Addison Road

In continuation of some earlier thoughts …

If the faith is going to find a natural point of integration with music, it will be not in the brute features of pitch and rhythm, of sequence and development. It’s natural point of integration will likely be found at the point where the human experience intersects with those brute features: there may be no such thing as “Christian Music”, but there might be such a thing as a “Christian Musician”. I’ve suggested three areas where I think holding to a Christian worldview might influence how we think about being a musician. The first pertains to the ethics of participation.

There are very few amoral acts. By amoral, I don’t mean immoral, I mean truly amoral, without any sort of moral weight. In a view that sees the world as a holistically intertwined place, where the imperator dei sustains all of creation, there are very few acts of human will that stand neutral to the will of God. This kind of holistic view makes it incumbent on us to evaluate our actions both in light of their individual moral weight, and also in their context as acts with persistent connection to other acts and consequences.

For the Christian musician, this gives rise to a particularly difficult set of questions about the moral weight of creative acts in the midst of larger projects. Let me state the problem in the traditional way: by hoisting it up on the wooded spit of an Aristotelian syllogism. Like all good philosophical questions, it’s beautiful and simple in the abstract.

• Premise 1: Participants in a project bear responsibility for the outcome of the project.
• Premise 2: Some creative projects have a negative moral outcome.
• Conclusion: Participants in projects with negative moral outcomes bear responsibility for those outcomes.

Premise 1 doesn’t require much defense, except to say that the degree of responsibility can be conditioned by any number of things: foreknowledge of the outcome, intent of the participant, degree of participation, kind of participation. The guy who greases the chain on the chain-saw before it leaves the factory doesn’t really bear any responsibility for the crazy man who uses it to terrorize his neighbors in a small fishing village in Oregon. He is justifiably ignorant of the potential outcome, and has no malicious intent in greasing the chain. The man who sells the chain-saw to the crazy-eyed drunk man with foaming flecks spewing from his lips, muttering angry threats against his neighbors, he obviously bears more responsibility. Even though he had no malicious intent, there were foreseeable consequences to his act of making the sale.

Premise 2, that some creative projects have negative moral outcomes, might require a little more convincing, but let me make an absurdly extreme case in order to make my point. Suppose that an artist came to you with a song they had written, and asked you to sing the backing vocals for the song. The chorus of the song is “We’ve got to kill all the Hittites, kill all the Hittites, come on everybody, kill all the Hittites.” Now, you happen to live in a neighborhood that has both Hittites and Amorites, and you know that the racial tensions between the two are running pretty high, so this song makes you nervous. You think that people might take it seriously, and that it might stoke some of the more excitable Amorites to start rioting against the Hittites.

Then he hands you the lyrics to the bridge, which are, “Everybody, come over to my house this Thursday at 8PM, I’ll have flaming torches and beer, we’ll burn those Hittites out, burn them out, burn them out. Everybody come over to my house, I live at 321 Maple, turn left at the 7-11, and it’s just past the 3rd speed bump on the right, we’re going to kill all the Hittites.” All of the sudden, it’s gone from protest song, to specific instructions for when and where to riot.

Obviously, this little project that you’ve been roped into has some foreseeable negative moral outcomes. You might find it hard to sing these words, knowing that they might be the cause of misery and suffering as the racial tensions in your neighborhood ignite into full-scale rioting. You might decide to bow out of the project on that basis.

So far, we’ve said nothing about music. We’re talking about the moral weight of the words, the intent of the artists, and the foreseeable consequences of singing those words. At this point, I want to assert again, as I did in my first post, and as Phil continues to do, that Music is not the sort of thing that we can assign moral value to when it is divorced from context. Any moral or spiritual weight that is attached to it is a kind of cultural sentimentality, a corporate response to the associations we’ve constructed. It’s not inherent to the music itself.

So here’s my question: how do we evaluate our participation in a project with a negative moral outcome, when our contribution to it is morally neutral, or even morally good? Suppose you aren’t singing the backing vocals to the song; suppose you’re playing guitar. There’s nothing evil about the notes you’re playing (unless you’re Bobby), and maybe the money from the recording session will be used to buy insulin for your 6 diabetic foster kids.

If there are participants in a creative work where their contribution is morally neutral, their intent is morally good, but the project is morally negative, do we still reach the same conclusion about the responsibility of the participant?

This is a particularly Christian sort of dilemma for two reasons; first, because of the holistic nature of the Christian moral view. We find it difficult to slough off our obligation to investigate the moral consequences of our actions, particular of our complex actions. Secondly, an orthodox Christian spirituality doesn’t allow for simplistic reclusion. We are people in the world, and we are immeshed participants in it. Our actions are persistently bound up with the actions of others who do not share our same value, goals, or convictions.

How should we think about our participation in creative works?

Amorites
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Ethics
Hittites
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Philosophy