@XXSpadeMasterXX,
The truth Spade is recognisable sensually. Take the distinct musical differences there are between cultures. Even sometimes between regions or even districts.
So also in the plastic arts and clothing. Poetic styles as well.
Mailer, following Aquinas, said that if it feels good it is good. That the good is something we are drawn to and the bad repels us.
And it's different for everybody. Unfortunately, what feels good to some people is bad for society. And then steps have to be taken to inhibit that sort of good. Under certain circumstances severe steps. The age old problem of the tension between the individual and society.
How bads are identified is a scientific operation as is what to do about them under the operant conditioning exigencies. Which are too complex for the man in the street.
The bads, like the goods, are hierarchical. There are really bad bads, ordinary bads and not so bads. With appropriate inhibiting sanctions.
There might be good bads even. Creativity's power source some claim.
And goods, when too good, can become bads. Like with the Cathars.
And all in a flux combining the industrial arts and the size of the population as with a chemical reaction. The industrial arts and the resources to which they are applied are redundant without the population.
Imagine a cauldron in which the industrial arts are stagnant. The population is the fire. Getting hotter and hotter as the bellows are pumped faster and faster until there is nothing left but a bit of inorganic dust.
Atheists on here are only able to identify bads using the Christian reference book. Some, like de Sade and Freud and Reich and Marx and Skinner, can identify bads in another way for which they have a certain scientific plausibility which is not easily dismissed unless it is charged with naivete.
Whether our capacity to be drawn to some things and repelled by others is instinctive or learned is a subject on which much hot air has been expended.
Those aspects of a culture which alien cultures readily adopt when there is no pressing need to, as there is with technology, which is learned: rock and roll, lingerie, for example, burgers, (dare I say smoking) provide evidence of an instinctive attraction.
