eventually, Kelly can be certain that he will "sink below." I would struggle to prevent Ms. Emin from being silenced by state censors or judges of taste. Yet I insist on finding their works inferior to those of, say, Picasso or even Andy Warhol in our times. Curiously, it is the decision to adopt ideals, the celebration of what is good in humanity, despite the horror and suffering that we see around us and experience all the time that is greeted with derision and insults, denigration and censorship, by trendy artsy-fartsy types or just plain old Fascists. "Life is nothing but a party!" A moron said that to me. ("Out of the Past.")
I could not bear to live if I thought that evil is all there is to humanity. I know there is more to us than that because I have experienced loves, including a difficult love -- an excruciatingly painful love (painful because of an unwanted separation), which I nevertheless affirm every day -- also the laughter of children and the wisdom and compassion in Rembrandt's eyes captured in his great self-portrait at the MET. Rembrandt painted that portrait as he faced financial troubles, social exclusion, loss of loved-ones. Yet there is pride and dignity in that image of heroic defiance and human struggle to live and create one's work at age fifty, when all that awaited him was poverty and pain, leading to an unmourned death. Imagine the person tearing a piece out of that Rembrandt canvas (or any painting) because its authenticity and beauty offends the culprit's understanding of her own degradation. To destroy something beautiful will not make you the equal of the person creating something beautiful. Perhaps this is a lesson for film and literary critics to bear in mind.
An attitude of denigration of persons requires its adherents to make no effort to rise above their lowest motivations or baser instincts. It permits and even encourages wallowing in the mud or something worse: "Love is an illusion, self-sacrifice is for idiots, beauty is whatever people like, everything is bullshit, we have seen through it all." ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
"Western civilization can no longer believe in its own 'values,' and any affirmation of them is considered an impudent act, a provocation that should and must be taken apart, deconstructed, and returned to a state of doubt. Today's Western imperialism is the imperialism of relativism, of the 'It all depends on your point of view'; it's the eye-rolling or the wounded indignation at anyone who's stupid, primitive, or presumptuous enough to still believe in something, to affirm anything at all. [This is a gross misreading of Derrida and postmodernism.] You can see the dogmatism of constant questioning give its complicit wink of the eye everywhere in the universities and among the literary intelligentsias. No critique is too radical among contemporary thinkers, as long as it maintains this total absence of certitude. A century ago, scandal was identified with any particularly unruly and raucus negation, while today it's found in any affirmation that fails to tremble."
The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (New York & Paris; Semiotexte, 2009), p. 92. ("Why I am not an ethical relativist.")
It is people pronouncing such non-relativistic "relativist" opinions -- not those of us coping with pain and the wounds of the human condition in our dismal times -- who are the true adolescents. For they have not yet learned that love and beauty exist, if we insist that they come into being for us. They are real, if we want them to be real. We make them real. If you search in the gutter for humanity, then you will always find it there; however, if you seek inspiration and long for what is beyond your grasp, then you may expect to reach farther and strive more mightily for improvements or even excellence.
Having discovered a letter removed from this essay since my last review of the work, I realize that destruction and tearing down the envied works of others is all that remains to individuals sick enough, at this late date, to try to hurt someone who has experienced what I have lived through. Each experience of correcting these inserted "errors" makes me stronger, more determined, less inclined to hesitate in my struggle against this evil, and far more appalled and disgusted by persons capable of such pointless malice. The foul and putrid aroma of this corruption can only come from New Jersey's legal system. ("No More Cover-Ups and Lies, Chief Justice Rabner!")
"All of us are lying in the gutter," Oscar Wilde reminds us, "but some of us are looking at the stars."
Great art calls us out of ourselves, like love, to regard the reality of others with awe, to strive to emulate what is fine or good. Religion performs a similar function, at its best, by teaching us what we are capable of becoming through inviting us to contemplate a symbol of moral perfection. George Steiner defends aesthetic communication in terms that are nearly religious:
"Interpretive response under pressure of enactment I shall, using a dated word, call ANSWERABILITY. The authentic experience of understanding, when we are spoken to by another human being or by a poem, is one of responding responsibility. We are answerable to the text, to the work of art, to the musical offering, in a very specific sense, at once moral, spiritual and psychological."
Notice the analogy to American Constitutional interpretation. Steiner also compares the experience of aesthetic dialogue to religious ecstasy later in his essay:
"In both the Talmudic and [Christian] scholastic models of encounter with revealed and inspired meaning, the postulate of revelation is itself transcendent. The struggle against the secondary is one that would inhibit the relativizing of the absolute."
The "Absolute" is a concept that sets the chi-chi folks' teeth on edge. People who badly misread F.H. Bradley describe him (of all philosophers!) as a "relativist, ethical and otherwise," when it was Bradley (drawing on Kant and Hegel) who solved the problem of partiality (or relativity) in human judgment by reference to the "Absolute," where all is reconciled and finally known, where truth is objective and complete. Bradley influenced T.S. Eliot along with many others, suggesting that beauty and goodness are not only real but, ultimately, joined with us in that Absolute which contains us and all that is or ever will be, as a matter of plausible inference or even logical necessity.
I have suggested that, given the revelations of quantum physics concerning entanglement and Western philosophy's tradition of dialectical reasoning, it seems plausible to conclude that from the existence of my left sock -- or even Ms. Emin's bedsheets (if I were smart enough) -- I should be able to infer the totality of relations in terms of meanings or concepts in human life. This observation may be the opposite of Ms. Emin's intention in creating her "work." Despite Bradley's protests, his concept of the "Absolute" sounds like another concept that I have been discussing. "Let's use the word God," Tennessee Williams said, "why not? It's a good word. A short one."
"I Envy Not in Any Moods"
By
Alfred Lord Tennyson
I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods:
I envy not the beast that takes
His license in the field of time,
Unfettered by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;
Nor, what may count itself as blest,
The heart that never plighted troth,
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
Nor want-begotten rest.
I hold it true, what'er befall;
I feel, it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
