You really don't have to wait seven years for your ticket to Bayreuth before you are allowed to think that Ride of the Valkyrie is a good tune.
You're not a bad person because you like your steak overcooked.
Actually, food is interesting edge case. It is very likely that a steak chef, or a coffee barrista, or a sommelier really, really, likes steak, coffee and wine and really, really wants you to like it as well. So he may be tempted to say "I think you will like that coffee better without sugar" or "That cut of steak really needs to be enjoyed pinkly." And I think some of them might out-and-out refuse to chill your red wine or serve your white wine at room temperature. "If you want latte, sir, I am using this coffee: I am not prepared to put milk into these unusual and expensive single estate beans."
But many others would probably allow you to ruin the food you have payed for.
Gate-keeping is very annoying. But the contrary, which I might as well call "gate-leaving-open" is very nearly as bad. If I happen to mention that I am a big fan of Victor Hugo's original novel, the gate-leaver-open is apt to think that I have somehow spoiled his enjoyment of I Dreamed a Dream. If I remark that Bob Dylan's later work repays close listening, the gate-leaver-open may think I have prohibited from liking Blowing in the Wind. To the gate-leaver-open, any criticism is an attack and any negative opinion a prohibition.
If I say that 1970s Doctor Who was the best Doctor Who (which it obviously was) it does not follow that I am declaring the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteen and fourteenth Doctor's non-canonical. And even if I am, that does not mean that I am declaring that the tapes should be expunged. And even if I am, no-one is likely to pay any attention to me. Your enjoyment of Jodie Whitaker is not impacted by my enjoyment of Tom Baker, any more than my enjoyment of Tom Baker is impacted by your enjoyment of Jodie Whitaker.
If I say that 1970s Doctor Who was the best Doctor Who (which it obviously was) it does not follow that I am declaring the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteen and fourteenth Doctor's non-canonical. And even if I am, that does not mean that I am declaring that the tapes should be expunged. And even if I am, no-one is likely to pay any attention to me. Your enjoyment of Jodie Whitaker is not impacted by my enjoyment of Tom Baker, any more than my enjoyment of Tom Baker is impacted by your enjoyment of Jodie Whitaker.
It is equally true that some people will read any positive criticism, or any push back against negative criticism, as gate-leaver-openerism.
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My opinion on Gatekeeping amounts to:
ReplyDelete"Do you mind if I put Cola in my 25 year old Glenlivet?"
"No, but I would mind if you put it in mine."
Mine is: you are allowed to like anything you want, and I am allowed to look down on you for liking it. And vice versa.
DeleteI feel that "leaving the gate open" is more apt as a description of the stance you adopt: "You enjoy this thing and I enjoy a related thing and we're both cool with that." The opposite of gate-keeping you describe seems regular anti-snobbery to me. It's certainly my experience that people (myself included) imagine the treshold for f.e. reading literary classics or enjoying opera as much higher than it actually is.
ReplyDeleteThe middle of the top three examples is different to the other two.
ReplyDelete‘I like this’ is a subjective statement and therefore cannot be right or wrong; it simply is.
But ‘this is good’ is an objective claim and therefore is objectively correct or incorrect.
So in fact you do need to have some amount of experience before your claim to be able to tell a good tune from a bad one can be taken seriously.
Whereas you need have absolutely no experience whatsoever to enjoy a tune; and it is perfectly possible to enjoy a bad tune (I enjoy listening to many objectively bad tunes).
P.S Could we at least use pseudonyms, so I can keep track of which anonymous is which? Thanks....
ReplyDeleteThird Anonymous ("regular anti-snobbery") is me. Signing in via Google is currently impossible. I think no one went anonymous on purpose. There seems to be a technical problem.
Delete- Thomas
I think this is perhaps an over subtle distinction. There could be a circumstance when someone says "This is a bad story" means "This story does not follow the Official Rules Of Good Story Telling as laid down by Joseph Campbell and/or Aristotle"; in which case you could say "This is a bad story, but I like it even so." And you might very well say of an opera or a comic book "This is a bad story, but it has lovely tunes or brilliant artwork." But most of the time "This is a good tune" and "I like this tune" are synonymous, or nearly so. And "Steak is nicer well done" means the same as "I like my steak well done".
ReplyDeleteI do think there is such a thing as "good taste"; i.e if someone genuinely thought that Pam Ayers was a better poet than Shakespeare I would say that they had "bad taste". I even think that it is worth acquiring good taste. But I am not quite sure I could justify that. I suppose I would have to say "If you read a few pages of Shakespeare every day for the next year, than I think in a year's time not only will you think Shakespeare is a better poet than Pam Ayers, but you will also get more enjoyment from Hamlet than you ever did from I Wish I'd Looked After My Teeth." But I'm not quite sure I could justify that.
If you give up sugar in coffee, then you'll be able to taste all the subtle distinctions between different blends and different beans. But I don't want to appreciate subtle flavours. I want a sweet milky drink. But you ought not to want that. Why not?
My judgement about whether Hallowed Be Thy Name is a good heavy metal track or a bad heavy metal track (or indeed, my assertion that it is the very best of all heavy metal tracks) is valueless if I haven't listened to a fairly large number of heavy metal tracks. I am clearly allowed to say that I don't like it. But if I assert that it's just noise and doesn't even count as music, then I think you are entitled to say "That's because you don't understand the genre." But I am not sure if there is any reason for to me to cultivate and appreciation of the genre. Because right now I enjoy two kinds of music, opera and folk, and if I spent a few weeks listening to people shouting and banging guitars I would be able to enjoy three kinds? But that only works if we are agreed that "it is better to listen to lots of different kinds of things" or "you have now opened yourself up to a 50% more pleasure than was previously available to you, and it's your moral or human duty to experience as much pleasure as possible"
I am honestly not sure what "enjoying objectively bad tunes" means. A bit like "liking nasty food". (I like blue cheese very much. A lot of people think it's disgusting.)
"If I happen to mention that I am a big fan of Victor Hugo's original novel, the gate-leaver-open is apt to think that I have somehow spoiled his enjoyment of I Dreamed a Dream. If I remark that Bob Dylan's later work repays close listening, the gate-leaver-open may think I have prohibited from liking Blowing in the Wind. To the gate-leaver-open, any criticism is an attack and any negative opinion a prohibition."
ReplyDeleteThis paragraph of your argument doesn't make sense. Your examples are all of you saying that you DO like things, but the generalization you give at the end is about the gate-leaver-open objecting to your saying you DON'T like things. I'm left not quite what you think a gate-leaver-open is, and why such a person is problematic. Should I trust your specific examples or your generalization?
Well, the term gate-leaver-opener quite clearly means whatever I want it to mean because I made it up!
DeleteBut yes, I agree, I was unduly conflating too ends of a continuum, possibly for rhetorical effect and possibly because I didn't notice.
Roughly:
Proposition: I like Tom Baker best.
1: Oh, you think that Tom Baker IS the best.
2: Oh, you think that Tom Baker is better than all the others.
3: Oh, you think that all the others are worse than Tom Baker.
4: Oh, you think that all the others are bad.
5: Oh you you that I shouldn't like any of the others
6: Oh, you are telling me that I am not allowed to like any of the others
7: Oh, you are saying that the tapes of all the others should be wiped and thrown into a fiery furnace.
Doubtless I am partly recalling "Aslan" days when "It's way cool to treat RPGs as improvised theatre and story telling" yielded endless letters saying "Oh, are we not allowed to enjoy throwing dice and moving miniatures and killing pretend orcs any more". To which the response, as you say, was "No, I'm saying that I enjoy a different thing." But doubtless I was a lot more annoying strident in those days than I would be now.
On matters of music taste, I find this observation helpful: it's impossible to say whether ABBA are better than Motörhead, because they are doing such different things (and both doing them so well) but it's possible to say that ABBA are better than Brotherhood of Man, because they are doing the same thing and BoM is an inferior copy of ABBA.
ReplyDeleteThe question (to bring it back to Doctor Who, which may have been a tangent in the original post but we all know it's the key to everything) is whether Tom Baker's Doctor Who and Matt Smith's Doctor Who were doing the same thing (and one was doing it better than the other) or whether they were doing different things.
"But I like Brother of Man better! What possible right do you have to tell me that I should like Abba more!!"
DeleteWhich is where it gets sticky. "Brotherhood of Man is unoriginal" is an objective statement. "Original things are better than unoriginal things" is a premise. (If I said that Kirby drew the Silver Surfer better than Mobius because he drew him first, I might get punched, particularly if I happened to be on a submarine.) "Inferior" is a value judgement -- are they worse *because* the other lot did it first; or are there some rules-of-tune-writing that one follows and the other doesn't. Or does Abba have some quality that Brotherhood lack -- complexity, say, or emotional depth. What if I happen to prefer tunes which are simple and emotionally shallow?
I agree of course that criticism should explicitly or implicitly ask "What is this trying to do?", "How well does it succeed?" and "Was it worth doing in the first place?"
[Tangent: Did you read the former Archdruid's review of Jordan Peterson's book on the Bible? I thought it did an admirable job of taking the book on its own terms first (saying what the argument was), critiquing it on its own terms (did it prove what the great man thought it proved) and only then asking "is this a useful or appropriate way of using the Bible to begin with?" It also contained an admirably non-bet-hedging definition of 'God'.]