Flashback Friday

Criticism is pointless without taste

Back in 2023, I wrote for Plough Quarterly on ways to bring poetry into our homes and daily lives. I listed three action steps, and want to revisit those in greater depth here, as a lot of people have recently been asking me about this. The whole piece is linked here.

Last week’s Flashback Friday offered guidance for how parents can teach their children how to experience art. This week, I want to talk about something a little more controversial: how parents can teach their children which art to choose to experience.

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From “Poetry at Home”

Few of us will memorize thousands of lines of poetry in our lives. But having even a few lines of poetry in your mind is like having a little secret place inside yourself where no one can trouble you; if your phone is lost, or you are away from your computer, or you are sitting on a delayed airplane with two screaming toddlers, those lines of poetry will rise up in your mind and nourish you, give you a place of beauty to inhabit for a little while.

I began memorizing poetry after reading about how, in the gulags of the Soviet Union, people who had memorized poetry were able to offer that poetry as a lifeline for those around them. Even a single poem, whispered in a prisoners’ barracks after dark, could become a touchstone for all that is good and beautiful. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, famed author of The Gulag Archipelago, recalled how during days of grueling labor he would internally “write” passages of his books, then scribble them down at night. His powers of memory, honed through memorizing poetry as a young person, allowed him to compose his own writing while enduring great suffering.

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Beauty has great power. (That statement there deserves its own post and will probably get one soon, but just go with me for now.) It strengthens the soul, or even more, it creates little wells and fields within the soul so that even when outside sources of happiness are cut off, the soul has its own supplies. But in order to develop those little wells and fields, we must give beauty time and attention.

It’s always been difficult to make time for beauty. In centuries past, nearly everyone was scrambling around every day to make sure they had food to eat; their time and attention went to survival. Today, we’re much farther from the brink of starvation, and our time and attention are much more available for leisure activities. But we haven’t exactly transferred our attention to beautiful things; instead, as Ted Gioia has so compellingly documented for years over at The Honest Broker, our attention tends to go to mass-produced entertainment—and now with the advent of AI, it goes to AI-generated Slop.

Here’s the problem: Beauty is, for our modern sensibilities, increasingly challenging. It’s easier to run a junk TV show in the background while we scroll on our phones (as many Millennials do!) than it is to sit and attend to a beautiful film. That is the great paradox of the modern age, in my mind: even as we have more content available than ever before, and more leisure time than ever before, our lives (and our minds) are less beautiful than ever before.

This brings us to the topic of today’s Flashback Friday: taste. Taste is an underappreciated virtue. In popular culture, it’s generally invoked for comic effect (snobby rich characters on TV claim to have “taste” as they flaunt their vastly overpriced consumer goods). Rarely is taste lauded as the virtue that it is.

To cut through some of the negative cloud around the word, think of having good taste as having “discernment.” Good taste simply means that we have developed a habit of recognizing beautiful and interesting things and we are attracted to those things, instead of to their mass-produced, boring, and demeaning counterparts.

Too often, I think, we think of good taste as something we either have or don’t have. This is a mistake. Taste is always cultivated. While it’s possible that some people have inherently better taste, I think it’s more likely that what those people really have is inherent sensitivity and ability to pay close attention. This close attention steels them against the invasive, garish nature of tasteless things. Taste—the ability to discern good and worthy things from trashy things—can be cultivated by anybody.

This might make many people uncomfortable. If taste can be cultivated, then we are (at least partly) responsible for our taste. If taste can be cultivated, our bad taste isn’t just a preference or a fluke of our personalities; it’s a choice.

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That brings me to children. As babies, we have no taste. None. Zero. We have no idea what we should pay attention to. We cannot discern good things from bad things in any meaningful way. We only know hungry/not hungry, cold/warm, lonely/snuggled, messy/clean. That’s it.

Then we start to notice things. My youngest child, a few months old, is just now starting to make decisions about where she wants to put her attention; up till now, she would pay attention to whatever was in front of her. Now, however, she will turn away from something in front of her if she isn’t interested in it and seek out something else. Her preferences are beginning to show.

As she grows, those preferences will become more marked. My son, who is almost seven, has always had a preference for non-screen activities. He loved cars and stickers as a toddler, and he didn’t really care for shows. His sister, nearly five, has adored screens ever since she realized they existed.

That difference is a preference. It has nothing to do with taste. It’s my job as a parent to cultivate my children’s taste regardless of their preference. It is my job, while my children are young, to ensure that they habituate themselves towards the good within their preferred activities.

This starts with only offering them the very best things within their preferred activities. It means not letting them choose tasteless things. That’s often difficult, because children (like all of us) are drawn to easy consumption. Like all of us, they’d rather have cheetos than baked Brie.

There’s a reason many children’s products, from clothes and toys to television shows and books, are garish, crudely illustrated, and demeaning. It’s because taste is cultivated. It’s not natural. Our natural tendency is to easy consumption, and beauty is difficult. Beauty requires deep attention. It calls us to rise, to work hard, to attend deeply, to grow, to stretch our souls. Very few of us naturally want to do this. We have to develop the habit of it.

I’m not going to make a list of “good” and “bad” things, “tasteful” and “tasteless.” But I will share with you some of the boundaries we have set for our children.

• we don’t buy and wear clothing with characters on it. That’s because we believe clothing is a way to exercise our own taste, rather than simply borrowing images from shows. In addition, many of the characters are from shows we don’t allow.

• we explicitly don’t allow certain shows and movies, and we explain why. It’s not a mystery to our kids why they can’t watch The Little Mermaid but they can watch The Lion King. They know that The Little Mermaid, in our view, is a story that teaches bad lessons; it teaches that young people can rebel against their parents without serious consequences. We do, however, read the story The Little Mermaid, and it is a favorite.

• we explicitly don’t allow certain books, and we explain why. We read a sentence from, say, Captain Underpants, and compare it to a sentence from, say, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. “Which is more beautiful?” we ask. We don’t ask, “Which do you like better?” That’s misleading. The question that matters is, “Which makes your human soul more beautiful and dignified?”

• we explicitly tell our children that they are beautiful and dignified human souls that have an eternal destiny. We also explain explicitly to them that whatever enters their senses goes into their souls; the two aren’t separate. We are trying to help them make the connection between body and soul—our souls are saved through our bodies.

• that said, we have a lot of fun with art! We dance to “9-to-5” regularly. We love Motown. We enjoy puns and jokes (Richard Wilbur’s book of children’s poems is great for this!). We love watching good movies and shows together (if you’d be interested in a post on our favorites, drop a comment below). And of course we love reading good books!

I realize that a lot of this is likely to be controversial. I’m not prescribing these methods; different families will develop different language and boundaries. What matters is this: children need their parents to help them cultivate taste. They can’t do it on their own. That requires us, as parents, to be rigorous in cultivating our own.

I’m really interested in your feedback on this! Please drop your impressions/comments/disagreements below. Cultivating taste is a huge task, and it’s one that our culture has not prepared us to do well. Let’s brainstorm this together!