Posted by
TheBean on Monday, December 22, 2008 5:35:23 PM
I was at a dinner-table discussion with a few friends
recently, and the talk turned to ethics. It was suggested that moral apathy is,
in some light, just as bad as or worse than actual evil because evil is, at the
very least, active. At the time, I nodded at this thought and let it slip
casually into my mind, there to sit.
On further reflection, I realized that the characterization
of apathy as nastier than active evil is obviously nonsense. The great slaughterers
and dictators of history are, in all practical and functional senses, worse
people than your couch-potato teenager. The aesthetic of this judgment was what
made it appealing—there was elegance to the thought that action is somehow
fundamentally good, and honest analysis in real-world terms fell to the
wayside.
This problem, I believe, is what makes artsy thinking a
dangerous, or at least unproductive, thing. Aesthetically charged processes,
like art, literature, tradition, stories, etc. can powerfully convey an idea
but must not be directly addressed as justification or explanation of
circumstances.
For example, let us suppose that Jack’s girlfriend has gone
home for the summer, and he doesn’t want her to discard him over the holidays.
Drawing on conventional wisdom, he could reassure himself by thinking, “Absence makes the heart
grow fonder.” He could just as well think, though, “Out of sight, out of mind.”
Neither one of these concepts is any use independent of the specifics of the
situation; depending on the girl, either of these things could be true.
Thinking of real-life problems in terms of song lyrics or
Dickens or poetry has the same quality—the aesthetic attractiveness of the
presentation obscures the actual nature of the situation; these perspectives should only be given admittance after the application of blunt logic.