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January 12 - December 10, 2021
attack on established cultural art forms in a manner designed to undo the deeper moral structure of society.
Deathworks make the old values look ridiculous.
One of the key examples Rieff gives is that of Andres Serrano’s infamous work Piss Christ, in which a crucifix is shown submerged in the artist’s urine. In many ways, this is a quintessential example of that to which Rieff is pointing: a symbol of something deeply sacred to the second world being presented in a form that degrades it and makes it utterly repulsive.
satirical TV show or a humorous column in a newspaper could be categorized as a deathwork, slowly but surely undermining the established order of things.
Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties.
Abortion, too, is a deathwork—not simply because it works the death of the unborn child but because it profanes that which the second world regarded as sacred: human life made in the image of God from the moment of conception. It revises the definition of what it means to be a person and also makes that which was once thought to be a person into something akin to a piece of garbage or excrement. It is therefore antireligious because it takes that which is most sacred in the social order, life itself, and flushes it down the toilet without a second thought. And it is antihistorical because it
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Thus, the act was driven not by some inward impulse that was intrinsically sinful but by a good desire that led him to perform a sinful act. He stole the asparagus to help Verrat. The desire was a basically good one; it was only the manner in which he fulfilled it that was morally problematic.
Society, or at least the society in which he found himself, is to blame for the young Rousseau’s delinquency. His corruption is essentially the result of his reaction to corrupting circumstances.9
Augustine blames himself for his sin because he is basically wicked from birth; Rousseau blames society for his sin because he is basically good at birth and then perverted by external forces.
this realization was what set Rousseau on his path to demonstrate that it is social institutions that breed corruption and wickedness, a point that was to have huge repercussions for his later thinking about society, ethics, and the individual.
Today, when subtler inquiries and a more refined taste have reduced the Art of pleasing to principles, a vile and deceiving uniformity prevails in our morals and all minds seem to have been cast in the same mold: constantly politeness demands, propriety commands: constantly one follows custom, never one’s own genius. One no longer dares to appear what one is; and under this perpetual constraint, the men who make up the herd that is called society will, when placed in similar circumstances, all act in similar ways unless more powerful motives incline them differently.
In short, while education in the arts and sciences might be expected to enhance humanity and improve life, Rousseau sees a real danger of exactly the opposite: it will in reality foster hypocrisy and wickedness because it creates a society where the need to belong and to conform requires individuals to be false to who they really are.
Rousseau defines pity as an innate repugnance to the idea of others who belong to the same species suffering. The natural man does not like to see one of his fellows in pain or difficulty and will, if he can, act to alleviate such. All the other social virtues, such as generosity and mercy, flow from this one basic source:
The key to basic social ethics is therefore the ability to empathize with others and apply to them the same principles as you apply to yourself. Each individual is to relate to every other individual in a way that respects his or her own personal integrity and sovereignty. Problems emerge only when one person tries to dominate another.
The virtuous person is the one whose instincts, whose sentimental or emotional responses to particular situations, are correctly attuned.
On the contrary, education is about allowing the person to mature in a manner that protects her from precisely those cultural influences that traditional schooling is designed to cultivate and that merely inflame amour propre. These serve only to alienate her from who she really is, making her inauthentic.
ethical subjectivism of our modern culture of anarchic emotive morality and expressive individualism. There is now no consensus about what it is that should evoke our empathy and sympathy: the baby in the womb or the pregnant teenager whose life will be utterly disrupted by having a child? The transgender teen who wants to become a woman or his parents who fear he is making a terrible mistake? The ethic Rousseau articulates may be rooted in sentiment, but it is not quite the same as the emotionally driven ethical subjectivism we have today. On the contrary, Rousseau sees empathy as having a
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The idea of the innate innocence of the hypothetical state of nature presses toward a cult of childhood and youth.
the Western world of today generally credits youth with wisdom and
For example, we have in recent years been treated to children and teenagers lecturing the older generation
that has not stopped serious newspapers and pundits taking the voice of youth seriously. Why? In part, it is surely because Rousseau’s basic point about nature, society, and the authenticity of youthful innocence has become one of the unacknowledged assumptions of this present age.
By reflecting on rural life, untouched and unspoiled by the artificiality of urban sophistication, and by representing it in a poetic form designed to arouse the appropriate emotional response, the poet is key to this process whereby people are enabled to grasp once again that which is true, authentic, and universal in human existence.
Only by going back before the effects of “civilization” can one hope to find that which is truly human, and enabling people to do this is the task of the poet.
Books present ideas, rational ideas, which militate against the deeper unity of the human race. It is the cult of reason, playing to the artificiality of sophisticated urban life, that has alienated men and women from each other. The answer, then, is to return to that experience of rural life and of the natural world to which it is so close. That takes us to the heart of who and what we really are, and that is also a turn inward, from the false sophistication of outward society to the unalloyed and uncorrupted movements of the unspoiled heart.
from the particulars of existence to the universal truths of human nature via the aesthetic experience that poetry gives the reader.
force of nature in the form of wind strikes the harp’s chimes and causes it to create music, to give expression to what would otherwise be an inexpressible force, in accordance with the harp’s own construction. The point of the analogy is clear: poetry is the result of the forces of nature moving the poet to give them literary or artistic expression. The poet is inspired by nature, not simply by way of his own emotional reaction to it but by forces that are innate within nature itself, and therefore external to him, and that move him in his works of artistic creation.
improvement is achieved aesthetically and not by rational argumentation.
Shelley states that for people to be truly good, they must be able to place themselves in the position of other human beings, to experience their pleasures and pains as if they were their own.
fact, Shelley believes that when poetic productions become directly didactic, they immediately cease to be great.
He asserts that human beings are unprepared for reasoned arguments until such time as sentiments like love and trust have first been cultivated.
The ethical and thus the political are built on the foundation of the aesthetic and are both, therefore, dependent on poetry.
Experiencing such visions, people will then themselves desire to see them realized in actuality. Revolutionary themes therefore permeate his poetry.
is written, so Shelley claims, more in the style of a popular song with an intentionally more direct and immediate appeal to the simple working people whose political consciousness he was trying to raise.
Shelley is acutely aware that the violent path to freedom as exemplified in the French Revolution proved to be a road to nowhere and culminated not in the liberation of humanity but in bloodshed and then the rise of a new tyrant,
This in turn finds its corollary in an emphasis on aesthetics rather than rational argument as being the most powerful means of exerting influence and changing people for the better. And we might also note the consequent importance of the poet or the artist as the means of transforming society. Credit where credit is due: Percy Bysshe Shelley made the case for cultural figures as the key to political revolution over a century before Antonio Gramsci and then the New Left.
his attack on institutional religion and his understanding that sexual liberation is central to political liberation.
the fairy guide launches a powerful attack on the Jews as they howl “hideous praises to their Demon-God”—which is in effect an attack on Christianity expressed in the then more socially acceptable idiom of anti-Jewish polemic.
Shelley’s mind between religion, political oppression, and restrictions on sexual activity
And here we see that that connection between individual authenticity and sexual liberation is not of recent vintage but has a clear precedent in Shelley some two hundred years ago.
his history of sex, Faramerz Dabhoiwala summarizes this shift by pointing to three significant and closely related developments in the 1700s: (1) the increasing importance ascribed to conscience (basically understood as natural instinct) as a reliable guide to moral behavior, (2) a growing public distaste for judicial punishment of consenting heterosexual transgressors (such as adulterers) of standard moral codes, and (3) the rising view that the moral laws based on external authorities such as the Bible might in fact be social
constructs and actually stand problematically over against the natural laws governing human nature.
Godwin dismisses marriage as an evil that checks the independent progress of the mind, that is inconsistent with the natural propensities of human beings, and that dooms people to a lifetime of unnecessary misery.
“the most odious of all monopolies” because, by making one woman the exclusive property of one man, it creates the context for jealousy, subterfuge, and general social corruption.
He identifies the underlying cause of inequality and servitude as the commercial marketplace,
at the heart of this current commercial oppression that exists in the world is the institution of marriage, undergirded by religious teaching and enforced by religious institutions.53
Liberty will never be achieved while the market controls everything and while human love is shackled by traditional Christian views of marriage.
It is, one might say, a sentimental union, and once the pleasurable sentiments that it stimulates have dissipated, it should be dissolved at the will of the contracting parties.
We should therefore take note: today’s understanding of marriage is clearly not a recent innovation; it was explicitly advocated by the likes of Shelley over two centuries ago.
Organized Christianity, with its imposition on humanity of the law code contained in the Bible, is that which has alienated human beings from each other and destroyed true liberty. Christianity must therefore be destroyed and marriage abolished, or at least dramatically redefined, if human beings are to be truly free and truly happy.
I went to the Garden of Love. And saw what I never had seen: A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green. And the gates of this Chapel were shut, And Thou shalt not writ over the door; So I turn’d to the Garden of Love That so many sweet flowers bore. And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be: And priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys and desires.60
