Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Diversity In Art Other Than Human Representation

Especially today, when there are so many different artistic mediums, ways to experience those mediums, and individual works of entertainment within different genres of each medium, there are calls for greater originality or diversity of content, something that in the sense of novelty cannot be introduced forever because there are a finite number of possibilities, and some of these possibilities are of low quality anyway.  Today, there is also an increasing demand for diverse representations of humanity in art, which would include portraying characters of both genders, of different races and ethnicities, of different nationalities, of different class status, of different ages, and with different disabilities, to give some examples.  It is possible for a certain kind of person, mostly a strong philosophical conservative, to long for the first kind of diversity and be suspicious of the latter kind, if not very overtly opposed to it.

One might find plenty of people online or in person who on one hand say they support experimentation and diversity of entertainment mechanics while on the other hand are dismissive or outright hostile towards almost all diversity of human representation in art, especially in visual mediums like movies, video games, and television.  They are typically conservatives and also people who mistakenly think moral and broader metaphysical beliefs stem from politics instead of the other way around, and they are usually very vocal about how a character's gender or race does not matter--which is true in one sense when the plot or themes do not require that a character have a certain gender or skin color, but there is a need for diversity in these areas to portray humanity as it is and to fight the stereotypes that conservatives ironically support in many cases.

Those who call for diversity of everything from genres to aesthetics to game modes to progression systems to home theater viewing options but oppose the portrayal of human diversity in entertainment are utter hypocrites who reject a significant part of reality itself.  For one reason or another, they want to ignore vital truths.  Perhaps they are sexist or racist (and sexism can be directed against either gender and racism against any skin color) and hate acknowledging the presence or humanity of people who do not look like them.  Perhaps they wrongly think that they must oppose human diversity in art to fit into a political group of family or friends, letting an assumed political philosophy dictate their general worldview instead of letting their more foundational worldview dictate their political philosophy and letting reason alone dictate their general worldview.  Perhaps they feel attacked when they see other kinds of people.  Regardless, the conservative objections to diversity itself are asinine.

To be sure, philosophical/political liberals can have their own hypocrisies in this regard. They might call for diversity, but they also tend to intentionally exclude or supposedly forget about things like male victims of sexual or physical abuse and could have wholly asinine objections to including them, such as the idea that it harms representation of women. They might only support diversity not for the sake of knowing and expressing truths about reality, but for the sake of looking as if they care about diversity for rational reasons and understand it as it is.  Conservatives are inherently irrationalistic because their ideas are false, assumed, or incoherent, and the same is certainly true of liberals, though both can express their delusions and hypocrisies in these aforementioned ways even as they try to hide them.

Liberals are also quite likely to hope for diverse representation of philosophical ideas not so that audiences will appreciate the ideological depth of a work or in some cases be prompted to think about significant issues for the first time, but so that people will tolerate or subjectively come to enjoy how people believe conflicting things that cannot possibly all be true at once, and many of which are either demonstrably false via logical contradiction or merely unprovable.  Diversity of philosophical worldviews is not at all the same as diversity of human physical characteristics or social standing.  If humans matter, then having certain genitalia or skin color or lineage is morally meaningless.  In contrast, ideas that are false cannot deserve to be respected or celebrated whether or not truth has any moral value.  Either way, they are false and and thus holding to them or defending them is irrational by default.  Wanting diversity of worldviews to be positively engaged with in entertainment out of relativistic pluralism is irrationalistic, but so is wanting diversity of artistic experimentation without the diversity in human bodily nature that is so easily observable in everyday life.  These are the ways that liberals and conservatives respectively tend to leap into stupidity when it comes to diversity in art.

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