John Gardner, from “On Moral Fiction”
… what we generally get in our books and films is bad instruction: escapist models or else moral evasiveness, or, worse, cynical attacks on traditional values such as honesty, love of country, marital fidelity, work, and moral courage. This is not to imply that such values are absolutes, too holy to attack. But it is dangerous to raise a generation that smiles at such values, or has never heard of them, or dismisses them with indignation, as if they were not relative goods but were absolute evils. The Jeffersonian assumption that truth will emerge where people are free to attack the false becomes empty theory if falsehood is suffered and obliged like an unwelcome — or worse, an invited — guest.
Good thoughts. Part of the problem is that it is easy for a clever but lazy writer to attack virtue. Especially unfashionable virtue. It is also easy to attack unfashionable facts. Throw enough mud and some of it sticks. Invent a clever putdown – and you own Twitter, maybe Facebook too.
Life’s all different when we actually have to do something, not just have clever opinions.
Also, from Anna Mussman: Consuming Only Modern Stories Will Cement Your Brain Into A Rut:
If Verne lived today, his “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” would be different. That is because the rules about what makes a book morally acceptable have changed. Nowadays, even as we have become less sensitive about portraying certain types of human death (say, the teen-on-teen killings in “The Hunger Games”) we are startled if a piece of fiction speaks positively or even neutrally about the wholesale slaughter of animals. It is not that our society refuses to kill animals or that we are unaware that animals (whether hungry great white sharks, antisocial pit bulls, or aged tigers), sometimes endanger human life. It is merely that we have complex, unspoken rules about how these topics should be handled in literature, rules that flow from our cultural perceptions and priorities, and one of our rules is that we must mention human culpability and encroached habitat when talking about, say, wild animals who prey on human villagers. To do otherwise is just…. wrong.
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Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? Certainly, rejecting aggressive violence is good, as is a proper humility about our own ability to always know friend from foe. Yet I think the shift is also tied to a widespread, paralyzing relativism. It’s a funny thing—a healthy humility about our own virtue seems to have created a potentially dangerous disbelief in virtue itself and therefore in evil. We are no longer comfortable with the idea that anything is worth killing for (or dying for). We might feel differently if we did not live in a prosperous, safe, first-world society. Thoughts?
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Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose