Not A Taste Test
TWWK at Beneath the Tangles pointed out this article at Christ and Pop Culture as something I might be interested in. I am, but I had to think about my reaction to it some. While I’m in sympathy, I can’t really agree with the article for several reasons.
The first area of disagreement would be in the title. Most of my beef with Christian culture is not that we have poor taste overall. I don’t like Left Behind, for sure, but I also didn’t like The Da Vinci Code, and How I Met Your Mother makes me physically ill. Yes, Christian pop culture is a lot of bonnet and grandmother books, but it’s not a matter of poor taste to like them, or good taste to reject them. It’s more that my dislike of them comes from them being omnipresent and all other genres being ignored. It’s not a matter of taste whatsoever as opposed to certain elements dominating the culture. If there were more science fiction and fantasy, chances are we’d see a spectrum of good and bad just as much as we see it in any other genre. Taste isn’t the issue.
The second disagreement is this. The author watches a movie with his friends. He is moved. His friends however, react like this:
One of my friends thought it was too long for a movie not starring transforming robots. Another thought it was a poor film because the characters made decisions that we as Christians disagree with. He asserted it was wrong to enjoy the movie or learn from it because of these differences.
You know, objections like this are not a sign of bad taste.
“Too long” is a valid criticism. You may like long, indepth movies or novels, but some people don’t. This is a matter of personal taste with no right or wrong answer. One of the most widely acclaimed science fiction films, Chris Marker’s La Jetee, is all of twenty-two minutes long. The second answer is an informed Christian perspective. He watched the movie, evaluated the decisions of the characters, and found them lacking in Christian ideas. He thought it wrong to enjoy it based on that. Again, this isn’t bad taste. This may not be fair, considering secular films can’t always be held up to Christian standards, but it’s not a defect in the person to not get the same sense of rapture from the work the author had.
Then the author immediately follows with these judgements:
We superimpose our fast-food culture on art.
We have bad taste.
We misunderstand the role secular art can play in our lives.
We can strike out number two right away. The author expects people to share his own reaction to a particular work of art, and calls that good taste. Disagreeing with it is bad taste. The thing is though there really isn’t a universally agreed upon reaction to any work where we can say this.
Usually, bad taste is more about class and morality than artistic merit. Low culture is considered bad taste to enjoy; ballet and opera are good taste, professional wrestling is bad. You see this in the original article when he mentions transforming robots, which is low culture. However, a lot of upper-class culture is just as turgid and unbearable in terms of artistic merit; impenetrable literary novels about college professors being cuckolded by their wives, thousand page omnibus works which are just as unrealistic as Twilight, except they court the sensibilities of the literarti instead of soccer moms, and more. So one reaction to point two is that too often class snobbery can drive reaction to or against works, rather than taste or sensibility itself.
I do think bad taste exists though, but the true marker is morality. Jerry Springer is in bad taste because what he does is immoral; he pushes dysfunction and mockery for personal gain. People who have bad taste often prefer works that are immoral over those that are moral, artistic craft be damned. You have bad taste if you like Brian DePalma’s films despite him being an excellent director. If you gravitate to the immorality in works, you have bad taste. This is because a lot of artistically sound works can be immoral or offensive despite their skill in execution.
Point one is back to class. You have a fast food culture because people do not have time to pursue leisure. You don’t have the time to cook savory food that takes hours to prepare and a stay at home mom to watch over it. Slow food is a conceit of the rich and another status marker to differentiate between classes. Paul Fussell mentioned that the defining activities of wealthy people’s hobbies is that they are expensive, take a lot of time, and need to be maintained at even more cost. So fast food culture is in many ways a disgust at those who don’t have advantages. They can’t sit down and slowly enjoy a three hour Tarkovsky film, because implicit in truly being into the experience involves a level of leisure and self-education many people don’t have.
Point three I agree with, in part.
This flows in with his point about “bad readers.” The point is that people use art only to confirm what they already believe in, and not to be challenged by. I can agree with this, although to be honest I think people can get wounded or fatigued by always being challenged or expanded. Information is like a river; too many perspectives can flood out a person’s inner self and cause ennui and dislocation. But the point is good. We can’t always expect art to act like this.
However, Lewis was being a snob in this. There’s nothing wrong in being palliated, refreshed, or what have you by art. Not every use of art has to add to your sum total of humanity; recreational use of it is perfectly fine. To use church as an example, you shouldn’t be expected that every time you go to a service, you develop a spiritual epiphany and grow as a person. Sometimes you need comfort and not challenging; belonging and not world-expanding. Both experiences have their place.
I think my final objection is that the writer tends to spiritualize his sense of good taste when it comes to secular works.
This is a dangerous thing. Yes, Paul quoted pagan thinkers and might have been current on philosophy, but Peter was an unlearned fisherman. Each believer must serve God in his own way, and some may not gain anything or even be hurt by serious secular exposure. You can’t make a rule out of something that each believer must grapple with in his own conscience, and it’s dangerous to assume a definition of good taste being any kind of a spiritual good or an aid to the Gospel. G.K. Chesterton illustrated why in this passage from Manalive:
“At Oxford, I fear, I had the artistic temperament rather badly; and artists love to be limited. I liked the church as a pretty pattern; discipline was mere decoration. I delighted in mere divisions of time; I liked eating fish on Friday. But then I like fish; and the fast was made for men who like meat. Then I came to Hoxton and found men who had fasted for five hundred years; men who had to gnaw fish because they could not get meat—and fish-bones when they could not get fish. As too many British officers treat the army as a review, so I had treated the Church Militant as if it were the Church Pageant. Hoxton cures that. Then I realized that for eighteen hundred years the Church Militant had not been a pageant, but a riot—and a suppressed riot. There, still living patiently in Hoxton, were the people to whom the tremendous promises had been made. In the face of that I had to become a revolutionary if I was to continue to be religious. In Hoxton one cannot be a conservative without being also an atheist— and a pessimist. Nobody but the devil could want to conserve Hoxton.
“On the top of all this comes Hawkins. If he had cursed all the Hoxton men, excommunicated them, and told them they were going to hell, I should have rather admired him. If he had ordered them all to be burned in the market-place, I should still have had that patience that all good Christians have with the wrongs inflicted on other people. But there is no priestcraft about Hawkins—nor any other kind of craft. He is as perfectly incapable of being a priest as he is of being a carpenter or a cabman or a gardener or a plasterer. He is a perfect gentleman; that is his complaint. He does not impose his creed, but simply his class. He never said a word of religion in the whole of his damnable address. He simply said all the things his brother, the major, would have said. A voice from heaven assures me that he has a brother, and that this brother is a major.
How much of the sensibilities he wants are just class markers? How much of having the right opinions about a certain film or being informed in it is part of being a member of a certain knowledge-using class? Is it really growth that comes from being familiar with the works of Woody Allen, or entrance into certain class and cultural circles? C.S. Lewis says:
All this is rather obvious. I wonder whether you will say the same of my next step, which is this. I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. This desire, in one of its forms, has indeed had ample justice done to it in literature. I mean, in the form of snobbery. Victorian fiction is full of characters who are hag-ridden by the desire to get inside that particular Ring which is, or was, called Society. But it must be clearly understood that “Society,” in that sense of the word, is merely one of a hundred Rings, and snobbery therefore only one form of the longing to be inside.
People who believe themselves to be free, and indeed are free, from snobbery, and who read satires on snobbery with tranquil superiority, may be devoured by the desire in another form. It may be the very intensity of their desire to enter some quite different Ring which renders them immune from all the allurements of high life. An invitation from a duchess would be very cold comfort to a man smarting under the sense of exclusion from some artistic or communistic côterie. Poor man—it is not large, lighted rooms, or champagne, or even scandals about peers and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it is the sacred little attic or studio, the heads bent together, the fog of tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge that we—we four or five all huddled beside this stove—are the people who know.
Often the desire conceals itself so well that we hardly recognize the pleasures of fruition. Men tell not only their wives but themselves that it is a hardship to stay late at the office or the school on some bit of important extra work which they have been let in for because they and So-and-so and the two others are the only people left in the place who really know how things are run. But it is not quite true. It is a terrible bore, of course, when old Fatty Smithson draws you aside and whispers, “Look here, we’ve got to get you in on this examination somehow” or “Charles and I saw at once that you’ve got to be on this committee.” A terrible bore… ah, but how much more terrible if you were left out! It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don’t matter, that is much worse.
A person can be honest and say “I am trying to evangelize people, therefore I must understand them and relate to them.” That’s fine. But the writer isn’t doing this. He’s using “good taste” as a reason, and one of the biggest reasons to be considered as having good taste is to be approved by others. It’s a form of pride, and it’s really dangerous. For myself, I have to be careful not to view my weirdness as good taste and as a way to differentiate myself from others. “I like obscure anime X; doesn’t that show how in the know I am?” It’s a harder temptation than you think, especially if you are a loner, misanthrope, and contrarian.
These are some of the issues I had with the piece. I think my issues with Christian culture is less about taste, and more about at how it picks insiders and outsiders. I don’t want to rehash that old argument in an already long blog post. I don’t think the advice the writer gives is bad entirely, but trying to universalize it is worrisome and can lead to the issues I mentioned. I don’t think Christian maturity is a taste test.
