I hear what you’re saying, but I will say that Polanski’s “Lolita” would be a good example of the opposite argument: that despicable creators create despicable art. When you read the actual book, it’s clear we’re supposed to recognize that Humbert Humbert is a pedophile who is fooling himself about the motivations and actions of Lolita (his victim). In the movie, Polanski makes it seem like a documentary showing how wily and sexy and manipulative the girl supposedly is, making HH the ‘victim’. You know how girls are.
Watch the movie again, if you can stomach it. It’s a good reminder that twisted thinking shows itself in creative work, if you’re looking.
I have that book in my reading stack somewhere. It’s definitely a gap in my knowledge. I guess I’ve been putting off reading it because I thought reading it might be too creepy.
OK, guys, I’m an idiot! Well, getting old and my brain is no longer the steel trap of info it used to be.
@Heraclito has very politely corrected me in a PM. “Lolita” wasn’t Polanski, it was Kubrick. I’d conflated them in my mind somehow. What I said about the movie versus the book stands, but obviously it is NOT an example of Polanski’s despicable nature.
Returning to the original question, can I say it’s an important topic in history and sociology and the jury is constantly out?
Max Weber defined the State as the organisation that successfully claimed a monopoly on violence. I’m not sure that even needs discussion; when you think about it, it’s self evidently true.
Perpetrators of violence are embedded in our infrastructure because that’s how the State works. In that respect we’re still a band of gorillas, but a very big one.
And the biggest single problem is that many people are content with that, which is how they come to elect a Trump (who even contrives to look like a male gorilla).
The scales are owned by the people who control the State. If those people are clever (as the British Conservative Party has mostly been) they allow the scales to tilt slowly away from violence. If they are stupid, they allow unrest to increase to the point at which their monopoly of violence is challenged - by war, uprisings or revolution.
But their primary motivation is fear - fear of losing power and fear of the breakdown of the social order which would affect their property. Power and property maintained by violence is at the bottom of society.
Understand that and you understand why so many people come to the defence of people who have used their power for immoral gratification. They are frightened that the order of things will unravel. I don’t think they have a view of a better society emerging from dealing with abuses. They just want to stop change from a state that benefits them, and the more people start to rebel against it the stronger will be their tendency to put the wagons in a circle.
Which leads me to the gloomy conclusion that things will not really change until the structures that maintain the State are weakened or the opposition becomes much stronger and better organised. Over here the State is weak due to internal divisions, failure of tax revenue and an obsession with leaving the EU, which means that it is under a lot of pressure. The membership of its political party is old, shrinking and divided. Something is going to happen. In the US? Not my subject, I don’t know. The way things may change is if the bubble bursts and the people with gun racks in their pickups suddenly decide that ole’ Silverback is losing it. But I really have no idea.
But who gets to say that anybody is white, or a man? Or anything else? Point being that most people seem to be content to ascribe to a person a race/color (NOT really the same thing) and a sex/gender (also NOT the same), based solely upon stereotyping their appearance,
In person, I can always ask a person how they identify themselves, and I find that this works better than assuming. But where I am unclear is with discussing public figures. People might refer to them as being in a specific category, but there is no way to know if some people are guessing and this is taken up by others, or if the person in question has put themselves in this category. As a person who remains agnostic and makes no guesses until the person in question says something about it, it’s hard to know how to proceed. Personal identity does not seem to be based upon the guesses of crowds.
I partly agree with @mindysan33; in the world of the Teutonic languages - English, Dutch and German - pinko-grey people* have made the decisions about what to call people of different backgrounds, including calling themselves “white”. Why this is so specifically a Teutonic thing I don’t know, but I include the Dutch and the Flemings because of South Africa and the Belgian Congo. The US was mainly invaded and colonised by people who classified themselves as “white”, and everywhere those people have gone they have introduced and encouraged the mythical idea of race. The Japanese are said to be the most racist of all countries but I don’t know that they have created a whole racist system like the Teutons.
But “most people”? France for instance is somewhat different. French nationalism is based around French language and culture. Spanish and Portuguese cultures are also very complicated and I don’t pretend to understand them, but skin color is much less of a determinant.
tl;dr I think this is a somewhat US-centric point of view. Cue the usual “this is a US website nada nada”, but I’ll give you white, straight-presenting stereotypical-male-clothes-wearing English speaking men.
Maybe, but that’s a recursive loop of an position. Like I asked how do we even get a consensus that they are white, ciscendered, or men in the first place? Lots of these kinds of discussion, both online and in person, somehow start with the notion that consensus already exists. But with little concern for auditing that process, for establishing consensus in-topic.
So you are saying that because you are a white cis male, you get to decide that Kubrick and Polanski are white males also? Or that they asserted that they are at some point? It is easy to simply assert a list of values, but that does not explain in detail how one uses them in daily life to create social interactions. Most people seem to socialize into these things at a young age and never get into analyzing how they are supposed to work.
Not only a US-centric POV, but a Euro-colonial US POV.
What I am getting at here is not “which group has influence”, but how do we decide who belongs to which groups. When we as individuals casually decide that “oh, they’re black”, or “that person is a man”, there seems to be a complex set of feedback loops, where power in culture gives us those categories, but then we use our power to (often unconsciously, it seems) impose them on other persons or groups. And that we as individuals have a lot of power over this process if we are deliberate in how we participate in it. We may not control the existence or value of the category, but we can control if/when/how we ascribe to others membership in those categories.
I’d assume that define themselves as such, yes. And whether or not they see themselves that way, the culture we live in reinforces that by granting them privilege and power over other people in very concrete ways… for example, in the case of polanski to rape a 13 year old and still be celebrated as a great artist who is consistently defended.
That doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. It has real world effects that you always want to ignore. But it’s there. Asking the woman who Polanski raped about it.
But why assume anything of the kind about them? As I was saying, that is how WE ascribe an identity to them, and give power to those categories, in our daily lives.
And how a culture treats people, and plays status games, can be crucial factors in how WE decide what cultures to ally ourselves with. We can’t control what cultures we may be the products of, but we do decide which cultures to associate with - including taking responsibility for what membership in that culture may say about us as people.
I never indicated that I wanted to ignore the effects. The reality of the effects is precisely why it is important to understand the cause, how it works. And what each of us actually do when creating a social reality. You seem to interpret this as a call for inaction, when it is precisely the opposite. We already know about the effects and talk about them at length. It’s like diagnosing a patient, and calling the job finished. It’s easy to keep repeating that “racism/sexism/exploitation is bad” whenever we witness some. But people trying to move past that to solve the puzzle of how it actually works as a phenomenon are doing a related job, and not invalidating that.
I also keep thinking that Kubrick directed Apocalypse now, but that was Coppola.