Taste

Taste is usually regarded as idiosyncratic and inconsequential. Some people like olives while others like horseradish. Some people like Big Band music and some like Bluegrass. Everyone can indulge with their tastes without being considered moral or immoral for doing so. And the explanation of taste is biographical rather than meaningful. You like bluegrass because you grew up in North Carolina and like Big Band music because you grew up in the Forties or, in a stretch, because you were exposed to it being more complex than Fifties solo artists but not exposed to even more complex classical music. And nobody cares except when it's time to buy Christmas presents. Only a wife cares if you prefer Mallomars to Almond Joys. Nothing is riding on it,  as is the case with a religious belief, where you favor one denomination to another, or a political preference for the Democrats or the Republicans, where you can decide to respect those whose preferences are different but where you have to work at being tolerant of their choices. When tastes are concerned, everyone has free will and acceptance, and, indeed, we can define free will in terms of the availability in a supermarket of any number of items and brands from which to choose, people luxuriating in the options of opulence, every customer the king in his court. But if you think about it seriously, taste is a serious matter because, as Hume said, taste refers to what is much deeper but where you have only a small sense, a taste, of what is going on underneath, whether that means an abstract analysis or a distinctive experience, as when we say you have a taste for democratic rather than republican politics or prefer Modernist novelists to the Victorian ones. Those choices do mean something even though we abide by other people having different tastes so as not to become quarrelsome.

Trace some tastes to their roots and see just how significant it is for a person to say he or she feels comfortable with their kind of book or work of art, or political party, or religious denomination, these of ascending order of meaning and importance. So if I come out of seeing the recent movie “Tar” and praise it, I am not just announcing that I liked that movie or even that kind of movie, but declaring myself as a person of discernment, given that the movie is uncompromising in making demands of its audience by having a fresh plot construction, in that it leaves out many explanations, only able to infer that the title character really had abused young women (otherwise, her lover would not have abandoned her and taken their child) however attractive the star of the movie, Cate Blanchett, may be, and that the visualization of the movie is equally demanding, what with its still lifes of interiors and squared off spaces, rather than the sweeping long takes, as in “Citizen Kane'' and “The Godfather'', which are used to make movies spectacular. A movie buff, if you will, is me, but I met my match when I met a movie connoisseur who listed for me a dozen Japanese directors he could mention when I could muster two or three. It is like being able to tell the difference in vintages of French wines or tell whether, as some people I know could do, think it incorrect to think, as in “Tar”, that the Berlin Philharmonic  is implied as the world’s best orchestra when it really is the Vienna. I can’t hear the difference and so have no taste in classical movie even if I respond to classical music for reasons I can't understand. Or consider when students told me that they did not watch “The Godfather'' because it was a classic movie rather than a current one and placed them to me as not being in cinema history, all the way back to Dreyer and Keaton, which means that my generation of movies, that thought of cinema as a tradition, akin to the British novel, was no more, just an entertainment rather than a literature. These things matter because they tell us what is in their heads, how people think about things and the limits of their depth of perception and so I ask what young people actually do treat as their aesthetic tastes. Taylor Swift? Video games? News only on their smartphones? Taste separates people and groups of people far more than political silos, however much people used to say that art and cinema united all of us in that everyone in the world loved Shirley Temple and Charlie Chaplin. Yes, you need not dismiss a person for their taste in movies or novels, but you can certainly recognize their limitations if they only want to see Marvel pictures. They can be nice and wonderful people but they are what they are as indicated by their tastes.

So despite the view that taste, including literature as a pastime rather than a specialty, is trivial, something at the back of the book, serious matters about politics and economics up front, matters of taste are vital in that they express what people really are, what are their fantasies and their hard nosed evaluations of life as it is, depending on their genres. Literature provides the windows to the soul in that people can externalize a sense of life by engaging with one or another piece of mental work. People show they see the world as a cruel place when reading Ayn Rand or Marvel movies even if they are placid or conventional in everyday life. People see life and themselves as romantic by catching rom-coms.  Spy and mystery stories show that events and mysteries work out to a solution so that everyone may figure out who is the perpetrator if they play a bit of Sherlock Holmes or John Le Carre. It is no surprise that the Soviets pushed Jack London. It wasn’t just that he thought life was raw and competitive and so materialistic; it was just that it was the human lot to struggle rather than aspire or expect a more noble and serene way of life. And yet rather than treat literature as dynamite, except by those school board advocates who want to censor literature from the right or from the left, they knowing how powerful literature is, letting people know that it awakens people, still, to the idea that Black people were and might still be badly treated, literature is there in the libraries as a reservoir, a sanctuary, where people can allow their minds to roam and explore, try out and discard, while forming ones own identity. Literature is an atomic explosion kept pent up in a volume rather than a bottle. 

Jane Austen knew that. In “Northanger Abbey”, which is treated as a satire about Gothic novels, but consider how the heroine has to come to terms with the apparently attractive people who are cavalier and who try a bit of danger, these the more dashing people, until she learns more about life and sees that the steady people are her real friends, people to rely on. Going through the Gothic novel is not just a fad; it is a stage of life until she engages life. Similarly, in the miniseries “The Queen’s Gambit”, the heroine who finally is asked to join their high school sorority sisters because she has won a chess tournament and so might be worthy of the honor, but finds that the girls are silly people because all they do is mimic pop singers on television.  She herself has a more serious pursuit than just getting pregnant as soon as possible to some high school hero, even though that means separating herself from her peers and finding friends among these similarly motivated and obsessed chess peers. What others do as a pastime becomes her life, just as anyone’s inner life is filled with the images and ideas culled from literature. We are all Walter Mitty. 

And taste shows something deep. The most recent Nobel Prize winner for literature, Annie Ernaux, is highly praised for her art but I find it to be overdrawn and tinny, which are literary descriptions that get at something deeper. When she says that her mother tried suicide one afternoon, it doesn’t come across as arbitrary or suddenly, only a literary effect. It had to happen sometime and so mention it? It is needlessly melodramatic, meant to shock rather than get to the heart of things, as is also the case when she describes her abortion without going into her feelings about it or her foetus or the biological changes that were enveloping here, none of the issues one would care about if a memoirist were recording a real event, a disclosure, rather than a newspaper account. So the books are disappointing and so should be assigned to the judgment of poor rather than good literature, something required, as by Kant, to all the arts, where “judgment” is just another name for “taste”.

Because reading and its precursors of reading, such as mythologizing and oral tradition, are so essential to being human, people are allowed to exercise expressing and exploring their fantasies, just as they do in dreams and daydreams, and garnering facts, even if false ones, and feeling emotions they like to try even if they are scary, as in horror movies, and governments shy away from constraining themselves except on the edges. Hitler banned Mendelson and Heine, but not Beethoven and Goethe and, as I have suggested, the Soviets allowed Mark Twain as well as the Russian classics, however individualistic and introspective their works could be, despite the attempt to make people only public people committed to the single general ideal. George Orwell and Ray Bradbury see book and thought suppression as a feature of the oncoming dystopia, but that didn’t pan out even in the most repressive of regimes perhaps because free expression is so deep into consciousness, and yet so foreign to political life. Reading is so necessary that curbing it, we discover, is so inimical that people will shun prohibitions as happened when people realized that they needed to congregate despite the dangers of the pandemic, a right to be recognized as such and the privation of such as a violation of rights not previously known as such. The protection of free speech and the press in the Bill of Rights are a mere shadow of these deeper rights that are truly unalienable in that without them people are barely human. Even those who are feral in that they are untrained in reading, such as the people who show up in school board meetings to decry various books about gay parents or “To Kill a Mockingbird” because they think their children will be upset by being exposed to them, are not banning reading just restricting it so that reading will not be upsetting though it takes but a moment to realize that what one person takes as serene, like “Ecclesiastes”, can even that be thought as upsetting, in that it declares everyone dies, there being a season for that, and literature as well as thought can always generate downsides. The feral are just in denial, and those who claim not to be literary are still provoked to imagine another realm of the vicarious when, for example, pondering manuals about how to work the internet because those diagrams also require engaging flow charts and commands that show how a programming process can be turned to work. In the details is another level of meaning and experience.

If, then, taste is another name for judgment, and so what happens is that a few facts or insights generate a conclusion about whether a play or a novel is good or bad or so-so, then the same thing can be said about politics. Remember, there are very few qualifications other than age to prevent citizens from voting, including people not versed much less trained in politics and so able to make the conclusion of whether to vote for one candidate or another for superficial or irrelevant issues, as when a bettor decides to put his money on a horse because he likes his name or is advised to do so by a tout, the voter not required to vote in a responsible or citizen-like fashion, perhaps only between his name was Kennedy and so reminded him of the assassinated President, or because he didn’t want to vote for a Black man or because of it, no one accountable. In a democracy, the most consequential collective event of voting is decided by taste, pundits and political philosophers hoping that the electorate will be wise and virtuous. So people hear rumors that Hillary was corrupt, or that she seemed frumpy or that she was too aggressive to be a woman, and to that is added that she was more hawkish on foreign policy (true enough) or that she was involved with the death of Vince Foster, or maybe the rumors were more plausible because she was not liked, as she would be, for being a Democrat, but all those things get jumbled up and citizens decide even though they have better things than follow the campaign but prefer to eat dinner and watch football and worry what their children are doing. The citizens are amateurs, while their doctors and shoe salesmen are not, and that is the heart of democracy: voting a spectator sport leavened, to some extent, by the economic interests and cultural issues  of the voters, never having to prove, for example, that the soul begins at conception, those interests and beliefs providing some ballast so that, it seems, voting is predictable, when, in act, it is always a horse race even if it is also ethnic, class based and also regional.

That view is very different from the idea about democracy which is offered by Functionalist sociologists, who always show, or nearly always do, that there is a reason or purpose for a social structure that will allow the society to survive or prosper.  S. M. Lipset, in “Political Man”, said that elections in a democracy were the functional equivalent of revolutions in that they allowed the peaceful transition of power by the people rather than through the unregulated practices of political upheaval. It took a while for nations to see that, to develop institutions that allow elections to be regularly and well conducted, but that was an improvement on either the succession of kings or uprisings. I am suggesting, however, a very different notion. The citizenry perform their electoral function because it is a way that people feel they can and ought to participate in their governments, appreciate it not as just a vicarious exp-erience but a participation in it, because that is a matter of right even if, for some of them, it seems that the vote is squandered by a lapse of attention or indifference. Voting is an end in itself and may or may not result in the electorate doing the wise thing, just the creation of and continuance of legitimacy.Trivial decisions become consequential and even cataclysmic.

And yet matters of taste are so important that the government is reluctant to interfere or constrain that enterprise, just as governments are wary of interfering in reading and other expressions of culture because they seem, both elections and books, to be so fundamental, so unalienable. It is amazing that there are not so many attempts made to curtail voting so as to get the outcome a government may want. You can say that this is the result of the English speaking peoples who have a talent for government  or because, having shed the tyranny of custom, advanced governments have implemented and provided provisions whereby what has now been considered to be deeply unalienable is now recognized. Whatever the cause, the fact remains that voting is very deep rather than just something that is useful.

Here is a paradox about a third matter of taste that might seem just its opposite: religion. That would seem for thousands of years to have been amply attested by reason and certainty, so much so that theology could be labeled as the queen of the sciences.  If you could stand on anything, you could stand on religion. But the truth of the matter is that there is no serious theological underpinning of religion as a way of reasoning since Malebranche in the eighteenth century, all of the serious proofs of God discredited.  You can think of Harnack as a late attempt to resurrect reason  and dogma by redefining them as an identification with the Social Gospel, which meant that the Church in some way was continuing to unfold its historic process by furthering good works to populations as well as to individuals but in that case was doing nothing other than identifying with the secular prospect of ever deeper and wider prosperity for all humankind. What was left as special to Jesus rather than just being humane by the ever evolving standards that included women’s rights and the rights of homosexuals?  It is very difficult to see how any longer to imagine, if it ever was, a belief in God as everywhere and eternal, covering eons and galaxies, and at the same time having will and emotions, including jealousy and demanding praise and obedience, at the same time, these very human figures who God would be beyond caring except if these beliefs and images were atavisms left over from a time when Gods were like lords of their lands and so might get concerned with petty matters. The best that could be done in the modern world was a twist on English ordinary language philosophy which said that religious talk was different from ordinary talk and so should not be treated like that, where declarative statements are not that but are performative utterances where one declares allegiances but not clearly to what. And all that ploy accomplishes is to see that religious talk is without content.

A breakthrough or progress of sorts was accomplished by William James who shifted focus from the beliefs of religion, being somehow true, to being experiences, which were cultivated rather than explained. You do not defend religion, just appreciate its emotions, such as feeling awe or feeling whole-minded. But what means is that religion is now to be taken as a glimmering, an intimation of immortality, rather than a full bodied system of ideas of morality and all the rest, just a hint rather than a certainty. And, following that, a believer, except for Christian Evangelicals, who reject the Enlightenment, and so are free to speak their ignorance, treat their beliefs as precious, held close to themselves rather than rendered into tatters, sure only in that they might well be ridiculed if put in the light of day. Catholics know what “a Catholic thing” is, as Cokie Roberts put it, which means a peculiar custom, so as to to deal with the hypocrisy of allowing annulments but not divorce, or follow their own consciences about birth control whatever the official dogma might be.

Taste is deep in that it is so familiar, so unalienable, that people are very loath to part with it and will, in fact, exert great risks and energy to preserve it, however tenuous are they tied to their beliefs but very certain of the aura of a church’s liturgy or architecture or fellowship. And so government, as it does with tastes having to do with reading or with government itself, stays clear of religion, at least in modern governments that are democratic rather than authoritarian or totalitarian, allowing the free exercise of  therewith, just not to rile people or, probably more likely, just to respect them, especially in that religion has circumscribed itself so that it doesn’t execute heretics or disqualify themselves from office, all “mature” religions treating one another as brotherly denominations all devoted to good works and an upstanding moral life, no threat to anyone however outlandish its precepts. It took a long time to come to that tolerance and it only happened finally as the Treaty of Westphalia, whereby every prince would decide its principality’s religion, and adopted by the United States to abide privately organized religions to act autonomously so long as they do not interfere with the dictates of state so that the Supreme Court decided that a religious view that Negroes were inferior as that was an interpretation of the Bible, would not prevent the passage in the sixties of the equal accommodations act, though the present Supreme Court seems bent on reversing that so that religious claims against gay groups will be honored. That is the way things now stand.