I
won’t discuss the question of art here; that’s not my point. What I do
want to discuss is this tendency – which I believe is fairly widespread –
to chafe at clear definitions; art is whatever someone happens to like.
Marriage is whatever the partners decide it is. Right and wrong are
what I say they are. This is supposed to be ‘freeing;’ a defense against
dogmatism, stagnation, and hide-bound unoriginality. In a sense it is,
but at a terrible cost.
The
trouble with saying “art is something I happen to like” is that we
already have a perfectly serviceable term for “something I happen to
like.” I’d be better and less misleading, therefore, to simply say “I
like this work” rather than to say “this is a piece of art.”
You
see what’s happened? By expanding the definition of art to the point
that anything and everything could be considered art, we’ve destroyed
the concept of art entirely. There’s no point in using the term. We’ve
killed it.
This isn’t a new phenomenon; Lewis described it in the introduction to Mere Christianity
with regards the word ‘gentleman.’ A gentleman, he reminds us, once
meant simply a man with landed property, before being expanded to the
point that it simply means ‘a good man.’ But we already had a
number of words and terms for ‘a good man,’ meaning that there was no
call for one more, and now the word has been rendered almost useless in
its original meaning, leaving a vacuum in the language that can only be
patched with tedious and pedantic clarifications.
The whole point of a language is that words mean something specific, and correlatively that they don’t
mean other things. The word ‘gentleman,’ in its original form, meant
what it meant and, consequently, could never apply to an honest
shopkeeper, however virtuous and courteous he may be. It was only when
the shopkeepers (or, more likely, the journalists and novelists who
purported to speak for the shopkeepers) became jealous of the word and
its connotations that the meaning changed so that it could be truly said
that the shopkeeper was a gentleman. The trouble was, by then there was
no point in saying it at all, since you only mean the same thing as you
meant when you said he was a good man.
We’re
all familiar with the story of the hypnotist who fell in love with a
woman and, out of desire, hypnotized her so that he could make her love
him. But once he did, he realized that what he had left was nothing but
an empty shell, and everything he had loved or which could love him in
return was gone. That’s the same dynamic at work in language: when we
jealously look on at high concepts and phrases which, by definition,
don’t apply to us, when we furiously try to make them apply to
us, to change the terms to suit ourselves, rather than ourselves to suit
the terms, we may succeed and claim the title ‘gentleman’ or ‘artist.’
But in the process we’ve robbed those terms of any meaning and are left
with nothing but empty connotations; jargon and double-speak and
platitudes, in other words. The reality that the words attempted to
describe remains unchanged; there are still such things as landed gentry
and art. Only now we have no words to describe them.
It’s
entirely reasonable to discuss definitions, or to discuss whether a
particular object fits the agreed definition. It’s not reasonable to
throw up our hands and say “it means whatever you think it means.” That
deadens the intellect and darkens reality. It murders language in the
name of inclusiveness. For my part, I think occasionally hearing “sorry,
this just doesn’t count” is a small price to pay to have my words
actually mean something.
Vive Christus Rex!
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