Beauty despite
One of these days I'll write an essay. It would help if I was asked for one - I love the idea of writing something that stands a chance of being read. For now, though, the usual: random thoughts randomly snuffled over. Long form tweeting into the awaiting void.
I've been feeling a bit upset and a bit dispirited after seeing huge numbers of people here in Guayaquil attending protest demonstrations against a recent government decision to allow same-sex marriage. If I wanted to, I could follow the controversy at first hand on Twitter - I've a shrewd idea which accounts I would have to resub to - but from the little that filters through to my stagnant, brackish TL I know what I'd find: an unkindness of ad hominems, lots of religious sloganizing, the odd etymological fallacy (matri-mon-ium! it's depressing how often that comes up), the odd red herring and slippery slope (but think of the children! do you really want them turned into cavorting drag queens?) and, ranged against, the Parnassian po-facedness of the local progresía. I also know from repeated experience that engaging in any sort of controversy does nothing good for my blood pressure, which is currently under medication. So it strikes me that the best I can do is turn my incapacity to get down and dirty to some advantage, by doing the step back and look at the bigger picture routine. That's the idea, anyway.
There's something that, I've always thought, goes wrong with us when we are still children. It's that thing that has often shocked me about the customary smug phrasing of school debate motions: "this House believes that X should Y", where the "should" in question requires a certain group of people to do something they don't actually want to do, like submit to the death penalty, or send their kids to a mixed school, or learn Greek as well as Latin, or do military service. Obviously, there are a certain number of shoulds that any sort of civilisation requires us to abide by, like or not - but it's the blithe, unthinking arrogance and glibness that gets me, this idea that because you're wearing a tie and washed behind your ears this morning you get to decide how other people should live their lives - and more often than not, the absence of any recognition that laissez faire is the elementary default for any such discussion, to go beyond which requires very high standards of logic and evidence and necessity. Are we educating our kids into thinking that coercion and lack of coercion are morally equivalent, with perhaps a slight preponderance of cachet or charisma accruing to the former, providing you can appeal to some fragile moral majority to justify your interference in other people's lives? Or is the desire to assert power over others, even if only symbolically through an assumption of moral authority, part of the human condition, something we each have to educate ourselves painfully and arduously out of as we grow older? I don't know. I also don't know how many people share my instinctive repulsion towards moralism: I have toyed elsewhere with the idea that there are two sorts of people, the autistic (me, us) and the oughtistic - the hamsters and the velociraptors - with the former condemned to consult their most primitive libidinal wiring to get some sort of handle on the latter; but I don't know if there's much science to back me up. Still, I think that's what's going on here. There are people who, prima facie, are convinced they know a "right" way to live, or to form a family, or to bring up a child, and are so enlightened they do not even need to know what science says on the matter (if it contradicts them, that just shows it's bad, paid-for science). Further, these people are not urbane enough to feel any residual sense of embarrassment while demanding that other people refrain from offending against their sense of entitlement to a certain sort of "society". They actually think they have a right to demand that the law should reflect their moral prejudices, irrespective of any harm caused to the lives of others, and at a pinch, irrespective even of whether theirs is the majority view. I don't see how you can avoid this conclusion.
That said, the Pollyanna in me persists, as always, in hoping that there is some sort of simple misunderstanding here, which once patiently cleared up, will allow us all to settle for some sort of modus vivendi. And lately I've been wondering if that misunderstanding might not have something to do with the absence of beauty in people's lives.
Beauty is something - in fact it's that thing - without which I could not live my life (I might have to live something, but it wouldn't be a life). This being so, it's mildly disappointing to find that not many people seem to have any desire to talk about it, at least in those terms. There's an eccentric English philosopher I know of, a Sir Roger Scruton, who has written books on the subject, but on the whole I find aesthetics is something most modern philosophers turn somersaults to avoid engaging with, perhaps because they think it's embarrassingly subjective - which of course it is. That's the point of it, surely? It's in the eye of the beholder: but not in the same way as a speck of dust or sand, rather in the same way as a pupil or a retina: it helps you, or rather urges you, to see, to seek out things to see, to pay attention to what you see even when the thing you're looking at isn't a velociraptor and doesn't have to be, you know, dealt with. And the point about seeing, which I hope you'll concede no matter how anti-postmodernist you are, is that it's also subjective. We do not all see or feel the same elephant even when we want to. Seeing is conditioned by what we seek and want and by what we expect and by what we've seen before: these things make up the keyhole we peer through. Seeing is personal: and so, hence, is beauty.
I spend a lot of my tiny allocation of free time (living time) trying to create beauty, or trying to find it. In doing so, I know full well that scarce one person in a million would share my seedy, unsavoury, perverse, off-kilter view of what is beautiful and what isn't. In saying "this (inky picture, daft music, clumsy pornographic scene, piquant arrangement of plants and reptiles and flies and turds) is beautiful", I'm not saying you have to or should like it, or that it deserves to be fenced off by the National Trust or put on show at the Tate. I'm simply saying that it does for me what similar, perhaps more conventionally uplifting, objects or tableaux do for you: it makes me accepting of my place in the world. It persuades me, momentarily, that my present consciousness is part of a larger arrangement, in which it has been suddenly swept up, like a dry leaf in a spring breeze. It nudges me towards a state that I would need another essay to describe, but which I will reference here simply as wholeness: a Platonic abstraction which no one, probably, in the present day can get very close to, but towards which every little step makes a difference.
One of my recent tweets which, like all my best tweets, nobody liked, was this:
"Ethics deals with how we live with others. Aesthetics deals with how we live with ourselves".
When I see people demonstrating to stop other people exercising their freedom to marry who they want, I see people who have failed to understand or make the above distinction. What they seem to fear is that, if same-sex marriage goes ahead, they will find themselves tomorrow living in an "ugly" society, one without real men or real women or real children, a grotesque upside-down world bristling with offences against Theology and Geometry. They are, in short, applying aesthetic criteria to an ethical question - the opposite mistake to the one made by those Progressives who insist on viewing art, architecture and the like as puzzles to which the solution is some statement of their creator's political orientation or group membership or social prejudices. Admittedly, it does take some discipline to remember that, in deciding questions of ethics, our personal vision of a "better world" is quite simply irrelevant. The opponents of same-sex marriage imagine, perhaps, an aesthetically pleasing world of properly gendered heterosexual couples bringing up properly gendered heterosexual children, with perhaps the odd ghetto for deviants tucked safely away in some corner of the map. Their natural opponents are perhaps driven by a different but equally beguiling vision, of a colourful, picturesquely diverse, rainbow-hatted society, in which every possible permutation of gender orientation and sexual preference is greeted with accepting smiles, and no one is made to feel left out. Each side will devote time and energy to demonstrating, or at least insinuating, that the other side's idealised vision is foolish, impractical, unrealistic or grotesque. That's what happens when you allow yourself to be led astray by the aesthetics of the question. The ethical approach, by contrast, is straightforward: Do I have some sort of right or authority to decide who other folks should marry? No? OK: would their choices of marriage partner cause unavoidable harm to me or to others? No? Then the matter is clear, regardless of which of the two "visions" described I privately find to be more appealing.
And yes, accepting that others are free to live how they please provided they don't cause harm to others often means accepting various sorts of "ugliness". It means accepting that some, maybe all, of the things we value aesthetically will one day be trampled underfoot by the selfie-seeking crowd. It means accepting that London, pace John Cleese, can no longer continue to be the neighbourly, matey, have-some-grapes place depicted in Mrs Miniver or in, say, the opening scenes of Hitchcock's Frenzy. It means accepting that no one will ever again be able to marvel with fresh ears at the early Beatles, who will be written off as not thudding or quantised or ironic enough for the fastidious tastes of the all-conquering gen-Zers. It means accepting that there will no longer be any beaches not strewn with plastic and tin, or Himalayan mountaintops not dotted with bags of excrement, or women not afflicted with eye-roll spasms. The byproducts of liberal civilization aren't beautiful, and it's naive to expect them to be.
Which is why I was surprised to find, in a recent Twitter exchange, that not everyone sees the constant recalibration of our personal aesthetic filters as a necessity (or even as a possibility). I assume my interlocutor was young; maybe that was part of the problem. I have spent my life falling in love with things and people that were then bulldozed to make way for marriages or shopping malls: I assume that's a universal experience for people my age (even those who never actually nurs'd a dear gazelle). What do you do in such a case? The beauty you saw has gone: well, you just have to teach yourself to find beauty somewhere else instead. That's how it goes. And if you define beauty as broadly as I do (in this context, roughly "anything the contemplation of which contributes to your mental and emotional well-being") then this learning to recalibrate your filters is an important part of staying alive - an important part of that acceptance of immovable reality which the Stoics enjoined (I'm interested to see there's something of a revival of Stoicism going on at present, I guess for reasons related to the present topic). We can't be inhumanly indifferent to what's around us - probably we shouldn't be - but at the same time, a sane liberal ethic prevents us from trying to control or even influence anything around us we do not legitimately possess (which obviously includes people). So, drawn against our better judgment to love that which is about to be taken away from us and turned into a meme or a sitcom punchline, what freedom do we have? Not much, except that of saying to the destructive whirlwind: do your worst, wipe out who or what you choose from my landscape, I will still be there at the end, snuffling around the wreckage, looking for something else to love, to be inspired by - some broken toy, some chance play of sunlight on a wall, some suggestive flash of unwittingly symbolic thigh, some momentarily orgiastic rush of a nearby fountain, some vermilion flycatcher on a wire, some unexpectedly kind word from an acquaintance who has momentarily forgotten the commandment to be po-faced unto thy neighbour.
Having said that, there are of course things you can't love however hard you try, and others you'd better not try.
I don't really know how my beauty filters work. I'm sensitive to the Golden Ratio, as I guess you are, and symmetry in features, and harmonious proportion, and perhaps Kantian crypto-teleology. Then there's the evocation of ungraspable childhood experience - that's hugely important for me. Increasingly, if I can't relate the seen to the undeniably lived but elusively unremembered, it doesn't register aesthetically. I can't be moved by or even remember the weird things that happen in dreams, unless they evoke an overwhelming (and often inexplicable) childish emotion. I can't understand a chord shift unless it be one I heard in the charts in the 60s, or was regularly thudded out by my big sister in the piano room downstairs. I can only find beautiful the sight of woodlice scurrying in the mud below an upturned stone because I upturned so many stones myself before the age of ten - that sacramental window of time, the age when we cared about colours, when experience could be received directly, rather than mediated through dour algorithms of calculation and comparison. I assume this is because the role of beauty is to take you out of yourself, and there's no easier way of doing this (at least for a lonely introvert) than rewinding you to a self that once was yours, but is no longer. A past you is generally more accessible than a present someone else.
As for beauty in women (I have to go there: for lots of people today it's the only kind of beauty they've heard named as such) - well, I proposed elsewhere that there are five modes of lust, of which the contemplative is one, and that when we contemplate, we impose emotionally or aesthetically charged schemata upon the object, or upon certain attributes of same. I look at a beautiful woman and I see clues, intimations of significant otherness - the sort of otherness that one tends to process at some deep level as maternal or divine, as superior consciousness (superior in the sense of "more important than yours"). In addition, I scan her for signs of what she's thinking, how she feels, what she cares about, what she wants, how she wants to be treated, and what she might be willing to do to, or have done to her by, a hypothetical partner. In this way, she starts up as a fictional character, or a multiplicity of characters, and even the most static and the most inscrutable outward appearance is transformed into a narrative. It's the nature and quality of this narrative, in part, which determines my judgment of beauty. A beautiful woman has to look as if she might say this, or do this, or understand this. Otherwise she's just a marble statue.
What she might say or do or understand doesn't belong here, I think.
I've been feeling a bit upset and a bit dispirited after seeing huge numbers of people here in Guayaquil attending protest demonstrations against a recent government decision to allow same-sex marriage. If I wanted to, I could follow the controversy at first hand on Twitter - I've a shrewd idea which accounts I would have to resub to - but from the little that filters through to my stagnant, brackish TL I know what I'd find: an unkindness of ad hominems, lots of religious sloganizing, the odd etymological fallacy (matri-mon-ium! it's depressing how often that comes up), the odd red herring and slippery slope (but think of the children! do you really want them turned into cavorting drag queens?) and, ranged against, the Parnassian po-facedness of the local progresía. I also know from repeated experience that engaging in any sort of controversy does nothing good for my blood pressure, which is currently under medication. So it strikes me that the best I can do is turn my incapacity to get down and dirty to some advantage, by doing the step back and look at the bigger picture routine. That's the idea, anyway.
There's something that, I've always thought, goes wrong with us when we are still children. It's that thing that has often shocked me about the customary smug phrasing of school debate motions: "this House believes that X should Y", where the "should" in question requires a certain group of people to do something they don't actually want to do, like submit to the death penalty, or send their kids to a mixed school, or learn Greek as well as Latin, or do military service. Obviously, there are a certain number of shoulds that any sort of civilisation requires us to abide by, like or not - but it's the blithe, unthinking arrogance and glibness that gets me, this idea that because you're wearing a tie and washed behind your ears this morning you get to decide how other people should live their lives - and more often than not, the absence of any recognition that laissez faire is the elementary default for any such discussion, to go beyond which requires very high standards of logic and evidence and necessity. Are we educating our kids into thinking that coercion and lack of coercion are morally equivalent, with perhaps a slight preponderance of cachet or charisma accruing to the former, providing you can appeal to some fragile moral majority to justify your interference in other people's lives? Or is the desire to assert power over others, even if only symbolically through an assumption of moral authority, part of the human condition, something we each have to educate ourselves painfully and arduously out of as we grow older? I don't know. I also don't know how many people share my instinctive repulsion towards moralism: I have toyed elsewhere with the idea that there are two sorts of people, the autistic (me, us) and the oughtistic - the hamsters and the velociraptors - with the former condemned to consult their most primitive libidinal wiring to get some sort of handle on the latter; but I don't know if there's much science to back me up. Still, I think that's what's going on here. There are people who, prima facie, are convinced they know a "right" way to live, or to form a family, or to bring up a child, and are so enlightened they do not even need to know what science says on the matter (if it contradicts them, that just shows it's bad, paid-for science). Further, these people are not urbane enough to feel any residual sense of embarrassment while demanding that other people refrain from offending against their sense of entitlement to a certain sort of "society". They actually think they have a right to demand that the law should reflect their moral prejudices, irrespective of any harm caused to the lives of others, and at a pinch, irrespective even of whether theirs is the majority view. I don't see how you can avoid this conclusion.
That said, the Pollyanna in me persists, as always, in hoping that there is some sort of simple misunderstanding here, which once patiently cleared up, will allow us all to settle for some sort of modus vivendi. And lately I've been wondering if that misunderstanding might not have something to do with the absence of beauty in people's lives.
Beauty is something - in fact it's that thing - without which I could not live my life (I might have to live something, but it wouldn't be a life). This being so, it's mildly disappointing to find that not many people seem to have any desire to talk about it, at least in those terms. There's an eccentric English philosopher I know of, a Sir Roger Scruton, who has written books on the subject, but on the whole I find aesthetics is something most modern philosophers turn somersaults to avoid engaging with, perhaps because they think it's embarrassingly subjective - which of course it is. That's the point of it, surely? It's in the eye of the beholder: but not in the same way as a speck of dust or sand, rather in the same way as a pupil or a retina: it helps you, or rather urges you, to see, to seek out things to see, to pay attention to what you see even when the thing you're looking at isn't a velociraptor and doesn't have to be, you know, dealt with. And the point about seeing, which I hope you'll concede no matter how anti-postmodernist you are, is that it's also subjective. We do not all see or feel the same elephant even when we want to. Seeing is conditioned by what we seek and want and by what we expect and by what we've seen before: these things make up the keyhole we peer through. Seeing is personal: and so, hence, is beauty.
I spend a lot of my tiny allocation of free time (living time) trying to create beauty, or trying to find it. In doing so, I know full well that scarce one person in a million would share my seedy, unsavoury, perverse, off-kilter view of what is beautiful and what isn't. In saying "this (inky picture, daft music, clumsy pornographic scene, piquant arrangement of plants and reptiles and flies and turds) is beautiful", I'm not saying you have to or should like it, or that it deserves to be fenced off by the National Trust or put on show at the Tate. I'm simply saying that it does for me what similar, perhaps more conventionally uplifting, objects or tableaux do for you: it makes me accepting of my place in the world. It persuades me, momentarily, that my present consciousness is part of a larger arrangement, in which it has been suddenly swept up, like a dry leaf in a spring breeze. It nudges me towards a state that I would need another essay to describe, but which I will reference here simply as wholeness: a Platonic abstraction which no one, probably, in the present day can get very close to, but towards which every little step makes a difference.
One of my recent tweets which, like all my best tweets, nobody liked, was this:
"Ethics deals with how we live with others. Aesthetics deals with how we live with ourselves".
When I see people demonstrating to stop other people exercising their freedom to marry who they want, I see people who have failed to understand or make the above distinction. What they seem to fear is that, if same-sex marriage goes ahead, they will find themselves tomorrow living in an "ugly" society, one without real men or real women or real children, a grotesque upside-down world bristling with offences against Theology and Geometry. They are, in short, applying aesthetic criteria to an ethical question - the opposite mistake to the one made by those Progressives who insist on viewing art, architecture and the like as puzzles to which the solution is some statement of their creator's political orientation or group membership or social prejudices. Admittedly, it does take some discipline to remember that, in deciding questions of ethics, our personal vision of a "better world" is quite simply irrelevant. The opponents of same-sex marriage imagine, perhaps, an aesthetically pleasing world of properly gendered heterosexual couples bringing up properly gendered heterosexual children, with perhaps the odd ghetto for deviants tucked safely away in some corner of the map. Their natural opponents are perhaps driven by a different but equally beguiling vision, of a colourful, picturesquely diverse, rainbow-hatted society, in which every possible permutation of gender orientation and sexual preference is greeted with accepting smiles, and no one is made to feel left out. Each side will devote time and energy to demonstrating, or at least insinuating, that the other side's idealised vision is foolish, impractical, unrealistic or grotesque. That's what happens when you allow yourself to be led astray by the aesthetics of the question. The ethical approach, by contrast, is straightforward: Do I have some sort of right or authority to decide who other folks should marry? No? OK: would their choices of marriage partner cause unavoidable harm to me or to others? No? Then the matter is clear, regardless of which of the two "visions" described I privately find to be more appealing.
And yes, accepting that others are free to live how they please provided they don't cause harm to others often means accepting various sorts of "ugliness". It means accepting that some, maybe all, of the things we value aesthetically will one day be trampled underfoot by the selfie-seeking crowd. It means accepting that London, pace John Cleese, can no longer continue to be the neighbourly, matey, have-some-grapes place depicted in Mrs Miniver or in, say, the opening scenes of Hitchcock's Frenzy. It means accepting that no one will ever again be able to marvel with fresh ears at the early Beatles, who will be written off as not thudding or quantised or ironic enough for the fastidious tastes of the all-conquering gen-Zers. It means accepting that there will no longer be any beaches not strewn with plastic and tin, or Himalayan mountaintops not dotted with bags of excrement, or women not afflicted with eye-roll spasms. The byproducts of liberal civilization aren't beautiful, and it's naive to expect them to be.
Which is why I was surprised to find, in a recent Twitter exchange, that not everyone sees the constant recalibration of our personal aesthetic filters as a necessity (or even as a possibility). I assume my interlocutor was young; maybe that was part of the problem. I have spent my life falling in love with things and people that were then bulldozed to make way for marriages or shopping malls: I assume that's a universal experience for people my age (even those who never actually nurs'd a dear gazelle). What do you do in such a case? The beauty you saw has gone: well, you just have to teach yourself to find beauty somewhere else instead. That's how it goes. And if you define beauty as broadly as I do (in this context, roughly "anything the contemplation of which contributes to your mental and emotional well-being") then this learning to recalibrate your filters is an important part of staying alive - an important part of that acceptance of immovable reality which the Stoics enjoined (I'm interested to see there's something of a revival of Stoicism going on at present, I guess for reasons related to the present topic). We can't be inhumanly indifferent to what's around us - probably we shouldn't be - but at the same time, a sane liberal ethic prevents us from trying to control or even influence anything around us we do not legitimately possess (which obviously includes people). So, drawn against our better judgment to love that which is about to be taken away from us and turned into a meme or a sitcom punchline, what freedom do we have? Not much, except that of saying to the destructive whirlwind: do your worst, wipe out who or what you choose from my landscape, I will still be there at the end, snuffling around the wreckage, looking for something else to love, to be inspired by - some broken toy, some chance play of sunlight on a wall, some suggestive flash of unwittingly symbolic thigh, some momentarily orgiastic rush of a nearby fountain, some vermilion flycatcher on a wire, some unexpectedly kind word from an acquaintance who has momentarily forgotten the commandment to be po-faced unto thy neighbour.
Having said that, there are of course things you can't love however hard you try, and others you'd better not try.
I don't really know how my beauty filters work. I'm sensitive to the Golden Ratio, as I guess you are, and symmetry in features, and harmonious proportion, and perhaps Kantian crypto-teleology. Then there's the evocation of ungraspable childhood experience - that's hugely important for me. Increasingly, if I can't relate the seen to the undeniably lived but elusively unremembered, it doesn't register aesthetically. I can't be moved by or even remember the weird things that happen in dreams, unless they evoke an overwhelming (and often inexplicable) childish emotion. I can't understand a chord shift unless it be one I heard in the charts in the 60s, or was regularly thudded out by my big sister in the piano room downstairs. I can only find beautiful the sight of woodlice scurrying in the mud below an upturned stone because I upturned so many stones myself before the age of ten - that sacramental window of time, the age when we cared about colours, when experience could be received directly, rather than mediated through dour algorithms of calculation and comparison. I assume this is because the role of beauty is to take you out of yourself, and there's no easier way of doing this (at least for a lonely introvert) than rewinding you to a self that once was yours, but is no longer. A past you is generally more accessible than a present someone else.
As for beauty in women (I have to go there: for lots of people today it's the only kind of beauty they've heard named as such) - well, I proposed elsewhere that there are five modes of lust, of which the contemplative is one, and that when we contemplate, we impose emotionally or aesthetically charged schemata upon the object, or upon certain attributes of same. I look at a beautiful woman and I see clues, intimations of significant otherness - the sort of otherness that one tends to process at some deep level as maternal or divine, as superior consciousness (superior in the sense of "more important than yours"). In addition, I scan her for signs of what she's thinking, how she feels, what she cares about, what she wants, how she wants to be treated, and what she might be willing to do to, or have done to her by, a hypothetical partner. In this way, she starts up as a fictional character, or a multiplicity of characters, and even the most static and the most inscrutable outward appearance is transformed into a narrative. It's the nature and quality of this narrative, in part, which determines my judgment of beauty. A beautiful woman has to look as if she might say this, or do this, or understand this. Otherwise she's just a marble statue.
What she might say or do or understand doesn't belong here, I think.
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