Tastelessness is not immoral or unethical
Have been given to think about that human tendency to frame differences in preferences and personal choices as questions of morality, and really, they're not. While I concede, with Pauline Kael, that 'taste [is] the great divider', it's usually ethically neutral.
(This may heark back pretty much to my thoughts on 'guilty pleasures'?)
Somebody's tastes may indicate that they are Not Quite Our Sort Dearie, but it doesn't necessarily indicate that they are bad people.
Providing their taste for Christmas ostentation does not lead them into having a massive Christmas display on the roof of their house that flashes its lights on and off all night and plays a tinny Jingle Bells... which is also pretty environmentally not on, I should have thought.
Unless the outcome of personal tastes leads to harming, inconveniencing or annoying other people, they're pretty much morally neutral. (As I constantly cite the divine Noel C as remarking, a gentleman is someone who, knowing how to play the bagpipes, refrains from demonstrating.)
Plus, one can share some tastes with a person while being boggled by some of the other things they like/do.
Liking e.g. opera does not make you a better person, but, nor is it merely something that people say they like for cultural cred. Liking comic books is not an indicator of warped morals (in spite of Dr Wertham).
Have a feeling that people tend to internalise this idea that taste is an indicator of wider issues of moral character.
This pretty much grew out of remembering one of those incidents in which someone comes in and pretty much sneers at one's books and claims that they are going to improve one's tastes. It's not about improving, it's about trying to render them similar to their own. And goodness knows there are ways of creating points of common interest without putting down what a person is already interested in. Or, of course, even, possibly, thinking that they might have something to offer in terms of expanding horizons?
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