The Moral Imperative for Art

The Roman Polanski arrest has reminded Glenn reynolds of some issues concerning elite views on the special status which should be afforded to art and artists.

Reynolds on "pure language" in poetry:

It’s easy to understand why poets might like to think that poesy confers high moral stature — just as beekeepers may think that the apiary arts do the same. But the evidence, frankly, is stronger for the beekeepers’ position than for the poets’. In fact, what’s interesting, or perhaps revealing, is that genocidal thuggish dictators so often have artistic aspirations. As has been noted here before, there’s often a lot of overlap between mediocre artistry and murderous tyranny:

Joseph Bottum on Poets Against War and related activists from the academic left:

. . . there's something peculiar echoing in even the mildest of these anti-American tropes, as there is, for that matter, in the anti-religious, anti-business, and anti-imperialist rhetoric of the protesting American poets. Christianity, capitalism, and colonialism, with the United States their flagship: all the old whipping boys of the Soviet-era Communists--except that the Soviet Union is no more. Lenin and Stalin may be gone, but their stalking horses go galloping on.

In one way, the collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe snatched even the pretense of coherence from much of the hard leftist complaint. There no longer exists the horizon--the eschaton of a socialist workers' paradise--at which to gesture as the positive alternative to the evils of the West. But in another way, the end of the Soviet Union set protest free to be, well, protest: not for anything, not pinned down by having to defend the indefensibility of the gulag, but a pure and absolute againstness.

Bottum again, on more mature reflections concerning the morality of war:

. . . responsibility must be taken in this world for both the use of force and the refusal to use it. All violence is crucifixion: The cross of the cold north is the pattern . . . of the acts of earth. But how are we, by that fact, relieved of either the necessity to act or the commandment to love?

In a 1932 debate in Christian Century over the possibility of American intervention against the Japanese in Manchuria . . . the theological ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr wrote of what he called "the grace of doing nothing." In the next issue, his brother Reinhold Niebuhr replied, "I realize quite well that my brother's position both in its ethical perfectionism and its apocalyptic note is closer to the gospel." But, he added, "I find it impossible to envisage a society of pure love as long as man remains man. . . . The hope of attaining an ethical goal . . . without coercion . . . is an illusion which was spread chiefly among the comfortable classes."