Pop Sanctimony
I’ve been surprised —stupidly— at the seeming resurgence of moralizing in pop culture (on all parts of all spectra) . I once felt that by aesthetic chance, pop culture had stumbled onto the position asserted by my favorite novelist, Milan Kundera:
Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil.
For Kundera, this position reflects an analytical claim that moral judgment is always a partialization, a reduction, a kind of error. We do not see others clearly, nor ourselves, nor our time or context —there is just too much we cannot know, too much “causal density"— but we have an instinct to judge "before, and in the absence of, understanding.” In art, we readily refrain from this judgment, as the interiority of a character on screen or page renders her human whether she does good or evil; this is why political art is trash, whereas art which humanizes those we considered inhuman is a special achievement. All of this may seem plainly obvious to us when we consider others and other times in history but we rarely adopt this stance when developing our opinions about, say, others’ religiosity or politics.
It should go without saying that I didn’t believe that pop culture reflected these particular ideas. When I called it “aesthetic chance,” I meant: it became “uncool” at some point to moralize; sanctimony was a “bad look”; musicians and directors and cultural figures of all kinds resisted sounding like preachers and op-ed columnists, resisted talking about moral categories, resisted shaming others and bragging about their positions; it seemed shallow to do so. There were exceptions, but by and large art was felt to be more important than politics, and truer as well.
At best, we can say: it was uncool because it seemed grotesque for individuals to posture morally, grotesque when someone mysteriously felt the confident superiority required to lecture and hector their cohort, their generation, other generations, all preceding humans in history. That is: self-satisfied superiority seemed gross. More plausibly, we can say: it became unpopular to moralize because that’s what conservatives were thought to do, while liberals were seen as likely to take vaguely cultural-relativist positions, and to like artists and politicians who were themselves morally complex.
But it no longer appears to strike us as grotesque at all; we rather adore it when someone offers an obvious moral position as though it is a revolutionary insight about which they should feel pride. This is especially strange because moral truths strike us as truths, requiring no special work or intelligence or depth. If we want to feel pride, we ought to look to our persuasive effectuality: are we changing minds, helping others to an understanding of what we think is objectively morally true? If we’re not effective —if we have no impact— being right is not an occasion for pride.
The competitive moralizing dynamic of online communities in particular favors those who can find straw men or the morally dim and contrast themselves with them through heated rhetoric, which has little to do with persuasion in Alfred Polgar’s sense:
To reform an evildoer, you must before anything else help him to an awareness that what he did was evil. With the Nazis this won’t be easy. They know exactly what they’re doing: they just can’t imagine it.
But we do not look for those who seek to illuminate the imaginations of those with whom they disagree, because “helping…to an awareness” is hard work requiring patience and compassion for all. Instead, we want angry pundits; we love when people moralize aggressively, like campus preachers screaming about how evil everyone and everything else is. And we love narratives that allow us to moralize from outside the system, viewing “culture” or “Americans” from an omniscient position: the intellectual’s great fetish is that fun Hegelian status as “observer of all things,” something Kierkegaard understood and rightly mocked. Such systems are popular today: for example, pop-psychoanalysis of “why others believe what they do,” whereas we do not suspect ourselves of believing what we do because of reducible feelings (rather, we think, we believe what’s right; otherwise, why would we care whether anyone agrees?).
Online, moralizing is part of the scrum of communities attempting to define and protect their values; it’s worst on Twitter because that’s where communities are allowed no distinct spaces but are instead mixed like armies on a battlefield; they have no choice but to fight. Nevertheless, it’s been amazing to me to see how ubiquitous sanctimony has become, how social our moralizing has become, how relentless our politicization and judgment. Kundera again:
In our time people have learned to subordinate friendship to what’s called “convictions.” And even with a prideful tone of moral correctness. It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth. Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue—perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.
I don’t think it takes any great maturity; I think the slightest familiarity with the human mind and human history makes obvious that judges tend to be asses. There is no self-flattery like privileging your own moral conceptions over those of others, because moral elevation is something we all seek. Humans in general like to know that they are “good,” especially in the sense of being “in good standing” with their community; there is no cheaper and easier way to accomplish this than by othering, which is why humans do it. Narratives that make othering easier will always be popular online. And the more “intellectual” they seem, the better.
But it does shock me to see what a religious world I inhabit online: a world of dogmas and excommunications, of Huguenots and Catholics, of certainties and casus belli, of inquisitors and the church-goers eager to revel in their (usually) flattering verities and then spill out into the streets parroting them as revelation. Everyone wants to tear down temples. The moralization of artifacts from apps to art reminds me of nothing so much as those religious texts which assert God’s position on minor matters like tattoos and silverware; and searching the world and all who live in it and their utterances for evidence of whether they conform to one’s beliefs has seemed to me wildly anachronistic, which, as I said, only shows how stupid I am. Form never changes, only content.