How to Make Art Bad
In the previous piece I wrote about circumstances in which non-factual sources can be deemed untrustworthy. You can compare the reactions of critics and audiences, and even check for yourself, and see if a specific bad or good take is justified; if not justified, there might something other than honest communication about the virtues and shortcomings of an artistic work going on than genuine differences of opinion. Another major tell that a written source is going to be untrustworthy is how much it uses squishy language.
Consider Orwell in his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature”:
Consider, for example, the various attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an English Communist or ‘fellow-traveler’ has had to adopt toward the war between Britain and Germany. For years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a continuous stew about ‘the horrors of Nazism’ and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after September, 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned against than sinning, and the word ‘Nazi’, at least as far as print went, had to drop right out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o’clock news bulletin on the morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism was the most hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch. Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.
Orwell had an unusually good facility with the English language. We can’t hold everybody to his standard. I hope you don’t hold me to his standard! Still, we can all recognize evasive circumlocution, thought-stopping clichés, and unnecessary paeans to the prevailing orthodoxy of whatever circle the writer is in, or hopes to be in. Among the left of center it is a slightly delayed march behind the far left, which has a rapidly changing set of rules about things you’re supposed to believe based on an unsteady hierarchy of various groups sliced into ever-smaller sections. Among the right of center it tends to be unreflective yearning for a Golden Age that never was, or an unjustified sense of hard-nosed realism about which threats override our normal precautions against overly expansive government power. Sometimes each side uses the other’s tactics, when it’s convenient, to allay fears they might suffer an excess of sincerity I suppose. Beyond political groups there are countless other self-identified groups with their own in-group mores, all of which have adherents ready to pounce on heretics.
Thus arts writers have to be especially cautious to send the right signals, knowing they might be the wrong signals tomorrow. Anything they think has to have every possible edge sanded down to avoid any possible internet sociopath’s intentional misreading during a future purge. This can only result in self-censorship and lack of human richness, a timid and unproductive approach to writing. The fact that some writers still get caught out shows how the hive mind’s updating isn’t instantaneous, but making examples of some quickly get the word out to the others. In a way we can’t blame them for being squishy when their circles will tolerate nothing less, but they’ve already lost the game by choosing to play it by those rules. They will not by their work illuminate the human condition in the way that Dostoevsky could, because they choose not to. When they join in the internet pile-ons of those operating in good faith by yesterday’s rules, they become guilty participants too.
The rule that fiction writers must stick to writing characters who share their demographic characteristics is a great example of how to get authors to write in fear. Trying to depict our common humanity imaginatively, or to see the world through another person’s eyes, which should be praised, is a big no-no lately. It could be done artlessly, sure, but that’s not an artistic critique, not a partisan critique. Because cultural-political partisanship has taken root so thoroughly among all but the smallest publishers, we rarely get honest artistic critiques, at least in my sample. Sometimes books are canceled for partisan reasons before they’re even released. You can’t critique the artistic merits of a book you can’t read; the bile in these circumstances is obviously not based on artistic merit.
In the above I have slightly conflated the dishonesty of the critics with the dishonesty of the writers, but they are two sides of the same coin. A game with unfair rules can’t be played fairly by any of the participants.
Related: It’s especially sad to see when people have legitimate factual topics to discuss that could be considered crimethink by somebody with more deranged zeal than brains, and they have to preface everything with reassurances of loyalty before timidly getting to the meat. I heard an interview recently about the genetic history of the early Americas, an emerging field that could shed a lot of light on pre-Columbian peoples, where the expert simply had to spend the first third of the time talking about how bad men in England once measured peoples’ skulls etc. Why should we expect the earliest forays into any field to conform to modern sensibilities? Of course we don’t always get it right the first time. Science, like culture more broadly, is an iterative process. And why should we care when that’s not what we do today, and when our worldviews are different? We don’t believe in the genetic fallacy—pun unavoidable—and interview time is a scarce resource. Let’s get to the topic. There’s a time and a place for the qualifying discussion, and it’s not immediately before every single discussion of the current state of the topic. I know that the speaker probably felt she had little choice in the matter, so I don’t judge too harshly, but I wish we didn’t have to do the routine every time. Let’s play a game where we’re all adults once in a while, and shun the people who don’t play by the rules.