The Good Life: The Moral Individual in an Antimoral World by Mendelson Cheryl

Author:Mendelson, Cheryl [Mendelson, Cheryl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2012-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

COOL TASTE

The cool style narrows sensibility. It disapproves of the passions and emotions of the moral life and finds its judgments distasteful. Moral qualities—mercy, trust, warmth, egalitarianism, compassion—are incompatible with cool; they war with its need for invulnerability and superiority. Cool cannot accept the tender, the stalwart, the passionate, the engaged, the upright, and the sublime and makes fun of them. It demands that one be uncommitted, skeptical, disengaged, and superior. It both shrivels warm feelings and increases tolerance of cruelty, sadism, and wrongdoing and the ability to take pleasure in these. As it restricts the emotional range, it undermines empathy, self-examination, and other moral capacities; people grow less able to be outraged, more indifferent, less caring.

The constricted sensibility of cool led to a broad change in taste. Cool people tend to find unpalatable the music, art, literature, and moral and political works from historical periods when the moral mentality was ascendant—to the point that 7- Eleven stores famously succeed in driving undesirable teenagers off their premises by playing Mozart on their sound systems. Cool has encouraged composers to produce the unlistenable new music that has done so much to damage the classical tradition and helped to render the plastic and visual arts docile, silly, and absurdly susceptible to the logic of the market. In the pop fiction of today, the moral sensibility has often gone missing. The popular subgenres of science fiction, fantasy, young adult literature, and romance increasingly express predominantly premoral tastes and concerns.

Because it limits emotional range, cool also cuts us off from traditions of literature, music, and art that speak to emotional life beyond that range.84 This is dangerous. The books, music, and art of past centuries of moral sensibility do more than entertain. They also fine-tune and develop the moral capacities, remind us of our moral premises and how they interlink and play out in life. New generations cut off from the stories, jokes, music, philosophy, and other cultural products of our past are more easily weaned away from the moral and more readily fall into moral confusion. They become increasingly less able to understand the structure of our political institutions, the motives that guided their creation, and less able to perpetuate the conditions of democracy, just as they become increasingly unable to experience the pleasures and meet the obligations of family and friendship. The rule of law, the restraints on government, the independence of the press—cornerstones of democracy’s dispersal of power—are poorly understood and protected by the culture of cool.

With its rejection of morally grounded taste, cool creates a divide between us and the moral traditions that enable us to maintain and advance our institutions and even to understand why they are desirable. It is not possible to sustain, let alone increase, the fruits of our past—science, humane democratic forms of government, personal freedoms, wealth justly shared among us—when ties to their sources have been cut, when the works of art and thought that elaborate and instruct in their meanings and workings are dead to us.

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