Art Is Supposed To Make You Uncomfortable — Jen Silverman in The New York Times
When I was in college, I came across “The Sea and Poison,” a 1950s novel by Shusaku Endo. It tells the story of a doctor in postwar Japan who, as an intern years earlier, participated in a vivisection experiment on an American prisoner. Endo’s lens on the story is not the easiest one, ethically speaking; he doesn’t dwell on the suffering of the victim. Instead, he chooses to explore a more unsettling element: the humanity of the perpetrators.
When I say “humanity” I mean their confusion, self-justifications and willingness to lie to themselves. Atrocity doesn’t just come out of evil, Endo was saying, it emerges from self-interest, timidity, apathy and the desire for status. His novel showed me how, in the right crucible of social pressures, I, too, might delude myself into making a choice from which an atrocity results. Perhaps this is why the book has haunted me for nearly two decades, such that I’ve read it multiple times.
I was reminded of that novel at 2 o’clock in the morning recently as I scrolled through a social media account dedicated to collecting angry reader reviews. My attention was caught by someone named Nathan, whose take on “Paradise Lost” was: “Milton was a fascist turd.” But it was another reader, Ryan, who reeled me in with his response to John Updike’s “Rabbit, Run”: “This book made me oppose free speech.” From there, I hit the bank of “Lolita” reviews: Readers were appalled, frustrated, infuriated. What a disgusting man! How could Vladimir Nabokov have been permitted to write this book? Who let authors write such immoral, perverse characters anyway?
I was cackling as I scrolled but soon a realization struck me. Here on my screen was the distillation of a peculiar American illness: namely, that we have a profound and dangerous inclination to confuse art with moral instruction, and vice versa.
As someone who was born in the States but partially raised in a series of other countries, I’ve always found the sheer uncompromising force of American morality to be mesmerizing and terrifying. Despite our plurality of influences and beliefs, our national character seems inescapably informed by an Old Testament relationship to the notions of good and evil. This powerful construct infuses everything from our advertising campaigns to our political ones — and has now filtered into, and shifted, the function of our artistic works.
Maybe it’s because our political discourse swings between deranged and abhorrent on a daily basis and we would like to combat our feelings of powerlessness by insisting on moral simplicity in the stories we tell and receive. Or maybe it’s because many of the transgressions that flew under the radar in previous generations — acts of misogyny, racism and homophobia; abuses of power both macro and micro — are now being called out directly. We’re so intoxicated by openly naming these ills that we have begun operating under the misconception that to acknowledge each other’s complexity, in our communities as well as in our art, is to condone each other’s cruelties.
When I work with younger writers, I am frequently amazed by how quickly peer feedback sessions turn into a process of identifying which characters did or said insensitive things. Sometimes the writers rush to defend the character, but often they apologize shamefacedly for their own blind spot, and the discussion swerves into how to fix the morals of the piece. The suggestion that the values of a character can be neither the values of the writer nor the entire point of the piece seems more and more surprising — and apt to trigger discomfort.
While I typically share the progressive political views of my students, I’m troubled by their concern for righteousness over complexity. They do not want to be seen representing any values they do not personally hold. The result is that, in a moment in which our world has never felt so fast-changing and bewildering, our stories are getting simpler, less nuanced and less able to engage with the realities through which we’re living.
I can’t blame younger writers for believing that it is their job to convey a strenuously correct public morality. This same expectation filters into all the modes in which I work: novels, theater, TV and film. The demands of Internet Nathan and Internet Ryan — and the anxieties of my mentees — are not so different from those of the industry gatekeepers who work in the no-man’s land between art and money and whose job it is to strip stories of anything that could be ethically murky.
I have worked in TV writers’ rooms where “likability notes” came from on high as soon as a complex character was on the page — particularly when the character was female. Concern about her likability was most often a concern about her morals: Could she be perceived as promiscuous? Selfish? Aggressive? Was she a bad girlfriend or a bad wife? How quickly could she be rehabilitated into a model citizen for the viewers?
TV is not alone in this. A director I’m working with recently pitched our screenplay to a studio. When the executives passed, they told our team it was because the characters were too morally ambiguous and they’d been tasked with seeking material wherein the lesson was clear, so as not to unsettle their customer base. What they did not say, but did not need to, is that in the absence of adequate federal arts funding, American art is tied to the marketplace. Money is tight, and many corporations do not want to pay for stories that viewers might object to if they can buy something that plays blandly in the background of our lives.
But what art offers us is crucial precisely because it is not a bland backdrop or a platform for simple directives. Our books, plays, films and TV shows can do the most for us when they don’t serve as moral instruction manuals but allow us to glimpse our own hidden capacities, the slippery social contracts inside which we function, and the contradictions we all contain.
We need more narratives that tell us the truth about how complex our world is. We need stories that help us name and accept paradoxes, not ones that erase or ignore them. After all, our experience of living in communities with one another is often much more fluid and changeable than it is rigidly black and white. We have the audiences that we cultivate, and the more we cultivate audiences who believe that the job of art is to instruct instead of investigate, to judge instead of question, to seek easy clarity instead of holding multiple uncertainties, the more we will find ourselves inside a culture defined by rigidity, knee-jerk judgments and incuriosity. In our hair-trigger world of condemnation, division and isolation, art — not moralizing — has never been more crucial.
Josh Marshall on the way the Supreme Court is basically in the bag for the rich and corrupt.
There were so many things that happened [Thursday] in the Supreme Court’s hearing on presidential immunity that it’s hard to know where to start. But one part that captured it for me was Sam Alito’s line of argument that presidential immunity might be necessary to make it possible for presidents to leave office voluntarily, or that not having some broad grant of immunity would make refusal to leave office more likely. Here’s one of the quotes: “If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is gonna be able to go off to a peaceful retirement, but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy? And we can look around the world and find countries where we have seen this process, where the loser gets thrown in jail.”
I think it’s safe to say that as a policy matter this is a very bad way to approach presidential accountability, the rule of law or the peaceful transfer of power. But that really isn’t the big point to me. It’s that the subtext of so much of yesterday’s discussion and — often the explicit statements from the justices during it — was that this is a new question that the Supreme Court is now tasked with crafting a policy to address. Neither is the case.
I am not naive enough to think that judicial interpretations and rulings don’t have policy implications. Of course they do. What’s more, the policy implications of judicial interpretations frequently are a reasonable part of the prudential analysis that goes into judges’ work: if we think the law and the Constitution say something, we need to have open eyes about what that something actually means in practice. What was so striking about yesterday’s performances, if not at all surprising, were that there was little effort to even keep up these pretenses. It was almost like these were de novo questions. Even down to the point where multiple justices waived off dealing with the actual case and facts before them, arguing that they’re being called upon to set up the big rules for posterity.
Listening to Sam Alito, but really Kavanaugh and Roberts too, you get the sense that if they decided that presidents need to be immune from possible prosecution forever for whatever policy reason they think makes sense … well, elections have consequences and it’s up to them to make that choice. But that’s not how any of this works. If you really want to get into history to make this ruling, it is the plainest thing in all the discussions around the authorship and ratification of the federal Constitution that presidents remain citizens. The core dynamic in the process of creating the Constitution was the belief that the country needed a more unified and powerful executive authority without making that person above the law, which is to say, a king. Presidents are not above the law. When they leave office they give up all their powers. The text itself gives not the slightest hint that presidents have immunity from the law.
You can play devil’s advocate and say: well how is it then that the Justice Department and pretty much the whole legal and political class has decided that a president can’t be prosecuted while in office? There’s an answer to that. There are numerous principles in the common law that say that you can’t be a judge in your own case. The president is the officer who enforces the laws. He can’t prosecute himself. It’s a contradiction in terms. Well, is there a defect in the Constitution? Did they leave something out? No. It turns out that the Constitution creates a process to resolve this contradiction. The document invests the political process with a means to deal with a law-breaking president: Impeachment. The Congress can remove the president. Now someone else is charged with enforcing the laws, and the contradiction is resolved. Some people disagree with this logic. But this is the proper process of looking at the document — resolving seeming contradictions or problems by looking at the whole document and trying to see what it prescribes, how it charges us to resolve seeming contradictions within it.
The display we saw was a vivid illustration of how the Court has gone thoroughly rogue, cutting itself off from even the appearances of the processes that give it legitimacy. That is the core of the current Court’s corruption. If we assume that there might be some limited ways that official acts can’t be reinterpreted as crimes, it seems to go without saying that refusing to honor the results of an election can’t be one of them. Trying to overthrow the government can’t be one of those official acts. If that’s the case — this hypothetical, narrow kind of immunity — then the Court’s proper path is clear. You say that there may be some cases where a very narrow kind of immunity applies. But what we have before us now certainly isn’t one of those cases. End of story.
But that’s not what we got.
It’s certainly the case that justices aren’t bound by things they say in the process of airing an issue. So perhaps this was all just the equivalent of the preposterous hypotheticals that a law professor raises in a class on constitutional interpretation. But lets be real. We know who these people are. They’re telling us.
It’s a rogue court, a thoroughly corrupt one, one that is so far gone in its corruption that it feels free even from the practical obligation to clothe its corruption for the sake of appearances.
Doonesbury — Shrink rap.
