A sudden realization

[fpb]

I suddenly realized the reason for the fad for the Sorry Trinity - Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hutchens. By all sane critical standards, their criticism of what they call "religion" is astonishingly incompetent; much worse than the notorious pamphlet by Bertrand Russell that gave Christian apologists so much matter for mirth and so

Comments

[jamesenge]

Much of the so-called New Atheism seems to be exercises in self-righteousness, which is always easiest when one ignores an inconvenient fact or twelve.

I'm not sure I follow you about erotic literature. Certainly the abusive obscenity in Catullus and Juvenal, though not without entertainment value, nowhere rivals Vergil. But Catullus' earlier love poems to Lesbia/Clodia (e.g. "Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus") and his later disillusioned poems about her (e.g. "Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle") seem to me as great as anything Vergil ever wrote (and I'm a big Vergil fan). Then there's book 4 of the Aeneid... But it could be I'm reading "erotic" in a different way than you intend.

[fpb]

Oh, absolutely. Some of Catullus' pieces are of a piercing and profound intensity - those that are purely about love, rather than indulging his potty-mouth tendencies. And a few of the insulting ones are rather impressive, at least in the cases where he tells the most powerful men in Rome - Caesar and Cicero - what he thinks of them. Poets of the Imperial age would certainly never again dare to speak with such freedom. But I do not think that most of his dirtier items deserve higher praise than "cheerfully irreverent and well-expressed". Juvenal and Lucian are more complex cases, but I do not think that their erotic passages show them at their best. Juvenal is out to condemn, and sometimes he does it amazingly well, but when he describes what he imagines that a lesbian couple would do with sacred altars, it is hard not to have a sense that he is half aroused himself. Certainly it falls below his great plea for human decency in Satire 12: "What man who is good and worthy of the mysterious torch,/ Who is such as the priest of

[fpb]

I am not sure I answered your question, so I will try again. What I meant is that to treat "erotic literature" as a field with its own cultural validity, on the same level as high art, destroys the sense of discrimination and comparative value in art. What this means is that everything that is "culture" becomes equally valuable, and that you are equally well educated if you are au fait with the history of nineteenth-century under-the-counter literature as if you were familiar with English poetry or Schubert's songs. And this deprives culture of its most important function - that of pointing above and beyond itself, to the truths of life and reality.

[filialucis]

"...to treat "erotic literature" as a field with its own cultural validity, on the same level as high art, destroys the sense of discrimination and comparative value in art."

But then we seem to be well on our way to abandoning the distinction between high art and trivial art altogether, and anthologies like the one you describe are typically put together by those who would actively foster this development. Essentially, we're being conditioned to believe that pop culture isn't just every bit as good as "high" culture, it's the only real culture there is, because every idiot can grasp it. No Moron Left Behind. After all, the truths of life and reality don't have much market value these days.

(Don't mind me; I'm reading Blaise Pascal while semiconscious with the flu, which is possibly a dangerous combination.)

[fpb]

AS a lover of comics and pop music, I cannot altogether agree with the point as you made it. I would rather say that the same scale of merit ought to be applied to all the various arts, and in that scale of merit, such people as Bruce Springsteen or Hayao Miyazaki rank pretty high. But it worries me to hear arts as such being discriminated. Remember, there was a time when only poets and writers were treated as proper sages, while musicians, painters, sculptors and architects were seen as high-end craftsmen.