Good art ennobles; bad art doesn't

Hello friends. When it comes to the Great Books it's easy to get stuck in a motte and bailey argument, where you spend all your time on big-picture, easy-to-defend points (Art enriches our souls!) and never bother defending the small, harder points (These particular books constitute the best possible source of the enrichment that art is able to offer).

But equally difficult, I think, is that sometimes even our big-picture defenses are unconvincing, and we end up devaluing even the overall benefits of art.

It's not the easiest task to, in the abstract, defend art. You end up sounding like a buffoon and making claims that can't possibly be true of art as a whole (art creates empathy, art teaches wisdom, art empowers people to rule wisely). It's not merely that you can't empirically prove the assertion that art makes you a better person, it's also that the assertion doesn't even seem intuitively true.

Because on all this great good Earth of ours, there are no people who don't like art. Every single person has some art that they like. Hitler, famously, had some affection for art! Mitt Romney’s favorite book is Battlefield Earth.¹ Ben Shapiro is a movie buff and aspiring screenwriter. Everyone loves art. So there's no control group of "art-haters" where you can be like, oh these guys definitely shouldn't be in charge of anything. The worst person you know still sings along to their favorite song when it comes up during their drive. Everyone likes art.

So the argument can’t be “art ennobles” because you might as well be saying “air and water ennoble”. It’s true, but trivial. The argument needs to be "Good art ennobles people". This is a much more logically defensible position. Nor is it a trivial point to make, because not all people believe that good art ennobles people.

Some people would say that there is an aesthetic sense that art feeds, and that this aesthetic sense is independent of other aspects of human judgement (such that a person can have great taste but not, for instance, be empathetic or wise),² but I think most people would say that art is somehow connected to life. You learn or understand something from art that, in some way, meaningfully improves your own fitness, your own you-ness. Good art grows you in virtue. What we got from art is not just abstract, disinterested pleasure. In other words: art is more than a drug.

That is, I think, something most people agree with.

And when it comes to "how does art improve your life", I also think most people, if they thought about it, would say that learning to appreciate good art improves certain capacities. Listening to music improves our patience and present-mindedness. Reading a good book improves us in wisdom and our ability to appreciate nuance. Looking at a great painting teaches us to leave the world of mental abstractions and to be present in our real, embodied life.

Yeah, you can't chop it up finely and assign everything character points like in a video game: You can't say that looking at a Rembrandt for thirty minutes increases your resilience score by three points. But we get that there is some capacity-building there.

I think we also understand that the ability to appreciate art is itself a skill that people can develop, called taste, and that people can develop taste without also developing any of the virtues associated with being a great art-lover. And the more discriminating your taste is, the more it tends to handicap you and to section art off into its own box, separate from the rest of your life. It's like sports--does playing sports make you braver, stronger, tougher, kinder, wiser, etc? Yeah, of course it does--but if that's true why are so many professional athletes such big whiny babies? Well, in an ordinary life, playing sports can improve a person's ability to perform in other areas, but a life devoted to sports is quite often very deforming, such that it undermines other areas of your life. It's diminishing returns, essentially. If all you do, every single day, is play sports, then it means you're losing out on other ways of building virtue.

It's the same way with literature. Does reading Revolutionary Road make you a better spouse? Probably! But if all you do all day is read books and think about books, you're not going to be a good spouse.

It's all pretty simple, but everything gets confused because we try to quantify these benefits. We want to figure out how much reading improves a person? What books improve a person the most? Exactly how does that person improve? Can we empirically prove any of these assertions?

But that's all really unnecessary, because we aren't making arguments, we are just talking about things that all people know. If you watch your parents fight all day--it's going to change you, going to affect you emotionally. If you watch a movie of people fighting, it's going to affect you. And if the movie is structured in such a way as to provide insight or understanding, on some deeper or unspoken level, then you're going to have insight on that experience now.

All of our confusion about the merit of art comes from walling it off into its separate aesthetic realm. If we merely say that art is an experience like any other, then it's obvious that it can have constructive or destructive effects, like any other experience.

What you can't do is reverse-engineer it. You can't say, oh I am only going to give people good art experiences so they're changed in certain good ways. You can't turn art into mind-control, that's not how it works. The person is still the one changing. Art isn't acting on them mechanically: it's their own psyche, in the process of understanding and enjoying the art, that is doing the changing.

Anyway, there's no need to pin this all down. All I’m saying is, we don’t look at art just to have fun. It’s very fun, obviously—it’s some of the must fun you can have with your cloths on. But the reason we write and talk about it and dwell on it is that art is more than that.

I think the core of the Great Books argument is that whatever art is, and whatever it’s supposed to be, some art is more that thing than other art. It’s really not all equal. You’re going to get more and grow more from reading some things than from other things.

And I think that’s an argument that people can understand. Because, honestly, without that argument, a lot of our art doesn’t make sense. If the purpose of art was purely to give pleasure, well—oftentimes low art gives much more pleasure than high art. I’ve been re-listening to the Les Miserables sound track lately, and it’s given me a lot more pleasure in my life than any symphony. Similarly, lots of high art has strange or troubling features that only make sense if there’s some kind of sub-surface growth or development that comes from contemplating this phenomenon.

Look at the Bible, for instance. Look at the life of King Solomon. At the end of his life, he turns from God and starts worshipping idols, and his kingdom is divided as a result. Or look at Abraham—this guy is such a coward, he’s constantly (twice!) pretending his wife is his sister, and basically offering her up to foreign potentates who want to sleep with her (because he’s worried they’ll kill him otherwise to take her). Or take King David, and him getting Uriah the Hittite killed off so he can take Bathsheba to be his wife. Why were these stories preserved? On any logical level, they are small-minded, petty, and counterproductive tales. And yet the idea of leaving them out of the bible seems like, quite literally, a sacrilege. The core of the Bible is the fact that God’s human servants are constantly fucking up or failing or lying (see for instance Noah and his drunkenness). That’s the art right there. That’s the part that ennobles you. That’s what makes the Bible into the Bible instead of some trite epic fantasy about a farm-boy who finds himself turned into a reluctant savior.

If you were writing the Bible, and you gave it to the editor, the very first thing they’d say is what the fuck is up with this wife-sister stuff! It is so bizarre (they’d also say there are two origin stories in here, and you should probably pick one). And they’d be dead wrong. The difference between logic and feeling—that’s literary criticism. The whole point of criticism is figuring out which stuff is working on an unspoken level. Bad art doesn’t have that shit, good art does.³

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Addenda:

• The publicity season for my literary novel is hotting up. It was featured in two lists of anticipated books, at Autostraddle and at the San Francisco Chronicle. I’ve also just gotten in blurbs from: Cat Fitzpatrick, Bhishokh Som, Jeanne Thornton, Matt Klam, Matthew Zapruder, and Taymour Soomro.

• Preorder The Default World if you want to make me look really good with my publisher

• I also have a bunch of appearances coming up. I haven’t done any real appearances yet these year, so these are the first!

• Young Adult

  • Books Inc Alameda - March 20th - 7 PM. I am in conversation with author Alex Brown.

  • YALLwest, May 4th, Santa Monica High School

• Literary

  • SF launch party at the Ruby on 23rd and Bryant — sometime in the week of May 28th

  • NYC launch party at P&T Knitwear in New York - June 6th

  • World Trans Forum, July 29th

• If any of you have anywhere you’d like me to come speak, let me know! I am not the biggest on single-author or in-conversation events, because it’s hard for me to draw a crowd on my own, but I’m always happy to come to any established reading series or festival.

• Oh, I don’t think I’ve mentioned this, but the blog sailed through 500 subscribers about a week or two ago, and it’s already at 525, so…that’s pretty good.

1. The great thing about this is that, say what you will about him, this must actually be his favorite book, because it’s such a bananas pick that nobody would ever lie about it. Personally, I think Battlefield Earth is really good: I’ve read it three times; it is the literal apex of 1950s-style sci-fi pulp (even though it was written and released in the 80s) and stands in a long line of throwback works that excelled the works that they pastiched.

2. My understanding is that this is John Guillory’s major opinion. We ought to study literature because it is an interesting phenomenon, the same way that we study all interesting phenomenon, but we shouldn’t exaggerate the importance of literature as an object for study—it is no more important than any well-wrought human object (of course, in that opinion the term “well-wrought” is doing a lot of work, because it’s entirely possible that works of literature are amongst the most well-wrought and most deserving of study amongst human objects, and as such their importance ought indeed be extolled).

3. Of course I immediately need to qualify. Bad art of course has many unspoken messages in it, but those are the messages imported into it wholesale from the culture in which it arises. That’s why literary theorists and freelance cultural critics love to critique dross, because, freed of any element of genius or nobility, they can use the artwork to critique the culture that gave rise to it. That’s why, for instance, every literary critic claims to hate autofiction and personal essays, and they all keep writing long take-down reviews of them anyway.