How do you measure vulgarity? Surely every person will see things differently. Nowadays, virtually nothing is beyond the pale. Yet, not one hundred years ago, Rhett Butler saying “damn” was scandalous.
I was in the Toledo Art Museum the other day. I am no art connoisseur, but I find walking the floors to be highly stimulative of thought. In that trip I developed an idea that had first come to me in the Indianapolis Art Museum, which is one of the best museums I’ve seen.
Science treats emotion as artifact. It is accustomed to “objectivity”, to measurement, to the idea that things exist “out there”, and that they can somehow separate ALL physical occurences from subjectivity, from an inherent inability to measure.
Scientism, the materialistic atheist fundamentalist creed, holds that our bodies, our minds, are objects. They are complex objects, but not different in principle from chalkboards or cockroaches. This creed has social consequences.
Our emotive lives are all out of whack. I see signs all around of the inability to mourn, to process deep emotion, to feel deep joy, to express anger in mature and useful fashions. All of these things are necessary for us to negotiate our connections with one another. When we do not exist as in-dividuals, when we do not privilege our own emotions above interpretations offered by others, or a fear of feeling at all–simply, when we lack spontaneity–we diminish as spirits, as people.
What I felt in the museum was a tide sweeping emotions out to sea, to be examined by specialists with no emotional ties to the topic, under microscopes. And please step out of your clothes, Mrs. Smith, we must take accurate measurements and shame is not anything we recognize.
What we NEED is to use science for what it was intended: making things. What we NEED is to learn how to express emotions more wisely, with greater freedom, with greater intimacy. And almost NOTHING in our culture is building this.
What does one see in most of the art from roughly 1918 to the present? Cries for help. Confusion, Anger. Lust. Willfulness. Treachery. All of these things are supported by the IDEAS of our intellectual elites, which posit, in effect, that meaning is a thing, and that we don’t have it, and can’t figure out how to manufacture it.
What is needed to counterbalance this flow out to sea is a tide inward, which focuses on quality of feeling, of hope, art in the good sense, justice, freedom: all the things which leftist tricks have removed from our national dialogue.
I will add that as I suspected I was not quite able to do justice to the sentiment. It’s frustrating: I can see and feel things, watch them flow, feel them in my body, but as much as I write, words sometimes fail me. I guess that words, too, are in the end quantitative. That would make sense.