"Rational Morality," and Art

In today's class, Professor Yake brought up a very interesting point about "rational morality." I would like to comment on it here.

I like the implications behind this idea of "rational morality." It seems, to me, to speak to the idea that we should question all of our assumptions, and only keep those for which we can find a rational basis. This, to me, is a view of high merit, for anyone. There is never any harm in exploring the roots of our views and having a solid foundation for holding what values we do hold.

I think, however, that trying to then apply this "rational morality" to art gets rocky. Art, in my view, does not exist solely as an expression of morality or moral living. Rather, art can, and should, reflect the realities of our lives. This is extremely important, as often, we can be blind to the reality around us, and fail to notice the proverbial elephant in the room.

To illustrate this point of cultural blindness, I'll draw an example from a course I took over the summer. In our society today, heterosexuality is so pervasive in all strata of social functioning, that it is considered to be the "norm" by which we judge everything else. This manifests itself in many ways. A famous example are the "coming out stories" we expect of, for example, homosexuals. Heterosexuality is so prevalent that there need be no explanation for the "discovery" of one's heterosexuality, but society demands a story, a reason, for one's "homosexuality."

In the same vein of the "heterosexual invisible" would be the rituals of marriage. This concept of marriage, of the wife in a white dress, the father giving the bride to the husband, etc, is so ingrained in our cultural consciousness that many, if not most, people are unaware of the historical symbolism behind the symbolism. The white dress is a symbol of the bride's virginity (which is questionable in today's society, and almost certainly so in the case of remarriages). The father giving the bride away is representative of the social view of women as property -- a woman is her father's property until she is married, at which point she becomes her husband's property, making the entire marriage ceremony a celebration of what is, at its core, a financial transaction.

How does this all relate to art? Simple. Art can, and should, function to expose such things to our larger cultural consciousness. Art is a perfect vehicle for revealing these sorts of truths that have become lost to the culture, and thus a great potential catalyst for social change where change is needed.

Hooray for interdisciplinary analogies! :)

... and now that I've just used a smiley in a graded blog, I shall end with a question: Should art serve as a "mirror to society," revealing the flaws in our society that we are often unconscious of, or should art restrict itself to utopian depictions of "high morality?"