A Philosophical Happy Hour questioning whether we do ourselves or our communities harm or benefit through cheap entertainment: movies, television, books, games, and more.
Popular entertainment is often dismissed as shallow, disposable, or even harmful. Yet much of what people actually read, watch, and enjoy falls squarely into this category. This week’s Philosophical Happy Hour takes as its point of departure George Orwell’s 1945 essay “Good Bad Books”, which challenges the assumption that only “high” literature deserves serious attention. What makes a book—or a film, television series, or game—worth engaging? Can a book be artistically poor yet worthwhile for humans to read? Is there merit in the visually beautiful—but narratively stupid? And how should we think about popular culture’s role in shaping imagination, habits, and judgment?
Distrust of Popular Entertainment
We have all likely known from a young age that some art falls into the “serious” category, and that the rest, to appeal to broad audiences, is “popular”. By our mid-teens or early twenties, we also likely discover that much “serious” art is not very good, and that many forms of “popular” art, though intended only to amuse and delight, may be better made than much that is serious. In other words: both can fail and both can succeed.
This raises some questions, however. Is it better to have a good piece of popular art than a bad piece of the serious? Better a stupid success than a noble failure? Conversely, do those who ignore popular art and attend only to the serious become snobs? Is this itself a vice?
But perhaps there are other reasons to distrust popular entertainment. In the twentieth century especially, and into the twenty-first, such entertainment has been seen as a kind of propagandistic tool, used to present as attractive various ideologies or political positions, persuasions away from traditional morality and towards base and vulgar pleasures or beliefs. Few popular works have conduced to the opposite. And even those that have held to a more traditional moral code have seen their legacies, often, perverted by the proliferation of entertainment media.
Orwell: “Good Bad Books”
To help stimulate our conversation, we want this week to read the very brief 1945 essay by George Orwell, “Good Bad Books”, which title he takes as a paraphrase of G.K. Chesterton: “the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished.” As examples, Orwell lists many authors and their works, some likely unfamiliar to us, others known to all. This list, in itself, should show us something: we may know as more enduring some of the authors of “low” works than those of the “serious” or “high”.
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Thus the central claim in Orwell’s piece: what makes a work lasting, and good—even if it is bad—is the vitality of its spirit, not its artistic refinement.
Aesthetic Taste, Formation, and Responsibility
De gustibus non est disputandum—and yet, we do dispute matters of taste all the time. Most of all, it seems, taste is a matter of formation (exposure, education, understanding works together as parts of a whole). We form habits of taste. As with all things which may be habituated, there arises also responsibility. Who is responsible for the formation of taste? Each individual? “Culture”? Community? Parents?
This Wednesday (21 January 2026, from 5:45-7:15+ pm ET) to join our Philosophical Happy Hour as we take up these and related questions:
- What do you instinctively classify as “guilty pleasure” entertainment, and why?
- Is Orwell right that vitality and sincerity can compensate for artistic deficiency?
- Can something be morally or intellectually formative even if it is aesthetically weak?
- Should educators and cultural critics engage popular entertainment, or ignore it? Who is responsible for our tastes?
- Where should we draw the line between harmless amusement and cultural degradation?
- Does popularity tell us anything reliable about truth, goodness, or beauty?