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Rape, pillage, murder, human and animal sacrifice, concubinage, and slavery in the Iliad; misogyny in the Oresteia and countless other works; blood-curdling vengeance; anti-semitism in more works of literature than one can count, including works by Shakespeare and Dickens; racism and sexism likewise; homophobia (think only of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Mann’s “Death in Venice”); monarchism, aristocracy, caste systems and other illegitimate (as they seem to us) forms of hierarchy; colonialism, imperialism, religious obscurantism, gratuitous violence, torture (as of Iago in Othello), and criminality; alcoholism and drug-addiction, relentless stereotyping; sadism . . .

Against Posner’s hair-raising reminders (his list goes on) can be examples of moral uplift found in literature and drama. The trouble many of the most influential of the edifying works—Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Pilgrim’s Progress, for instance—are not the best works of literary art. Posner’s point, as Peter Lamarque has nicely put it, is not to deny literature can have morally beneficial effects; it is rather that the benefits are so obscure, so diffuse and self-contradictory, that they poor evidence for the claim that moral edification is the main achievement of literature.

Art’s encounters with morality and politics are made difficult by the that moral and social systems require rules to be observed and obeyed. Moral or legal systems essentially ask that people be good, and prefer (or require) narratives to promote that end. Art’s most essential is not that the characters it fictively portrays be good but that they be interesting: Oedipus, Richard III, Becky Sharp. I do not believe this is a mere cultural convention: it is a natural outcome of the fact fiction is imaginative (and therefore partly insulated from moral judgments) and intended to capture attention. That is why even the earliest examples of literature—the Iliad and the Odyssey, for instance—take their audience far beyond moral instruction. In so doing, they effectively undermine morality, which is one reason why Plato in the Republic wanted to have Homer banned from his ideal state.

Color and variety, the spectacle of human wills set against myriad art. This is especially true in the regrettable way that much academic criticism has been carried out in the last generation. It may be exciting discovery for some to know that Rudyard Kipling was a racist that Jane Austen was not perhaps sufficiently bestirred by the slave trade, but besides being reminders that the past is a foreign country, such do not tell us much about their art. Politics is rightly about what be done today in order to improve our lives. The arts as we confront them in Milton or the late Beethoven quartets are about features the human condition that are not open to “improvement” by ethics committees or by legislatures. As the literary theorist Ihab Hassan it, politics, “when it becomes primary in our lives, tends to exteriorize all the difficulties of existence. It literally makes them superficial Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Pascal are not. Tragedy is not injustice.”

4. High-art traditions demand individuality. Why would anyone awkward when two women show up at a party coincidentally wearing same evening dress? Where did we learn to react in this way? answer is that we didn’t simply learn it, as we learned the road code. The sense of awkwardness comes from an intuitive recognition that an eve ning dress—along with the coiffure, the makeup, the jewelry—ought context of a party to be the expression of an individual personality, ought to show the originality of a person. A party is an occasion display—flamboyant or discreet—whether the woman is young mingling with suitors, or happily married and just demonstrating personal taste (and maybe her status). In social life generally, we expect be presented with distinguishing differences in outlook and expression, especially on occasions involving display. Everyone in his or should stand out and be an individual. For a person of either sex,