I wrote my take on what is the root cause of such events as the latest "Amish school" killings. Basically, it all amounts to the hard-boiled moral bankruptcy of our society, or what the Bible names as "the hardened heart". Now, I find this article in 'First Things', which explores the aspect of what postmodern art says to us ... and how it says it. I find this as simply an underline or emphasis in my general view that what we have is not a "failure to communicate" to our society, but a communication which is steadily eroding it.
Robert T. Miller puts forth this idea at the beginning of the essay:
Characteristic of postmodernist art is transgression, the idea that the artist ought to produce works that violate traditional moral and aesthetic norms. The theory is that such norms are ultimately baseless, and thus violating them will liberate us from their tyranny and (the theory suddenly gets vague here) open up for us a new form of life that will somehow be better than that we have enjoyed in the past.
The actual point of the First Things essay is to point up the hypocrisy of the Left in its capitulation to the demands of fanatical Islam, but for me this illuminated force within our culture, that freedom is transgression, speaks also to the phenomenom of moral implosion inside the walls of our civitas, our Republic as the philosopher would define it.
We adulate transgression and insulate transgressors with our society's wordplay with the idea of "toleration". We have hardened our hearts, and teach tenets to perpetuate that, while wondering at the symptoms of senseless violence that repels all efforts to rally on issues seen to exacerbate or give rise to it. The hardened heart is teflon-coated to the call to a moral cause, and that is why we go nowhere on many of the most pressing moral issues of our day.
Such an example was on the news the other day. A reviewer asking questions of Bumfights creator, Ryan McPherson, repeatedly showed evidence of the impact of the videos on those who were convicted of the criminal acts of killing homeless victims, but was answered with denial of responsibility. The disconnect between the depiction of transgression without any real moral context mirrors the observations that Miller makes on the postmodern artists. As he says,"transgression remains popular with artists themselves because it allows them to pretend to speak truth to power, to pose as courageous intellectuals exposing the pretensions and predations of the bourgeois power structure." and "Postmodern art can exist only in a tolerant, liberal society of the kind postmodernists affect to criticize but are actually parasitic upon."
But the further conclusion is that we as a society actually coddle the violent by stripping away moral parameters in our quest to be "tolerant" in all that our contemporary definition would paint it: a heart hardened against all that is given the valuation of "good" while perversely finding pleasure in the depiction of evil in the interest of "This is what is going on".
Are we part of this, with our own hardened hearts, or are we weeping and speaking out a message that counteracts the headlong plunge into moral confusion? It is a question to ask yourself.
