Today I want to start with a question. Would you rather see the world as it is or as it ought to be?

I mean this question very seriously. I'm not asking a rhetorical question here. I'm not trying to make a point. It's not a trick, I'm actually curious, I'm actually wondering, and I want to wonder

about this question with you on this podcast, because last week we were talking all about art for arts sake, this philosophy that kind of emerged among the bohemians of the 19th century.

Ours, gratia, artists, lach, poor'r' comes up in various languages and formats, but in essence it amounts

to a claim about what art is supposed to do, especially fiction, I think, but art of all kinds, painting, sculpture, film, when film comes along, literature, poetry, all that stuff.

And I argued last week that it's very understandable why people started to talk about art for art

sake why people like Oscar Wilde and Vladimir Nabokoff and even Edgar Allan Poe and Benjamin Constant, why all of these guys started to resist the idea

that art should have a moral dimension or should be judged in moral terms.

And part of it was a reaction to Victorian society and to perhaps overly closed-minded and

strict way of thinking about morality and art, kind of this maybe Philistine approach

that a lot of the critics were taking, some of it was that, but at a deeper level I argued that this was a rebellion, a kind of desperate rebellion or a struggle against the mechanical philosophy of the world.

The idea that began to take shape with Newtonian physics and with the Industrial Revolution,

that everything can be understood the way a machine can be understood that is a series of interlocking parts that move kind of automatically against one another and

People were trying furiously,

sometimes violently, to build systems that would work for humanity.

Political systems, economic systems, philosophical systems that they could shove humanity into so that mankind

itself would become just another cog in just another machine, something that you didn't

have to worry about or think over or make difficult choices regarding, but something

that would just work now forever.

The idea was to fix the world and humanity is the most complicated thing in the world, and so

the Bohemians and the socialists and the

art for art sake people were reacting against that impulse and insisting on a truth

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