I suppose in our culture - in our lifetime - we've always enjoyed people who tell it straight. We like our presidents, our comedians, and our actors to do that. . . It's funny. You say that people prefer a tasteful formalism - as opposed to an oppressive formalism - but I do feel very strongly that form follows function.
The rejection of all abstract formalism. Materialism reminds every science of its real source: the world men transform. No science can, whether in its history or its object, grasp its own origins within itself or constitute itself as a closed world, exhaustively defined by internal rules. Materialism refers every science and every activity to the reality they depend on, even if this dependence is masked by a great many abstract mediations: mathematics as well as logic, aesthetics as well as ethics and politics.
The least-challenging way to make art for me would be to reinforce decorative formalism or find a way to extend entertainment values. Humor can sometimes be the only way out of this intolerable dilemma. And if that doesn't work, arson.
Do not speak of God much. After a very little conversation on the highest nature, thought deserts us and we run into formalism.
We must grow out of religion. It is either bugaboo, formalism, or hysteria. Besides, what proof is there that "the churches" know more about "God" than the Cockney sentry on duty outside the camp? We have only their say-so.
But it is certainly not possible to insist on one hand that the formalism is complete and to insist on the other hand that its application to 'the actual' actually demands a step which cannot be derived from it.
In theology the conservative temper tends to formalism.
