Should art be a battleground for social justice? This is the question Wesley Morris asks in a recent essay, “The Morality Wars,” in the New York Times Magazine‘s Culture Issue. It’s a long, wide-ranging, and beautifully composed essay, and in it, Morris considers the Moment we are in right now and if we’ve entered a time when art can no longer be judged on its own merit instead of the creator’s underlying race, sex, gender, sexuality, politics, or even his/her/their moral code.
I’ve read this essay four times, tweeted it twice, and texted it to half the people in my phone, and I still cannot stop thinking about it. It’s an essay within an essay within an essay, and Morris touches on everything from the culture wars of yesteryear to the Twitter cancellations of today. He writes:
A person who insults, harasses or much, much worse is “problematic,” and certain “problematic” people, and their work, gets “canceled.” Recent cancellations include Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Roseanne Barr, Kanye West, Ian Buruma’s stewardship of The New York Review of Books, Matt Lauer, Woody Allen, Netflix’s flagrant high school satire “Insatiable” (but only figuratively since it has been renewed for a second season), the YouTube star Logan Paul, the Nation’s poetry section. People you love but who’ve misstepped are “problematic faves” — Scarlett Johansson, Dave Chappelle, Cardi B, Justin Timberlake, M.I.A. — and you don’t outright cancel so much as temporarily block them until they get their acts together. The people who know who’s who, what’s what and when’s when are “woke.” They tend not to be black, because black people are born woke; the trick for them is to stay that way.
The nomenclature is supposed to make the moral sorting expedient. The “hot or not” lists of yore have, more direly, become “O.K./Not O.K.” Individuals are not necessarily permitted a say in the cancellation — or, for that matter, in the coronation — of artists or their work. A temperature is taken and you’re advised to dress accordingly. What’s bad for some people is deemed bad for everybody, and some compliance is in order, lest you wind up problematic, too.
At the risk of being problematic myself, YAS QUEEN. Morris perfectly captures the zeitgeist of 2018, when, as I’ve written before, if you disagree with the dominant narrative, you are wrong, and if you are wrong, you are bad, and if you are bad, you are trash.
This atmosphere of intolerance makes criticism a minefield: If you don’t particularly like, say, HBO’s Insecure—which Morris himself finds lacking—you’d be better off keeping your opinions to yourself. A show created by a black woman on a format historically dominated by white men is too important, too vital, to be critiqued. And what if you do enjoy art (or artists) deemed problematic? Best keep that to yourself, too.
None of this is new. In the 1990s, as Morris points out and as anyone over than 35 likely remembers, the culture wars raged just as hot as they do today. Back then, however, it was parents, not their children, doing the censoring. From Morris:
The past two years are a disorienting inversion of the previous 30. The culture wars, as they came to be known in the 1980s and 1990s, were less existential and more ideological. The moralizers tended to be white people from politics and the church. Their concern was that television, movies, books, museums and music were exposing people — young people — to unsavory concepts like abortion and lust. In 1988, for example, fundamentalist Christians promised a boycott of any theater that showed Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” for imagining a mortal, married, procreating Jesus. …
The culture wars back then always seemed to be about keeping culture from kids. Now the moral panic appears to flow in the opposite direction. The moralizers are young people, not their parents. And the fight is no longer over what we once called family values. It’s for representation — seats at the cultural table on the basis of race, gender and sexuality — in museums, on television, in movies. And what’s most valued is existence. And the fight is to keep that existence unobstructed.
While I suspect few people outside the White House and Congress would argue that representation is unimportant, Morris argues that by judging work primarily on the basis of representation, on how diverse the cast or marginalized the artist, “we wind up with safer art and discourse that provokes and disturbs and shocks less. It gives us culture whose artistic value has been replaced by moral judgment and leaves us with monocriticism. This might indeed be a kind of social justice. But it also robs us of what is messy and tense and chaotic and extrajudicial about art. It validates life while making work and conversations about that work kind of dull.” I thought about this last night while watching an old episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. The episode was set in Montana, and while it was beautiful and interesting and gave me a glimpse into a place I’m not familiar with, I still found myself thinking, “Well, this certainly doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test.” Does failing to include women make Parts Unknown bad? Personally, I’m not sure we should condemn a work of art solely based on the chromosomes or color of the cast, but to many of today’s armchair critics, the answer is an unequivocal yes.
After reading Morris’s essay for the third time, I figured that surely Wesley Morris himself had been canceled for criticizing this new moral code, and yet, when I went to Twitter (today’s cultural thermometer) in search of the response, I found almost none. Slate published a rebuttal, but other than that, the conversation around this piece just isn’t really happening, which is a shame, because it deserves to be both read and discussed. Perhaps ironically, I think it’s likely that Morris’s own identity as a black man gives him more leeway when it comes to critiquing identity politics, which, at its heart, this piece does. Had, say, Andrew Sullivan written something similar, the response would certainly have been more heated (although Sullivan has been canceled so many times he probably no longer feels it). And maybe that’s okay. Morris brings a unique, and perhaps more valuable, perspective to the issue than the old guard bitching about SJWs and kids these days once again.
Still, don’t take my word on the brilliance on this piece. You’re better off reading it yourself.
