There’s a distinction, in my mind at least, between your opinions and thoughts and preferences and what might be called your character. This seems uncontroversial, even banal, yet I perceive it as unusual. It appears that I’ve stumbled into a culture where your tastes—in music or film, in restaurants or stores, in clothes or belongings—provide a portrait of your character, describing all that’s meaningful, all that’s needed, to evaluate your life. Aligning these incidental preferences with a person’s character is obviously absurd yet it is somehow also commonplace—although I’m fairly sure that I understand what triggered this tendency.
If you’re not prepared for this alignment, then you’ll probably, at some point, find yourself hostage to a conversation that you didn’t expect. You might offer a few casual, haphazard thoughts about a recent film, or perhaps you’ll make a frivolous comment about an artist, thinking aloud about a singer or actor or painter, until you begin to discern the contortions in the face before you—the tightening brow, the clenching jaw, the menacing stare. Your awareness that the conversation is rather different from what you perceived will come much too late, as your halfhearted opinion turns out to feel, for the person trembling before you, as provocative, repellent, even hurtful. What sounds like a preference, an incidental aspect of life, no different than having a taste for a specific food, represents a principle that is vital for the person who is provoked by your words.
Perhaps you want to be a decent person. I imagine that’s occasionally true for some people. Perhaps you want to be kind. I imagine that’s occasionally true too. Perhaps your first reaction, therefore, is charitable. Besides, there’s no reason to further upset the sniveling, syrupy face that stands before you and blocks your view of the world, so you attempt to ameliorate the situation by stressing a point or two of agreement. Nothing major, just enough commonality to clear away the storm clouds and get on with your day, that vastly underrated objective. There must be something, surely, about this testy subject where there’s some consensus, however marginal. But you quickly catch yourself from speaking those words of harmony because your second reaction is to recognize that the entire discussion is preposterous. Now you don’t purposely want to antagonize the conversation partner that has abruptly become your conversation opponent, but you do decide, I hope, that it’s silly to feign agreement with someone’s preferences for bands or directors or authors, that you’re not responsible for someone’s emotional regulation, even if that person is a child dressed as an adult.
What’s happening, I believe, is that many people have defined themselves, have found meaning and connection and vibrancy, in the parts of life that are typically deemed external. Preferences that might in another context be charming, such as a favorite restaurant or a desire for a particular genre, are considered intrinsic to identity. And this mentality results in a world where there’s no separation between the value placed on those external preferences and how a person views themself.
If I don’t happen to listen to your favorite band, then I don’t happen to like you, as goes this mentality. If I don’t enjoy the same films, then I’ve attacked your very essence in a personal and intimate manner—because your taste in the external culture is what forms your internal character. What I perceive as a mere inclination—my inchoate thoughts about the quality of a particular album—sounds cold, abrupt, even cruel, to the person who has affixed their personality to that album, who perceives its value as a reflection of their value.
This manner of existing is, to my mind, a necessary part of life, if you happen to be on the frontier between childhood and young adulthood. When you’re still young and straining to figure out your character, adopting a few personas, grabbing what you discover in the environment and declaring it indispensable for your existence, is perfectly fine. My sense is that this is a productive and necessary stage of life. Much of adolescence comes down to a long struggle of fashioning a character, so there’s no surprise that adolescent arguments about taste are loud, or that disagreements about trends in the culture feel, at that age, so significant. At that point, when the concrete for your own foundation hasn’t settled, preferences are worn like the latest fashions—some fit, most don’t, some are kept, most are discarded, all in hope of shaping a distinct life.
How sad it is, however, for the adult that never leaves this adolescent stage. That perceives a disagreement about taste at age forty as an insult. That needs agreement on the most superficial preferences to believe that a connection is possible. That links a list of artistic favorites to a moral discussion. Of course you can still be passionate about art and combative about your preferences, finding them enlivening and inspiring and even important—I certainly hope that you do—but you should dismiss any notion that they reflect your character.
So far there’s a disturbing lacuna in these paragraphs. An empty space, a missing ingredient, an obvious but unexplained shadow. How tragic it is, alas, when you sense a flaw and you’re the one typing the argument. Unfortunately, I am the only person who can be accused of begging the question—in a rare instance where I can use its actual definition—because I’ve hummed along quite nicely while ignoring a rather large assumption: what is meant by character?
Perhaps I can still sidestep a direct answer and, instead, chip away all the extraneous bits that are unrelated to character, in the hope that something will be left that’s worth salvaging—a bit like carving a marble slab, where the figure in the stone emerges from what remains. And if you do grab a chisel and mallet and play along, you might discover a curious pattern, too, while you pound away, because all the traits that feel so vivid and vital during the typical day begin to disintegrate. Once you start searching for the core, all those traits that feel the most personal, most distinct, most individual, are somehow the first to collapse into dust. Anything that you can select with ease—your list of favorites, in food and music and design—tumbles to the ground with the same ease.
It might seem unsettling to watch these idiosyncrasies, the tendencies and tastes that feel so personal, collapse with each strike, crumbling from just the smallest tap. Goodbye to your favorite foods, goodbye to your favorite songs, goodbye to the expressions that supposedly define your essence. And you just might be left with a little paradox as you come closer to the core, to what’s most essential about the individual figure in the stone: what’s left is fundamentally social.
Words like morals and ethics and virtues and even manners come to mind, along with an abrupt awareness that these concepts require another person—a fact that isn’t quite true about all those preferences that you’ve already chipped away. You’ll still have preferences if you’re alone on an island, you’ll like sweet fruits and enjoy a spot in the shade and want pretty sunsets, but it would be nonsensical to talk about your manners when you’re alone—without an external lens, without a social dynamic, we can’t reach the word character.
Curiously, in a contemporary culture that comes with more individual isolation than at any point in evolutionary history, perhaps there’s no surprise that our most superficial tastes have taken on so much importance. If the most fundamental aspects of your character result from how you comport yourself socially, by your compassion and comity and connection, but you just happen to be disconnected, isolated, without the push and pull and muddle of relationships, perhaps what’s left of your daily, humdrum preferences is what inflates.
That’s a veneer, of course, a veneer atop what actually comprises a person. But if that veneer is all that you possess, if it is all that you can cling during the difficulties of life, then you might consider any difference of opinion, any difference in thought, as a form of judgement. Your tastes in film and music and culture become the measurement of your character—because it is only when there’s nothing underneath the veneer that it feels so urgent to maintain its shine.
What you understand as character, I call identity. These cultural elements embody attitudes, that, if strong enough, or cohesive enough, engender the zeitgeists that can also resonate with people individually, to the extent that they see themselves in these things and form preferences.
The idea of being seen as 'having good taste' is a cultural value.
But identities, like the culture that foster them, are mutable. Whereas, I see a person's character as something fixed, like a basic config comprising the acts a person would or would not do.
Being affluent is the most conventional way of expressing quality and excellence, prime societal values. This expression of quality is so highly valued that people confuse it with notions of good character. Culture is commodity; art is a social vehicle designed to convey status.
There is something infantilizing men and women today, and consumerism certainly plays a part, and perhaps it's contributing to the death of empathy/community living. But Im not sure there aren't other factors involved, such as the obsession with success/failire, and the ever-increasing demands on productivity and intolerable levels of stress. Social media is also to blame, with its insistence that outward approval should be the highest societal value.
This whole conversation points to why I'm so bothered by the phrase "It was my childhood!" It's okay to have some nostalgia and to fondly remember what it felt like watching movies or reading books or listening to music or whatever that you've subsequently grown up on. It's okay if you still like it or if you now see its flaws but forgive them because of your childhood enjoyment. What's bizarre to me is then buying into new versions, sequels, franchises or whatever. It's not the same product! And above all, do you really want your 'childhood' to be the intellectual property of some corporation?
My example is Jurassic Park. I lived and breathed that movie for years after its 1993 release. Had all the toys, novelized the movie myself with a friend, studied maps to figure out where Isla Nublar would be located, knew way more about the potential scientific approaches than were realistic, had detailed debates over whether the characters were better in the book or the movie... etc.
None of that makes any of the Jurassic Park sequels good. Not one of them. So I stopped watching them, because they're not good. But people keep saying "But Jurassic Park was my childhood!" So what? Why do you identify with a franchise? That seems like a really superficial place to distinguish your memories. Your self.
One of those small moments my mother taught me a lot was when we watched The Matrix at my urging, despite the fact she doesn't like science fiction, and afterward she said, "Listen, it's a very good movie. I don't like it at all." People need to separate the distinction between 'liking' a thing, its qualities, and its importance. Nobody "likes" Salo: or the 120 Days of Sodom, but it's important. Is it a good movie? I actually don't think so. Any of these issues being bounded by your own personality or character is bound to be fragile.
I don't believe in guilty pleasures. Like what you like, even if you recognize the quality is poor. But simply being capable of understanding other people don't like the same things is basic maturity.