On Conservative Taste
A reader writes:
I write you as a fellow reader.
I had the opportunity to download the newly released Hugo voting packets this morning. I express my unvarnished sentiments when I say that I find Sex Criminals stupid and gimmicky, Ms Marvel barely disguised ideological tripe, and Rat Queens another piece of ‘watch women do the disgusting things guys do in the name of equality’.
In fact, I actually find Ms Marvel’s attempt at incorporating Hindu elements offensive to the religion.
The only work which I find promising is Saga.
Am I hopelessly blinkered by my conservative tastes?
The answer to your question is not just ‘no’ but ‘hell, no’.
Conservative taste is taste. We stand for standards: melody in music, perspective in drawing and painting, soaring & sublime beauty sculpted in stone for architecture, plot and theme in storytelling, and so on.
We have the Saint John’s Passion by Bach, the paintings of Bouguereau, the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and the Lord of the Rings by Tolkien.
Morlockery is untaste. They stand for scrawling graffiti on standards and urinating and vomiting and excreting on them. They stand for atonal cacophony in music, bleary visual mess in drawing and painting, inhuman blocks of concrete and featureless steel in architecture, dreary incoherent psychopathy in the written word.
They have the music of Scriabin, the spastic scrawls of Picasso, the soul-crushing ulginess of Corbusier, and Ulysses by James Joyce.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
