On being a stormy petrel
Jun. 10th, 2006 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbI don't know. I just cannot seem to stay out of trouble. Time and time again, I encounter viewpoints, even among friends, that I have discarded with contempt long ago - if I ever accepted them at all - and which seem to me to violate all common sense and even basic fairness. And yet they are not only kept, but entertained and fed and honoured like sacred cows. And then there is a kerfuffle.
Case in point. I am reading recent postings from my f-list. One person has an entry in her LJ that seems to want to do nothing more than bash Ann Coulter. Fair enough, I don't much like her either, and I said so before. But this person does not seem to want to even understand whatever it is that Coulter is saying; just because it is like nothing she ever heard before, therefore it is condemned. It is unlike what I and my friends say. I never heard anyone talk like that. Therefore it is wrong, and, what is more, ridiculous. I have no need to understand it - just laugh at it, because she thinks and acts differently from the way my friends and I think and act.
Now, obviously, that sets me off. It is one thing to say that Coulter is ill-tempered, self-satisfied and very poor at arguing; it is one thing to take her points and dismantle them, or point out that she herself does not understand them; or even moderately approve some, with the proviso that her personality and her poor arguing skill make even those moments unloveable. And it is another, quite another, to ask whether "she even means" what she has spent a lifetime and several books to say; as if her ideas were such strange and uncouth things, that no ordinary human could ever contemplate such things. Of course she means it; and just because nobody from your own small circle ever says such things except in derision, it does not mean that they cannot be said and thought by intelligent and honest people. And you are too young to realize it, my friend, but it is you who, by treating ideas not as something to be discussed and refused, but as ordure that decent people do not dirty their hands with, are being dishonest.
Then someone else posts on the subject of JKR getting an award, and finds herself unhappy because JKR is not really that important. And why is she not important? Because she is not clever or original, and because she is successful. At which point I lose it completely. If there is one prejudice I utterly loathe, one false and prevalent idea that seems to me to stand near the core of all the poisonous and evil things that have happened to our culture since the beginning of the twentieth century, it is this crass and totally false opposition between popular and deserving. What underlies it is simple contempt for human beings; because the majority of human beings like something, therefore we have to assume that it is bad. The majority is bad in its tastes, its passions, its political and religious views, its artistic attitudes. If you cannot hear in these assumptions the murderous sound of self-satisfied elites resolving to treat the masses as mere vile bodies on which to practice their own political and intellectual views, in other words, if you do not hear the sound of the crimes and massacres of the twentieth century, you are not listening hard enough. And far from the multitude's tastes being automatically bad, nearly the reverse is true. Almost every one of the really supremely great artists and writers, with the single exception of J.S.Bach, was a huge hit in his or her time. Sappho became famous from one end of Greece to the other. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Eurypides, won dozens of theatre competitions judged by ordinary Athenians. Virgil, who was shy, had to duck into doorways to dodge his fans. Thomas Aquinas received letters on the most absurd questions from all corners of Europe. (One asked whether there really was a Book written up in Heaven with all the good and bad deeds in the lives of men; Aquinas answered, with typical patience, that as far as he could see it was not so, but that the idea could be entertained without damage.) Dante heard his own verses read by literate peasants and workers to their illiterate friends. Shakespeare was so successful that he was able to retire in his forties and buy the largest house in his native village. Cervantes, Moliere, Racine, were stars in their lifetimes. Voltaire's works were read as soon as published from one end of Europe to the other. Goethe spent most of his life being treated as the greatest living poet; not only Beethoven, but Napoleon too, made a point of meeting him - and in each case the meeting had something of a State occasion. Dickens was as popular as JKR, and, as in her case, bookshops had to open at midnight to accommodate eager fans. And the same is true in the other arts. Hell, when Michelangelo completed the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the populace of Rome were let in, and they went in an admiring and enthusiastic procession that lasted for weeks. The only thing as poisonous as the belief that popular equals bad is the absurd overrating of cleverness and originality. The greatest writers are only original in so far as they discover, or rediscover, an universal experience. But we have to deny their claim to greatness, which that every man and woman can see their greatness, in order to flatter a cancerous little presumption that only what the select few like is good - and, by our own singular fortune, we are among the selected few. Can you see why this kind of attitude makes me sick?
And yet... here are two more people, indeed considerably more, with whom I am likely to clash.
Case in point. I am reading recent postings from my f-list. One person has an entry in her LJ that seems to want to do nothing more than bash Ann Coulter. Fair enough, I don't much like her either, and I said so before. But this person does not seem to want to even understand whatever it is that Coulter is saying; just because it is like nothing she ever heard before, therefore it is condemned. It is unlike what I and my friends say. I never heard anyone talk like that. Therefore it is wrong, and, what is more, ridiculous. I have no need to understand it - just laugh at it, because she thinks and acts differently from the way my friends and I think and act.
Now, obviously, that sets me off. It is one thing to say that Coulter is ill-tempered, self-satisfied and very poor at arguing; it is one thing to take her points and dismantle them, or point out that she herself does not understand them; or even moderately approve some, with the proviso that her personality and her poor arguing skill make even those moments unloveable. And it is another, quite another, to ask whether "she even means" what she has spent a lifetime and several books to say; as if her ideas were such strange and uncouth things, that no ordinary human could ever contemplate such things. Of course she means it; and just because nobody from your own small circle ever says such things except in derision, it does not mean that they cannot be said and thought by intelligent and honest people. And you are too young to realize it, my friend, but it is you who, by treating ideas not as something to be discussed and refused, but as ordure that decent people do not dirty their hands with, are being dishonest.
Then someone else posts on the subject of JKR getting an award, and finds herself unhappy because JKR is not really that important. And why is she not important? Because she is not clever or original, and because she is successful. At which point I lose it completely. If there is one prejudice I utterly loathe, one false and prevalent idea that seems to me to stand near the core of all the poisonous and evil things that have happened to our culture since the beginning of the twentieth century, it is this crass and totally false opposition between popular and deserving. What underlies it is simple contempt for human beings; because the majority of human beings like something, therefore we have to assume that it is bad. The majority is bad in its tastes, its passions, its political and religious views, its artistic attitudes. If you cannot hear in these assumptions the murderous sound of self-satisfied elites resolving to treat the masses as mere vile bodies on which to practice their own political and intellectual views, in other words, if you do not hear the sound of the crimes and massacres of the twentieth century, you are not listening hard enough. And far from the multitude's tastes being automatically bad, nearly the reverse is true. Almost every one of the really supremely great artists and writers, with the single exception of J.S.Bach, was a huge hit in his or her time. Sappho became famous from one end of Greece to the other. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Eurypides, won dozens of theatre competitions judged by ordinary Athenians. Virgil, who was shy, had to duck into doorways to dodge his fans. Thomas Aquinas received letters on the most absurd questions from all corners of Europe. (One asked whether there really was a Book written up in Heaven with all the good and bad deeds in the lives of men; Aquinas answered, with typical patience, that as far as he could see it was not so, but that the idea could be entertained without damage.) Dante heard his own verses read by literate peasants and workers to their illiterate friends. Shakespeare was so successful that he was able to retire in his forties and buy the largest house in his native village. Cervantes, Moliere, Racine, were stars in their lifetimes. Voltaire's works were read as soon as published from one end of Europe to the other. Goethe spent most of his life being treated as the greatest living poet; not only Beethoven, but Napoleon too, made a point of meeting him - and in each case the meeting had something of a State occasion. Dickens was as popular as JKR, and, as in her case, bookshops had to open at midnight to accommodate eager fans. And the same is true in the other arts. Hell, when Michelangelo completed the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the populace of Rome were let in, and they went in an admiring and enthusiastic procession that lasted for weeks. The only thing as poisonous as the belief that popular equals bad is the absurd overrating of cleverness and originality. The greatest writers are only original in so far as they discover, or rediscover, an universal experience. But we have to deny their claim to greatness, which that every man and woman can see their greatness, in order to flatter a cancerous little presumption that only what the select few like is good - and, by our own singular fortune, we are among the selected few. Can you see why this kind of attitude makes me sick?
And yet... here are two more people, indeed considerably more, with whom I am likely to clash.
