The Relationship Between Art and Morality

 No, this is not an April Fool's post. I write this on March 25.

Also, for all of my being a moral leper, this is not meant to be self-serving.

What I want to do is point you to Garth Greenwell's A Moral Education: In praise of filth in The Yale Review.

When I first tried writing fiction, the idea was not to be moralistic. This worried me as I had a tendency to the didactic. And pedantic. I think I lost the former, and this blog may allow a release of the pedantic.

Mr. Greenwell neatly states his thesis at the opening of his essay:

Here’s a way of putting the problem: on one hand we want art to be free, and on the other we want it to mean. Not just to mean, but to be meaningful—to be useful for, and so maybe responsible to, other realms of life: our sense of community, say, or politics, our moral relations. As often happens when competing positions have claims to truth, the pendulum of consensus swings between them, and the pendulum has swung quite far, in recent years, toward the pole of responsibility and holding art to account. Within the small world of people who care about literature and art, the culture is as moralistic as it has ever been in my lifetime: witness our polemics about who has the right to what subject matter, our conviction that art has a duty to right representational wrongs, that poems or novels or films can be guilty of a violence that seems ever less metaphorical against an audience construed as ever more vulner­able. We have a sense that the most important questions we can ask about a work of art are whether and to what extent it furthers extra-artistic aims, to what extent it serves a world outside itself. The idea that artists should make what they feel compelled to make, regardless of such considerations, that in fact art should be pro­tected from responsibilities of this kind, seems part and parcel of a discredited Romantic model of the artist as exempt from workaday morality, licensed by genius to act badly, or at least to disregard the claims of others. When I work with students now, graduate or undergraduate, their primary mode of engagement with a text often seems to be a particular kind of moral judgment, as though before they can see anything else in stories or poems they have to sort them into piles of the righteous and the problematic. These responses sometimes seem to me an index of an anxiety I see more and more in my students, in my friends and myself, a kind of para­noia about our own moral status, a desire to demonstrate our per­sonal righteousness in our response to art.

Politically, this kind of thinking comes under the heading of politically correct or woke. I think those terms are pretty much empty of content to the point of lacking meaning. I will adopt them to the point that they advocate banning a writer of opposing political/cultural positions on what amounts to moral grounds rather than a reasoned disagreement with the banned writer's position. 

One thing I learned from the Orthodox Church's Desert Fathers is that we are not to judge the morality of others. That judgment exceeds human abilities. So, I found the following congruent with my thinking:

The value I find in the art I love seems different from and greater than formal experiment or technical display, greater than play, certainly greater than “metabolic churning.” Art has a value that seems to me moral, and, like my students, like much of what we’ve taken to calling The Discourse, with its purity tests and can­celations, its groupthink and dismissal, I want to think of art mak­ing as an activity with moral implications. More, I want to place it at the heart of one way of striving toward a moral life, by which I mean at the heart of our attempt to live flourishingly with oth­ers, or at least bearably and with minimal harm. The problem is that, in much of our discussion of art, I think we’ve made a mis­take about what moral engagement is, and so what art’s role in it might be. In much of our commentary, there’s a desire for art to be exemplary, to present a world the moral valence of which, whether positive or negative, is easily legible; there’s a desire for the work of art to provide an index of judgment clearly predicated on val­ues the reader can approve. We want the work to give us a place to stand that grants access to righteousness, a place from which to judge a work or its characters. But more and more I question the role of this kind of judgment in moral life. I don’t mean the constant, shifting, provisional evaluations we make moment-to-moment, the moral echolocation by which we position ourselves and our actions. I mean the act of coming to judgment, to a verdict: of assigning someone a durable or even permanent moral status. This is sometimes necessary, of course, though maybe less often than we suspect; it’s what we do, hopefully with some seriousness, in courts of law, and what we do sometimes flippantly, recklessly, in social media campaigns for de-platforming and cancelation. The seriousness of our verdicts depends in large part on the density of their contextualization; and, since the context of a human life is so nearly depthless and made up of such incommensurable ele­ments, ideally righteous judgment is impossible. To be bearable, to be plausibly adequate, even our imperfect, sublunary judgments require an immense amount of work; the idea that we might carry that work out on social media is one of the genuinely repulsive aspects of our moment. I am immensely grateful, every day, that judging others in this way is not my job. The best thing about being a novelist, in fact, is that my job is actively to resist coming to such judgment. Plausibly adequate verdicts may be a necessary fea­ture of the real world, but they are never necessary in matters of art.

When we place this kind of definitive moral judgment at the heart of our engagement with others, assigning a person or a work a status as problematic or righteous, we make a mistake about what a moral relationship to another is, I think. If a moral rela­tionship means to live with or beside another in such a way as to recognize the value of their life as being equal to and independent of our own—that impossible, necessary Kantian standard—then passing judgment is the abrogation of that relationship: it destroys the reciprocity necessary for moral relation, it establishes a hier­archy utterly corrosive of it. This is another reason to reject the idea that we should only consume art made by good people: Who am I to judge the goodness of another? (For all the ravages of Calvinism in America, one misses a sense of the inscrutability of election.) Coming to judgment in this way is anathema to the nov­elist because the task of art isn’t to judge, but to know, to observe, to carry out research into the human—and passing judgment is a radically impoverished form of knowledge. An important part of the moral work of art is to teach us how much richer and more capacious our engagement with others can be.

 I can see the sense of this passage:

...If the great moral question is how to live bearably with others, Sabbath’s Theater pursues an answer through the very things that make the novel’s protagonist morally repulsive—the very things that, by our current standards of what is acceptable in art, should place the novel beyond our regard. A moral education depends not on condemning or averting our gaze from filth, the novel suggests, but on diving wholeheartedly into it.

It would seem to me that by condemning as filth certain subjects, we miss the moral issues of racism and sexism that have dogged our culture. Genteel fiction worked hard to keep those subjects hidden from the tender nerves of their writers. For example, it was genteel culture that counseled for segregation's continuation.

Hypocrisy is also immoral.

sch 3/25