05-26-2019, 07:52 PM
(05-26-2019, 06:04 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote:(05-26-2019, 03:20 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: That said, the solution to bad speech is more speech, speech deeper in thought and usually with more complex reasoning. At the extreme, the coarse hatred of the Jew-baiting of Julius Streicher and the crass stereotypes in Der ewige Jude succeeded in Nazi Germany only because nobody -- especially the Jews - got the right to contest it.
The audience doesn't have to be compliant but it seems today people are oversensitive about everything. Everything is offensive now so there's no point in trying to appease the public opinion, which is elitist and often wrong.
On the other hand, people are right to object to speech that advocates subjection, dispossession, and physical brutality. A Jew has the obvious right to be offended by Nazi symbols and rhetoric. A capitalist has the right to find offense in Communist symbols and rhetoric. Anyone not Muslim or 'the wrong sort of') Muslim has the right to find offense in anything related to ISIS. Anyone black or Jewish has the right to be offended by KKK symbolism or rhetoric.
We can be tolerant of cultural expressions that we find unsettling on the assumption that (1) some cinema, painting, sculpture, literature, and music is intentionally disgusting; (2) just because it is not one's own it may be valid in another.
There are plenty of 'offensive' chords in the music, a complete repudiation of romantic sensibilities. The ballet score has more in common with hard rock of sixty years later than with the 'classical' expressions of Haydn or Mozart -- or even such (then) recently-deceased composers as Bruckner, Brahms, or Dvorak. Stravinsky could imitate 'classical' expression if he so desired. Choreographer Vaslav Nizhinsky obviously had no intention of creating a 'pretty ballet'; this is not Coppelia.
It may be an exaggeration to say that this ballet and its score breaks down the mass perception of refined civility as the sure direction of Humanity -- but the year is 1913, and the refined civility of the Victorian Era is doomed even if those who latch onto it believe otherwise. World War I is a year away, the dangerous second KKK would form in two years in America, the Bolshevik Revolution would erupt in in four years; chaos would develop in several countries in the wake of the First World War, Mussolini would march on Rome in nine years, and Satan Incarnate would take over Germany in twenty. None of this reflects the comforting assumptions of refined civility; it is a reversion to the primitive.
We are no longer in the Victorian Era (which outlasted the old queen by twelve years); we can only re-enact it.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.