Michael, one of the Two Blowhards, has a great … well he calls it a “rant”, but all I take that to mean is that it took him only ten minutes to write it. Whatever it is, it’s very good and very true, and is about the inadequacy of envy as the explanation of leftism. Michael offers another:
I’m hoping you can explain to me why so many people on the right, libertarian or conservative, discount the question of attractiveness. Are they puzzled by it? Do they think it’s pussy stuff? Are they even aware of it?
As you and I, arty maniacs, both know, beauty and pleasure play big roles in people’s lives. People — and not just artsy-fartsies — make life decisions based on feelings and tastes. Aesthetic preference is a powerful engine that can affect which neighborhood you choose to live in, how you dress and feed yourself, where you shop and travel, and how you make a living.
Too bad the right refuses to wrestle with the question of aesthetic preference. In doing so, they risk alienating everyone who’s attracted to attractiveness. (And who isn’t?) Seductiveness, glamour, sensuality, entertainment, food: are righties really willing to let the left own all these potent issues and qualities?
…
I’d humbly suggest that resorting to “envy” as one’s only, or root, explanation for leftie-ism, is itself unattractive. It has its validity, of course. But it’ll never sell.
Michael is kind enough to exclude Natalie Solent and our good selves (“slyness, elegance and perversity”) from these critical generalisations. If they haven’t already the Blowhards should also have a read of the sly, elegant and perverse Alice Bachini.
By the way, thanks again to the 2Bs for making me read Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilization, which I took with me on my recent holiday that I promised not to keep going on about. It’s over a thousand pages long and weighs about four and a half tons but I didn’t regret taking it with me for a single second. Had I left it behind I would have pined dreadfully. I’ve already done (since we’re on the subject of aesthetics) Athens, Florence, Shakespeare’s London, Vienna (twice – at each end of the nineteenth century), Paris (also end of C19) and post WW1 Berlin. Then it was on to the techies: Manchester (cotton), Glasgow (ships), Berlin again (electronics), and I’m now in Detroit doing Ford and his Model T. Great stuff, and there’s twice as much again more great stuff to come, including Hollywood (Hollywood) and fifties Memphis (rock ‘n’ roll). I will surely be saying more about this fabulous book.
“Arts and Entertainment” doesn’t really do all this justice, but it was the best label I could find. There isn’t a samizdata subject category for “not pussy stuff”.
Hear, hear! Guns and other macho machines are certainly ‘beautiful’ in their own way, but there is more to aesthetics than the music of the machine gun fire! Although with terrorist attacks nowadays and with the Beethoven’s 9th hijacked by the EU Tranzis, it may yet be the music of the spheres!
I can see the point, but if the Left have the monopoly on attractiveness and aesthetic appreciation, why did they build such incredibly ugly buildings? For anything built by the communists in the Eastern blor or 60s and 70s London, the only good thing to be said about them is that if you are in them you can’t see them. It’s the Right that argues that architecture should be beautiful, after all it wasn’t the right that created the concept of “brutalist architecture”.
Good point Sean. I was briefly an architecture student (and mostly I learned not to be an architect). But I also learned that Michael’s point did still apply to the architects, even then. They built amazingly ugly buildings, for other people, but they lived extremely beautiful lives, for themselves.
I was looked after for a while (while I worked in his office) by the family of the man who built those red brick blockhouses at Heston that you can see from the M4 (this only makes sense to Londoners), and who had also helped to perpetrate the Parkhill Estate in Sheffield. But he was simultaneously building a house for himself in the Oxfordshire countryside that was a delight.
They were genuinely kind and lovely people who meant desperately well. And the daughters …
What about the daughters?
The daughters were aesthetically enviable.
Speaking of horrid architecture, has anyone seen the new library they built over in Alexandria, Egypt? (Touted with much hooplah: “they’ve re-opened the Library!” Guys, that was a big deal thousands of years ago when there weren’t any other libraries. Now there are tons, and plenty of them aren’t afraid to stock “controversial” novels that might upset fanatical Islamists…) Anyway, it’s another plugly glass monstrosity.
I don’t think the left have a total monopoly on aesthetic beauty, but it is notable that the art and media world is dominated by lefty-liberals rather than warmongers like myself. This is why I think fashion is important: it’s the place where capitalism and aesthetics meet and have wild sex in a grand hotel room in Paris. But something about this meeting is scary, so people write it off as trivial and take sides. Prettiness *or* practicality must be the order or the day, they think. Shame.
(Hmm, does that make any sense? This is the other problem with the aesthetic world-view: it’s not very literal).
Alice, in what way is being a leftist related to not being a warmonger? There have been plenty of leftist warmongers, and at least one fiscally conservative pacifist…
It isn’t so much that aesthetics is only for pussies, as that the only attributes it is capable of perceiving are those that are least important. By this I mean, that as nice as it can be to have a beautifully engineered car, it is even nicer to have one whose brakes work. Also, the only measure of aesthetics is one’s personal feelings. The problem is not that people have feelings about a product, person, or idea, it is that there are too many people who use no other criteria for decision making. Deciding which car to purchase for instance, based solely on how ‘cute’ it is.
The arguments of collectivism are designed to appeal to feeling rather than logic. So it shouldn’t come as a shock that areas of life dominated by people who make a living catering to the emotions are a hotbed for the left.