Monday 17 September 2012

A world where Genius (and high talent) is evil

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For a long while we have been living in a world where most instances of Genius, and indeed most of the most talented people, are evil in their net effect.

By evil I mean quite precisely destructive of virtue, beauty and truth - as these transcendental values are traditionally conceptualized.

This applies almost wherever you look: philosophy, prose, poetry, music, science - and in more modern areas like journalism and comedy.

I am particularly impressed by the extent to which so much of comedy has been an agent of evil - especially satire. And I mean the most accomplished, most creative and innovative comedy - the funniest comedy: how it has culmulatively and almost sytematically attacked meaning, purpose, hope.

At any rate, this is one of the biggest problems of Western culture - the extent to which its greatest exemplars were evil; hence destructive of the basis of their own pre-eminence.

Indeed, this seems the norm: there are exceptions, but the evil Genius is the usual kind of Genius.

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4 comments:

dearieme said...

I am not taking the mick when I say that it must be possible for a Christian to make the case that The Life of Brian was capable of being interpreted as a pro-Christian film.

Bruce Charlton said...

@d - That case *could* indeed be made - but it wasn't, was it? (And we know it wasn't.)

The one thing that LoB did not in any way countenance was that Jesus really *was* the Son of God, because such a possibility was outwith the world view of that movie.

So LoB was an example of what I mean: an extremely funny, indeed brilliant, comedy done by a bunch of superbly talented humourists (a couple or more of whom were perhaps 'comic geniuses'). And yet with an effect that was devastatingly subversive of The Good.

That's what we are up against! When the best of the best are agin you.

dearieme said...

"The one thing that LoB did not in any way countenance was that Jesus really *was* the Son of God": my memory may be faulty, but I have a dim impression that the film did have some nonBrian preaching in the background: presumably he was meant to represent Jesus. I don't remember any opining on whether that Jesus was the SoG.

JP said...

"it must be possible for a Christian to make the case that The Life of Brian was capable of being interpreted as a pro-Christian film."

That would require a Christian to ignore the incontrovertible facts that the Pythons were non-believers who made the film in order to mock Christianity and Christians. That the Pythons did this while maintaining a credible semblance of not being "against Jesus" merely reflects their (evil) comic genius.