Offbeat Humor

Chingford has long been recognised as the natural home for English eschatologists. pic.twitter.com/s9b6kaQuWu

— Ian Duhig FRSL (@ianduhig) March 3, 2026

 

Their attitude to the thing they love is imbued with judgement and discrimination.

From Beauty: A Very Short Introduction by Roger Scruton.  

For the past two or three years I have been wrestling with a set of interconnected thoughts which I still do not have untangled.  

The foundational observation is that Classical Liberalism is in constant struggle with totalitarian systems which are in themselves antithetical to the philosophical foundations of Classical Liberalism.  Totalitarian systems such as Socialism, Communism, Islam, and Wokeism (derivative from the first two), etc.  

What is the Classical Liberal response to someone espousing arguments from any of these totalitarian systems of thought?  To engage in argument.  To debate.  Which is fundamentally a waste of time.  The Totalitarian system's goal is to win and crush anything inconsistent with itself.  Argument and debate are mere tactics on the path to victory.  They have no relevance or reality in the totalitarian context.  

What is the Classical Liberal antidote to the Totalitarian mind?  What I have been considering is that it is a three pronged aspiration - pursuit of Knowledge (arguments and debate), pursuit of Truth, and pursuit of Beauty.  The first two are interesting to think through and I am pretty confident in their role.

The pursuit of beauty is where I have a conviction but not a particularly well developed argument.

These passages from Scruton are relevant to the thought.  Beauty is always, and necessarily, both intensely personal and individual, while also having a communal and social aspect.  It is the individual element which renders beauty incompatible with Totalitarianism.

Just as there is sex addiction, arising from the decoupling of sexual pleasure from the inter-personal intentionality of desire, so too is there stimulus addiction—the hunger to be shocked, gripped, stirred in whatever way might take us straight to the goal of excitement—which arises from the decoupling of sensory interest from rational thought. The pathology here is familiar to us, and was interestingly caricatured by Aldous Huxley, in his account of the ‘feelies’—the panoramic shows in Brave New World in which every sense-modality is engaged. Maybe the Roman games were similar: short cuts to awe, horror and fear which reinforced the ensuing sense of safety, by prompting the visceral relief that it is not I but another who has been torn to pieces in the ring. And maybe the 5-second cut which is the stock-in- trade of the B movie and the TV advert operates in a similar way—setting up addictive circuits that keep the eyes glued to the screen.

The contrast that I have been implicitly drawing between the love that venerates and the scorn that desecrates is like the contrast between taste and addiction. Lovers of beauty direct their attention outwards, in search of a meaning and order that brings sense to their lives. Their attitude to the thing they love is imbued with judgement and discrimination. And they measure themselves against it, trying to match its order in their own living sympathies.

Addiction, as the psychologists point out, is a function of easy rewards. The addict is someone who presses again and again on the pleasure switch, whose pleasures by-pass thought and judgement to settle in the realm of need. Art is at war with effect addiction, in which the need for stimulation and routinized excitement has blocked the path to beauty by putting acts of desecration centre stage. Why this addiction should be so virulent now is an interesting question: whatever the explanation, however, my argument implies that the addiction to effect is the enemy not only of art but also of happiness, and that anybody who cares for the future of humanity should study how to revive the ‘aesthetic education’, as Schiller described it, which has the love of beauty as its goal.

Ties to the idea that one of our present challenges is that we have become unmoored from constraints.  Absent constraints we are at risk of overindulgence to the point of addiction.

In a world of comparative and astonishing abundance, we are able to indulge ourselves in a fashion never before achievable.  When there is a dessicated but ever present access to virtually everything (knowledge, pictures, sound, etc.) everywhere and always, I wonder that there is even any remaining commitment to experience, to engagement, to anticipation, and of course to the pursuit of Knowledge, Truth, and Beauty.  

Augustus at the tomb of Alexander the Great, 1878 by Lionel Royer

Augustus at the tomb of Alexander the Great, 1878 by Lionel Royer (France, 1852-1926)

Click to enlarge.