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<p class="paracenter">THE MODERN TASTE
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<p class="para"> From the standpoint of artistic 
and literary taste and culture, the present world is a thing of extremes. On one 
side, it is trying hard to discover something very noble, and on the other, it 
is sinking into a vulgarity which is infinitely greater than the vulgarity, say, 
of two or three centuries ago. In those times people who were not cultured were 
crude, but their crudeness resembled the crudeness of animals and had not much 
perversion in it—there was something certainly, for as soon as the mind appears, 
perversion also comes in. But in our days, what does not rise to the peak, 
remains on level earth, is a crudeness of the most perverted kind; that is to 
say, it is not only ignorant or stupid, it is ugly, dirty, repulsive, it is 
deformed, it is vile, it is extremely low. What makes it so is the wrong use of 
the mind. If there were no mind, this perversion would not exist. Now what is 
ugly is ugly from all points of view.
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<p class="para"> There are things that are 
considered beautiful these days. I have seen photographs and reproductions
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<br><p class="pageno">Page-62</p>
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<p class="para">which arc frightfully vulgar in the perverted sense, and yet 
people are uproarious about them and find them pretty. That means there is 
something there which has not only no culture and development, but has developed 
in the wrong way, that is to say, is deformed, which is worse, for it is much 
more difficult to straighten a perverted and deformed object than to enlighten 
that which is merely ignorant or without education.
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<p class="para"> I believe there are certain 
things that have become great instruments of perversion and among them I name 
the Cinema. The Cinema could have been, and I hope one day it will be, an 
instrument of education and culture. But for the moment it is largely an 
instrument of perversion, a truly hideous perversion: perversion of taste, 
perversion of consciousness, a moral and even a physical ugliness. And yet it is 
something which can be serviceable for education, for progress, for artistic 
culture and growth. It can be made a means for the spread of the sense of the 
beautiful and the creation of things beautiful in a way much more general and 
accessible to all than it was possible in the older methods. But what could have 
been better, is not better but has become worse.
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<br><p class="pageno">Page-63</p>
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<p class="para"> As I said, we are in a period of 
excesses; we move from one excess to another. If it is not an excess of zeal 
towards perfection, we fall back into the opposite excess of perversion. As we 
live in the midst of such a world, if we carefully note we shall find that we 
automatically share in the universal vulgarism, unless we are watchful over 
ourselves and bring down into our being the light of our highest consciousness; 
at every step we run the risk of grave errors of taste, in matters spiritual 
also.
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<br><p class="pageno">Page-64</p>
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