Posted by
Josh Kon on Thursday, February 19, 2009 8:06:34 PM
In "The liberals and arts," I offer an explanation for what seems to be a glaring hypocrisy in which an increasing number of so-called liberals gladly engage. Far too many modern day liberals disdain tradition yet embrace with obsession the beauties of the past, many of which champion those traditions. The explanation I offer is merely that this art gives these liberals access to the transcendent without any of the moral responsibility which otherwise comes along for the ride. As I said before, "The Mona Lisa demands of us nothing but to look at her."
If it is possible, however, the responses to this argument are almost more nonsensical than this hypocrisy was prior to my attempt to shed some light. Excluding a few outliers, the responses came in two varieties, both of which are ultimately flawed.
The first set of responses, I am convinced, must have been a product of a determined effort by some to make an embarrassing joke of themselves. These people attempted to explain this hypocrisy away by saying some conservatives like art too. I guess this is meant to imply that since conservatives like art -- even though they do not disdain tradition but embrace it – the liberals that do disdain tradition no longer have to worry about the ideological contradiction lurking between their worldview and behavior.
I only add that this typifies many liberal’s inability to even take their own values seriously: All too often, liberals need not worry about their issues so long as conservatives are doing the same thing; of course it doesn’t bother them that for most conservatives flying a gas-guzzling private jet, for instance, is not a bad thing, but something to which we may all want aspire. Yet as long as conservatives refuse to take the insane religious convictions of the left seriously, many on the left, incredibly, feel they don’t have to either.
The second school of thought offered a more measured response, but one that still fails to persuade. In the second wave of retorts, people argued that they can love art that champions traditional values, but still abhor those traditional values. They bolstered this odd and counterintuitive claim with two tidbits: One, they claim that they can love the technical beauty of art yet still hate the underlying substance and message of a piece. Two, they argued that they often love art for the emotion it invokes – anger and disgust in the case of the art that extols traditional values. While these may seem like fair rejoinders, a more than superficial glance betrays the house of cards upon which these points rest.
If any liberal can honestly tell me that they would also love depictions of children being raped or Nazis and their swastikas being lauded, because the painting possesses technical splendor or provokes emotions of anger and disgust, then I would find credence in these responses. But, hopefully, such people are in an extreme minority. These responses, therefore, cannot explain the rampant love of traditional art by an increasingly widespread selection of liberals who detest tradition.
Indeed, when I brought this swastika example up to one of my ideological opponents, the response was nothing short of remarkable. The person began explaining to me that the swastika was really stolen by the Nazis and was not always a symbol of secular hate. Despite that this does not respond to the import of mentioning liberals’ negative reaction to praising swastikas as a symbol of Nazism, it further cements my original point: Would a liberal who disdains tradition first, or ever, offer up explanations defending religion or -- at the very least -- qualify their hatred of it? Would they, for instance, say that although they may not like the Medieval Church, torturing people is really a product of a universal human deficiency that in fact predated Christianity? I doubt it.
So all this shows us is that liberals will protect their love of art even if it means betraying their values, torturing logic – no matter, just as long as they can at least taste transcendence.