Tag: moral criticism

Return of the Tropical Pedo Beams

In a recent post, I made the argument that artistic works should be judged, either morally or artistically, on their own merits and not on the reputation of the artist. reply to a recent post, a reader has made the following comment:

Y’know it’s also worth mentioning the same arguments people make about buying American apply here. For example, you limit your consumption to domestic goods only, you’ll never get a Lamborghini or a Rolex … or in this case Polanski’s Chinatown. How can you limit yourself like that? But I’m sitting here now and thinking about it, and it occurs to me the same problem sets in with both scenarios.

Choose to sacrifice for quality over principle, fast forward a couple decades and what have we got? No wholesome mainstream entertainment, no US manufactured goods, and yet no Lamborghinis or Chinatowns. All of our consumer goods are crappy and made by communists, and all of our books and movies are crappy and made by creeps and pederasts. Meanwhile both the American workers and Christian authors are on unemployment.

Maybe the real problem here is the Darwinism of the almighty dollar.

My initial reaction is to suggest that this is a false analogy. One question is ethical (how are artistic works to be judged?) and the other is economical. In both cases, the average consumer can’t be expected to vet the issues in question. Most people do not pay attention to where there goods come from, and most do not investigate the personal lives of the writers they read or the directors whose movies they watch. Nor am I convinced they should be expected to; indeed, before they days of the internet, such vetting was in many cases difficult if not impossible.

Traditionally, protecting locally manufactured goods has largely been the domain of governments, which have exacted tariffs or limited trade. Dealing with artists’ criminal behavior, like anyone else’s criminal behavior, has usually fallen to the same authority. I’m not convinced this is the wrong way to do things: In the latter case, the alternative is mob justice. In the former, I’m not sure home-grown efforts to buy local make a significant difference in the long run.

I might add, too, that protecting the populace from smut has also traditionally fallen to the government, but only partly. Only gradually did the United States decide that pornography was protected by the First Amendment (which, as written, was clearly not intended for such a purpose). This has been a disaster.

Tropical Pedo Beams, or, The Danger of Roman Polanski

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.

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