Note on art and the political
In the world of public thinking, there are moralists and experimentalists. Moralists think you should criticize ideas you want defeated, and the personality of the person who holds the idea is as important as it is. For a moralist, the charge of hypocrisy is damning, for you can only rightly criticize a tendency you do not share in. For experimentalists, you should want to criticize what you best understand because you are part of it. And then the charge of hypocrisy is irrelevant. Identities of persons matter little or not at all.
If you criticize something you are part of, while affirming that belonging, you will be more likely to criticize with a generous eye. There is no role for war or policing if what is bad cannot be walled off from the good.
The paradigm of argument ought to be discussion of art works rather than the prosecution of accusations in courts. In the latter case, people would tend to become like those protestants who, in the interest of being polite, rarely say anything, especially to those they live or work around.
The artwork is an object of curiosity detached from a context of shared use. It is a shared object of a use outside all projects and norms other than understanding it, in its mere appearance. The shift in art in the last century from the norm of the beautiful to that of the interesting is imminent in its logic.
When what is evil is ugly, we don’t actively condemn it (in the militancy of opposition) until we have appreciated it, for whatever concerns us is by definition interesting. Judging and acting are different from thinking, with an immediacy it lacks. But the norms of acting and judging rightly are those of thinking. We intuit things as good or bad, mostly because pleasing or displeasing, and we lose our way if we fail to connect things up using reason. Thinking is to knowing what love is to sex and marriage; the most banal necessities are justified with reference to things most honor and few understand. What we always need to understand better is what we are part of, not what we know we must reject.