I recently came across a thoughtful and challenging essay entitled “Slippery-slopism and False Gods” by Paul Lucas. I will summarize his thinking in order to make my own comments, but I am unlikely to do him justice, so I invite you to read his own words.
The case he makes is that it is morally wrong to consume the art of morally depraved artists both because this gives the artist further financial support to practice his depravity, and because that depravity is almost certainly injected, perhaps in a subtle fashion, into the artist’s work.
That is an extremely brief summary; if you are inclined to dismiss that out of hand, I again urge you to read the original.
Lucas makes his case well, using Roman Polanski as a concrete example. Polanski committed a variety of vile acts, including drugging and raping a thirteen-year-old girl, before he escaped justice. He also regularly got standing ovations and spirited defenses from Hollywood types—the same Hollywood types who would later, hypocritically, throw Harvey Weinstein under the bus when they realized which way the wind was blowing.
Lucas argues that defending the art of a wicked artist leads inevitably to defending the wickedness of the artist himself, hence the “slippery-slopism” in the title of his essay.
Discussion
I am uncomfortable with Lucas’s conclusions, though I cannot deny the power of the case he makes. We see these days a division in thought about art: On the one hand are those who believe art is mere entertainment that a man can ingest injudiciously without fear of harm or of changing in any way; we may call this the “all art is quite useless” school. On the other hand are those who believe art contains mind-worms that enter and infest all consumers, shaping our ethical outlook even without our knowledge, so we must be vigilant to let the good worms in and keep the bad ones out.
The one position is flippant and shallow and obviously false. The other is dreary, restrictive, and oppressive. And yet it is difficult to imagine any happy medium between the two.
Though I’ve exaggerated to make the point, Lucas falls into the latter camp, and he is in good company: The idea that art has the power to shape morals goes back at least to Plato—and we know Plato didn’t originate it. But Plato in the Republic takes this premise to its logical conclusion, a (probably) unintentional reductio ad absurdum in which music is restricted to pure tones and the works of Homer are censored beyond recognition.
Being more rigorously logical than most, Plato is also stricter than most: Even the most censorious busybodies will usually give a pass to the works of Homer on account of their antiquity and acknowledged merit despite their gleeful slaughters and godly philanderings—and to the works of Plato too, which contain frequent references to the Athenian practice of pederasty, a practice Plato did not approve but nonetheless treated sportively.
Cancellation
One reason I am cautious of accepting Lucas’s argument is that it is strikingly close to something he himself detests, the worldview of “social justice” or “cancel culture,” in which any person, and especially any artist, is to have his career destroyed and his reputation ruined if he does not adhere to the latest fashions in moral outrage.
There are those among the social-justice crowd who sincerely believe that refusing to call a man by feminine pronouns at his request or expressing mild disapproval of sodomy are actions just as heinous as raping a child, if not more. I happen to think that’s insane, and Lucas apparently does also. I do not want such people dictating which writers can publish or which painters can paint.
And thus one of the problems with envisioning some kind of standard for morality in art is that there are precious few genuinely moral voices left that could set the standard. The days of the Legion of Decency are long gone, and the morals of the “woke” are actually immorals, the exact opposite of morals.
But overlooking that thorny problem for a moment, I will note that the Hays Code, which once governed Hollywood feature productions, or the Legion of Decency, which once dictated what films faithful Christians and Jews were allowed to see, based its standard on content, not on the character of the people making the movie. One of the biggest problems with “social justice” and its bastard offspring “cancel culture” is that it presumes to judge hearts rather than actions or things, and it destroys people through gossip and mobbing. Lucas, I believe, slips into a similar mistake. I’ll return to this in a moment.
On Polanski
To illustrate his argument, Lucas, after briefly reviewing Roman Polanski’s heinous crimes, describes an argument he had with a Polanksi fan and also offers an interpretation of Polanski’s film Chinatown, which—perhaps not coincidentally—involves a child molester who escapes justice.
Lucas attempts to interpret the movie as Polanski’s subtle, deliberately crafty attempt to justify himself. His interlocutor dismissively called this a “pedo ray” that Polanksi was supposedly beaming into the movie; Lucas takes the dismissive phrase seriously and makes the case that a skilled artist can, in fact, weave a subtle defense of depravity into his art—a “ray,” if you will, that may defend pedophilia or other evil things.
Certainly, such a “ray” is entirely possible, and I know this because I have seen it. If you (for some reason) want to see an example of a defense of child molestation woven into an otherwise arresting and well-executed story, I could point you to the Gunslinger Girl manga, which is subtle enough that I naïvely enjoyed reading it—some volumes multiple times—and was unable to recognize its more twisted elements until I returned to it years later after I had learned some of the “language” in which such works are written.
However, in his discussion of Chinatown, we may see a chink in Lucas’s armor. Lucas’s own discussion strongly suggests another interpretation for the movie—that the miscarriage of justice is a tragedy rather than a victory. Perhaps Polanski really did imagine himself as the perpetrator who escapes unpunished—or perhaps he was trying to confront his own demons, which he plainly failed to exorcise.
After all, there are not only artists who defend their depravity in their art but also ones who wrestle with it. For an obvious example, the novel and fairy tales of Oscar Wilde are a condemnation of the philosophy and lifestyle of Oscar Wilde, as if he faithfully recorded the message of his conscience on the one hand while blithely ignoring it on the other.
Art and Artist
That brings us around to a point Lucas does not address, the possibility of separating the artist from the art. Lucas claims that it is impossible to admire Chinatown the movie without making an idol out of Roman Polanski the man—and this is the weak link in his essay.
There have been a great many depraved artists, but for most of history, the artists were invisible to the people who admired their work. You don’t need to know a thing about Michaelangelo to be struck by the power of his sculpture. In arguing that an admirer of Chinatown must inevitably defend Polanksi, Lucas implies that such an admirer must know who the hell Roman Polanksi is—which is not necessarily the case.
It is only with the rise of social media that the wall between artist and audience has broken down to the extent that we are free to see that most of the artists whose work we admire are both immoral and stupid. But for many people, the names attached to movies or books or paintings are just names about which they know nothing and care even less. Even today, this is probably still the case for most.
The Challenge
With that in mind, I will meet a certain challenge that Lucas gives. In his previous debate, he invited his interlocutor to spell out, in his own words, Polanksi’s crimes, and to continue defending Polanksi’s films after having done so. His interlocutor then left the chat, but I am willing to meet the challenge: Polanski drugged and raped a child and probably did other things I’d rather not look up to refresh my memory. He also escaped earthly justice. He also directed a handful of well-crafted films.
All of these, as far as I can tell, are facts, and I’m not completely sure I understand why Lucas thinks anyone should have a hard time stating them.
The Solution
Let us say that I am right and we must separate the art from the artist. What does this mean? Does it mean the “art-for-art’s-sake” school is correct and that we can mindlessly consoom to our heart’s content, heedless of what messages, subtle or otherwise, are forming our moral outlook?
No, that does not follow. But I do think the proper focus of moral criticism is the art itself and not the creator thereof. The artist should be judged by the law if necessary and will be judged by God inevitably, but his life and behavior are not the proper objects of the moral evaluation of his work. Indeed, in argumentation, to attack the person is ad hominem; art criticism is not quite the same as argumentation, but it is analogous enough that we can learn from ad hominem why a focus on the artist is a distraction.
What we need is better moral instruction, including an ability to treat the stories we read or art we see critically, so that we are active rather than passive consumers.
This does not require looking up the life history of every artist or (good heavens!) reading his Twitter. It does, however, require a serious ethical grounding in something more sure and lasting than the outrage du jour.
