Gotham Diary:
With Time (Discrimination)
25 September 2014
Today, I want to look into something closely related to taste — a matter that I touched on very lightly a few days ago, and that needs fuller treatment in due course — and that is discrimination.
“Discrimination” is not the happiest of words in America. Everything fine about it was blunted by what I take to have been an originally euphemistic misappropriation intended to make a virtue of what was really going on, dehumanization. It is hard now to see the difference between the Nuremberg Laws and Jim Crow; what difference there was between the two cultures was that the world of Jim Crow still had an economic use for black Americans, and preferred exploitation to extermination. “Discrimination” was supposed to make it sound as though bigoted Southerners were making a principled decision about ordering their social world, which, in their view, black Americans were inadequately well-bred to join. “Discrimination” was supposed to be the impulse behind delicate housewives’ building bathrooms in their garages, for the use of black maids and nannies. A woman who didn’t “discriminate” had no self-respect.
Despite this odious outlook, for which we white Americans can never entirely expiate our shame (we shall have always had it in us to do such terrible things), the word itself remains tied to its original denotation, which named the act of choosing among things and selecting the better. Now more than ever we need to be skilled discriminators; it is our only hope against drowning in a sludge of toxic banality.
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The first thing to be said about discrimination, at least in adults, is that it is purely personal and private. Young people ought to be encouraged to talk about discrimination with any older people whom they might know well enough for candid, somewhat intimate discussion, while older people ought to make sure that their young listeners hear about the missteps that unavoidably occur in the development of true discrimination — the unfortunate choices, the immoderate enthusiasms, and the principled mistakes that, like Seventies hair, we should all like to forget. Mistakes must be made! But they must be made in youth and learned from. Also, for young people the idea of private discrimination is almost anti-social. They are busy learning about almost everything from each other.
So I am talking about adults.
For decades, it seems, the importance of learning new things, of “pushing one’s boundaries” and “going beyond one’s comfort zone,” has been shouted with Orwellian relentlessness. To the extent that “new things” must be strange and, at least initially, uncomfortable, I find the admonition to novelty highly dubious. What’s important is to bear in mind is that new and different things are out there, and that one’s likes and dislikes are far from comprehensive. I find it productive to pay as little attention as possible to my dislikes. This makes me vulnerable to surprise attacks from dislikes that I’m finally ready to reassess. For, at bottom, dislikes are simply failures of imagination. With time, and the greater pressure of time that comes with time, dislikes give way to also-rans, which one might have enjoyed had one only the time.
Also with time, discrimination becomes less a matter of preferring this print to that one and more a matter of choosing the print that goes best (whatever “best” means for you) with the myriad other choices that you have already made. The proof of sound discrimination is harmony, and this harmony is largely private. Even the best friend cant keep track of all your discriminations. No one else can ever fully know why you prefer this recording of Eroica to that one. They can know only what you can tell them — the tip of the iceberg.
The root of discrimination is quasi-erotic: it begins with what you happen to like. You can accustom yourself to something that you don’t like, and every now and then find that you haven’t just gotten used to it but have come quite genuinely to like it, but you can never force yourself to like anything. With time, what you like will be conditioned by what you know, but what you know cannot be allowed to take over. For the truly discriminating mind, “fashion dictates” are tissues of no consequence.
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In recent decades, and earlier too, probably, men have not gone in for discrimination to the extent that women have done. To the extent that men regard living like a slob as an essential marker of masculinity, this is not only stunted but tragic; it is also very stupid. There are also men who regard “home” as the abode of their mothers, and this is very irresponsible, because mother is not going to live forever. (You can’t begin to hope that she will outlive you — what a terrible curse!) Another way to avoid making one’s personal base of operations more than a utility locker room is to invest one’s discriminatory impulses in collections: comic books, model trains, telephone pole insulators, whatever. Absorbing as such items might be, they none of them have an impact on how your body inhabits intimate space. That requires a minimum of interior design — which is nothing but an engagement with intimate space. After the engineering essentials of a sound sense of spatial organization, discrimination (your personal choice!) makes the most important contribution to meaningful interior design. It ought to be noted that utility is not an aesthetic.
So much for choosing sofas and framed artworks. (After the first round, the starter house or flat, you don’t just go with the first thing that looks good.) Such choices are, or ought to be, uncommon, arising every ten years or so at the most.
Where discrimination must be exercised almost constantly is in the choice of books.
It is not the sign of a discriminating mind to decide that what one really likes best is military history, and then to read nothing else. Ditto thrillers, true-crime books, or the biographies of heroes. This is rather the sign of discrimination forsaken. Discrimination is easily regarded as a ruling-out, but it is no less a force for increasing the variety of different kinds of things among which to make individual choices. You do not discriminate, for example, between Victorian and modern fiction. You discriminate among the examples of both.
Discrimination has something of the look of an Internet tournament: one is forever forced to choose between items of equal merit. I find consolation in knowing (from experience) that the rejected item is likely to come up again, and that the fact of having rejected it (regretfully) will tip the scales in its favor. In the realm of discrimination, no decision is really final.
Fine discrimination produces, as I say, harmony, but it also gives taste the widest range in which to play. More on taste to come.