None of what I’m about to say comes out of the burning bush. I claim no universal truth, nor even wide applicability. It’s just my very personal (and hence probably flawed) way of looking at things.
My first reaction to any news, any development, any image isn’t moral, religious, philosophical, intellectual or political. It’s aesthetic.
Hence my first, usually unspoken or even unconscious, question isn’t “Is it ethical, legal or clever?”, nor even “Is it right-wing or left-wing?”. It’s “Is it in good taste?”
This doesn’t mean that my first reactions and questions will remain my last, far from it. If the subject is interesting enough, I’ll then ask more questions on the basis of those other criteria I’ve mentioned. But depending on the answer to that first lapidary question, my judgement will be skewed.
In this, I humbly follow the lead of many great thinkers of the past: pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides; Plato and Aristotle; medieval scholastics like Albertus Magnus and Aquinas; then subsequent Catholic theology; and of course classical German philosophers, most notably Kant.
Both Plato and Aristotle devoted much attention to what they called ‘transcendentals’, objective ontological properties of being they defined as Truth, Beauty and Goodness. The key word there was ‘objective’: the transcendentals weren’t contingent on personal tastes, ideologies or cultural diversity.
Moreover, they existed as one – meaning that a deficit in one transcendental also diminished the other two. In other words, what’s true and moral is also beautiful, what’s beautiful is also moral and true – and hence what’s ugly can be neither true nor moral.
Which of the transcendentals one wishes to apply first is a matter of personal, often intuitive, preference and also the situation analysed. My tendency is to look out for Beauty, or lack thereof, first. I simply feel that nothing ugly and tasteless can be either true or good.
Just look at the Epstein scandal and those involved in it. I’m sure some of what was going on there was illegal – but that to me is secondary. Actually, most things happening on that notorious island broke no laws – but that doesn’t matter to me either.
What matters to me more than anything else is that the whole affair is staggeringly tawdry, vulgar, tasteless – and so are all the individuals involved in it. That’s what is really criminal to me, as it would have been to that professional aesthete, if a somewhat lesser intellectual light than the men I mentioned earlier, Oscar Wilde.
“All crimes are vulgar,” he wrote, “all vulgarity is a crime”. That makes everyone who has ever set foot on that wretched island a felon, whatever the letter of the law has to say about it.
Popping over to Epstein’s properties to indulge pornographic fantasies was much worse than patronising a brothel. A visitor to such establishments is engaged in a cash-and-carry transaction, exchanging real money for ersatz sex.
Old men doing so may look for professional stimulation of their flagging libido. Younger men, especially those who see carnality as a competitive sport, may simply want to run up their score or else obtain a quick release without wasting time and money on courtship with an uncertain pay-off. The whole institution is as democratic as any shop: anyone willing to exchange cash for goods is welcome, provided he isn’t seen as a factor of danger.
The morality of such activities is questionable, but their redeeming quality is their patina of age. A conservative thus finds himself in a quandary: on the one hand, prostitution is immoral; on the other, it has existed roughly for as long as mankind has. And conservatives are innately conditioned to give ancient institutions the benefit of the doubt.
Aesthetically, I find brothels to be in bad taste – but not nearly as bad as Epstein’s enterprise. His guests didn’t pay for sex, at least not directly, in banknotes. They partook in the whole spectacle of entitlement: it wasn’t a few hundred they traded for sex but their station in life, which was thereby affirmed.
Politicians, noblemen, tycoons, stars of screen, stage and catwalk all basked in their self-importance. For Epstein’s island was more than just a brothel writ large. It was a monument to vulgar narcissism and powerlust – it was a vindication of Freud’s swindles, which ipso facto made it vulgar in the extreme.
Therefore, every visitor to that island is a criminal in Oscar Wilde’s book, and mine. That’s why, when news emerges that some of them committed criminal acts defined as such not aesthetically but legally, I don’t gasp in incredulity. Par for the course, I dare say.
If we plausibly define civilisation as a sustained collective effort to uphold Truth, Beauty and Goodness, then Epstein, Maxwell and all their guests have delivered another kick to the body of our already prostrate civilisation.
To me, that crime trumps (no pun intended) all the other crimes they either committed or suborned, such as running a KGB honeytrap operation, blackmail, passing insider information to interested parties, money laundering, corrupting the morals of minors, living off the proceeds of prostitution, human trafficking and all the rest.
I must emphasise again that I don’t think all or even most visitors to Epstein’s island violated the letter of the law. What they did violate was the spirit of our civilisation, and for that crime there ought to be no pardon or parole.
I agree. Snobbery first, law second. But still….one, might be tempted…. lovely deserted beaches, the best wine, cool spacious bedrooms with crisp white bedding, the chance to see someone famous or influential…but still no, you’d have to talk to Geoffrey Epstein/ a famous influential person.