For better or worse I have been identified by the British
establishment as the person who can be relied upon to defend the
indefensible, and who might be allowed to defend the indefensible
even on state television (that is, the BBC) provided the defense is
sufficiently diluted by others defending the obvious. In official
code, “indefensible” means “conservative,” while “obvious” means
“left-liberal.” Hence when the BBC asked me to contribute to a
television series on beauty it was expected that I would argue that
there really is such a thing, that it is not just a matter of
taste, that it is connected with the noble, the aspirational, and
the holy in our feelings, and that the postmodern culture, which
emphasizes ugliness, despondency, and desecration, is a betrayal of
a sacred calling. So that is what I said, since after all they were
paying me. To achieve the balance that the BBC is required by its
constitution to deliver, two other programs were commissioned,
reaffirming the orthodoxies. They argued that art is not about
beauty but about originality, and originality means putting
yourself on display, with the tongue, or some other suitable organ,
sticking out.
In Why Beauty Matters I talked a bit about art, but I
was more concerned to draw attention to the place of beauty in
everyday life — in manners, clothes, interior decoration, and
ordinary vernacular buildings. I criticized both the functional
concrete and glass architecture that has destroyed cities all over
the world and the self-centered manners that have done the same to
domestic life. I tried to explain why the philosophers of the
Enlightenment followed Shaftesbury in placing beauty at the center
of the new code of secular values. For Shaftesbury, Burke, Kant,
Schiller, and their followers, I suggested, beauty was the path
back to the world that they were losing in losing the Christian God
— the world of meaning, order, and transcendence, which we must be
constantly emulating in this world if our lives are to be truly
human and truly meaningful. And I went on to argue that, since the
puerile jokes of Marcel Duchamp, repeated again and again in every
art-school graduate exhibition in Britain, a habit of sarcasm and
desecration had overcome the practice of visual art.
Hence British artists today — at least those recognized by the
official culture — have nothing much to show us except how
repulsive they are. It seemed to me obvious that Delacroix’s
painting of his unmade bed (in the Maison Delacroix in Paris) is a
true work of art, which shows something about mankind’s spiritual
condition, while Tracey Emin’s famous bed (in the Tate Modern
gallery in London) is just an unmade bed. We can deduce from the
sight of this bed quite a lot about the person who unmade it, but
that does not distinguish it from any other piece of debris left in
the wake of a human life. The higher meaning that is the aim of art
— the meaning that shows why life matters — is something that
this bed neither achieves nor aims for.
I received more than 500 e-mails from viewers, all but one
saying, “Thank Heavens someone is saying what needs to be said,”
half of them adding, “but how did you get away with it on the BBC?”
Meanwhile the reviewers ganged up to lament the sad, anomalous, and
reactionary character of poor Scruton, and to thank the BBC for
showing the absurdity and outdatedness of the aged professor’s
views. Waldemar Januszczak, who made another of the films in the
series on beauty, mounted a libelous character assassination in the
Sunday Times in order to advise his readers, in advance of
the showing of my film, to dismiss me and whatever I might try to
say to them.
The episode was, for me, an instructive glimpse into my country
and its culture. I don’t say that my film had any merit beyond its
honesty. But it produced overwhelming proof that its vision of art
and the aesthetic is shared by many ordinary British viewers, and
that the official culture is not just detached from such people but
profoundly hostile to what they believe, what they feel, and what
they hope for. The nihilistic art of our time is delivered to the
British people as a rebuke, which they are to accept in all
humility, and in a spirit of apology for having wanted something
“higher.” There is nothing higher — that is the lesson to be
gleaned from Young British Art, and from the heaps of nonsensical
garbage that it has delivered to our museums and galleries. We can
understand the human condition, it tells us, only if we adopt a
posture of rudeness and confrontation, and if we let those tongues
stick out.
THIS IS JUST ONE ASPECT of something that American visitors to
Britain increasingly remark upon. In the '50s and '60s, when my
generation was growing up, British people were actively recruited
by the educational system and the worlds of art and religion to an
aspirational culture. Those were the days of Henry Moore and
Benjamin Britten, of Graham Sutherland and Michael Tippett. W. H.
Auden was an important voice, as was the ex-American T. S. Eliot.
Britain was a place of deep historical and religious significance.
You were privileged to belong on its soil, and all around you the
national history had left the signs and portents of a higher way of
life. At the risk of exaggeration, it could be said that my
country, in those years when the baby boom generation was advancing
toward its lifelong immaturity, was an experiment in redemption.
Its art, culture, and religion were devoted to the ideal of a
community in which decency, puzzlement, and self-denial held sway.
And there remained, as a kind of leftover from wartime propaganda,
the belief in the gentleman, who faces life in a posture of
self-sacrificing devotion to nonsensical ideals — nonsensical,
that is, from the point of view of the cynical observer, but not
nonsensical at all, given the spirit in which they were
accepted.
The American visitor to Britain today, and especially the
visitor who retains a memory of that extraordinary world in which
decency, self-deprecation, and the stiff upper lip were the ruling
principles, often recoils in shock at what he finds. The public
culture is one of appetite and satire, and the whole country seems
to be “in your face,” as though sticking out a collective tongue.
Many American friends tell me this, and speak sorrowfully of the
change from the Britain that they used to visit with a sense of
coming home, to the Britain that they visit today, which is a land
of strangers. The interesting thing, however, and the response to
my film seems to confirm this, is that many of the British people
agree with them. The British people too are in a land of strangers,
and the culture that rules over them is one to which many of my
countrymen cannot in their hearts belong.
The official ethos, which prevails in schools and universities,
and also in the Labour Party, is one of scorn and repudiation
toward the old ideals. Official British culture is accurately
portrayed by Tracey Emin’s bed. It is a culture of emotional chaos
and random affections, in which traditional loyalties play no part.
Emin herself is the illegitimate daughter of a Turkish Cypriot, and
her situation is typical of her generation. Unable to identify with
a country or a way of life, educated by a curriculum of
multicultural fairy tales, and learning in art school that you find
your place in the world through transgression, and through putting
the self on display, she has had the good sense to be a publicly
visible and authentic mess. Her works may not be works of art, in
the sense that my generation was brought up to understand this
honorific label, but they show a world that the official culture of
Britain has chosen to endorse.
The circumstantial evidence of the response to my film proves
nothing. All I know is that a lot of people out there feel as I do.
They agree with me that beauty matters, that desecration and
nihilism are crimes, and that we should find the way to exalt our
world and to endow it with a more than worldly significance. But
perhaps just as many or more believe the official “multicultural”
story, which tells us that there is nothing special about Britain,
that the old ideals and dignities are mere illusions, and that the
purpose of art is to pour scorn on the values of antiquated people.
And if the impression of American visitors is right, it is not the
official culture only, but also the rising generation of New Brits,
which has settled for facetiousness against dignity and
transgression against the norms of social life. If this is so, then
at least one part of the message of my film has been vindicated:
namely that beauty matters, and that you cannot pour scorn on
beauty without losing sight of the meaning of life.
