Good taste can suppress a bad thought, but not the other way around. Nothing can suppress bad taste, nor even keep it from inflicting damage that goes far beyond mere aesthetics.
One can easily attack all the warped orthodoxies of modernity from a purely commonsensical position, but it’s even easier to do so on aesthetic grounds.
Just look at every constituent of wokery: feminism, LGBT fanaticism, ‘hate’ crimes (as opposed to love crimes?), abortion, euthanasia, net zero fanaticism, obsession with race, hatred of history posing as ‘anti-colonialism’, DEI, cultural appropriation and so forth.
Using sequential logic to get to the bottom of such aberrations isn’t difficult, but it would be a total waste of brain cells. One can ponder rationally only rational ideas, which none of those above is. It’s better to dismiss those travesties out of hand simply because they are all in bad taste.
But here’s the real problem: bad taste is the new good taste. Tastelessness has been raised to a virtue, and it didn’t just happen yesterday. Bad taste is the formative impulse of modernity.
This brings to mind Diana Vreeland (d. 1989), the long-time editor of Vogue magazine. When she once said, “nothing is as communicative as bad taste”, she meant it positively. Bad taste was to her something to celebrate, not decry.
Good taste was boring, predictable, staid, whereas bad taste betokened imagination, creativity and flamboyance (“It’s hearty, it’s healthy, it’s physical”). It also kept publications like Vogue in business, she could have added but didn’t.
It’s the very nature of modernity that has turned bad taste into a pandemic leaving in its wake the corpses of everything beautiful, noble and honourable. The pandemic is triggered by an aggressive virus: modern societies are all dedicated to the advancement of the common man, which doesn’t sound like a bad idea at first.
However, when that goal is pursued with fanatical zeal and unrelenting consistency, the common man, rather than benefiting from civilisation, begins to shape it. That human sub-species gains the power to impose his tastes, urges and goals on the whole society – with devastating effects.
If you look at all modern democracies – with so few exceptions that I can’t think of one offhand – you’ll see how effectively and irreversibly the common man has established his despotic rule.
This goes for politics too. The common man is so self-satisfied that he is incapable of electing his superiors. He doesn’t believe anyone is, nor possibly can be, superior to him, which is why he elects nonentities shaped in his own image as enthusiastically as he rejects them soon thereafter – only to replace them with other nonentities.
This doesn’t mean the common man’s interests shouldn’t be represented in government. The problem is that modern democracies end up representing not the common man’s interests but his wishes, which has been known as the recipe for disaster since, well, for ever. Burke wrote something to that effect, and he died in 1797.
If you look at the two current leaders of the most populous Anglophone states, the US and Britain, you’ll find any number of policies they disagree on. Trump has quite a few worthy ones; Starmer, none that I can discern.
Yet it’s tedious trying to find rhyme or reason in either case, or lament their absence. Intuitive aesthetic rejection ought to come more naturally: both men are bone-crushingly tasteless, each in his own way.
If Trump had any aesthetic check valve built in, he wouldn’t be saying 90 per cent of the things he says, nor doing half the things he does. When it comes to Starmer, raise both proportions to 100 per cent. For example, if he had a modicum of taste, he wouldn’t be clinging so greedily to his job, having caused serious damage both to his party and, more important, to his country.
One could sympathise with his stubbornness if he fought his detractors tooth and nail because he knew that any possible replacement would be even worse. There would even be a certain elegance to that stance.
But Starmer is motivated by nothing but naked self-interest and powerlust fuelled by the realisation that, without his job he’d be less than zero, a negative value. What can be more tasteless than this combination of egoism and insecurity?
If Starmer is an egoist, Trump is also an egotist, and both are in bad taste, elucidating different facets of that noxious vice.
Unchecked democracy is an ideal political tool for the common man’s ascendancy; unchecked commercialism, a perfect aesthetic one. And unchecked practice of all seven deadly sins, falsely extolled as an expression of individuality, has subjected society to the implicit moral code of the common man, one based on asocial selfishness.
This morning I came across a Nabokov quotation, and I like things he said more unequivocally than the books he wrote. In his autobiography, Speak, Memory, Nabokov defined tasteless people as: “Those who know Pushkin from Tchaikovsky’s disgusting libretto, weep over Italian operas and like paintings that ‘tell a story’.”
It was on aesthetic other the any other, grounds that Nabokov instantly rejected Bolshevism, as did Bunin, the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize. Other celebrated Russian writers of the time, such as Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetayeva, Blok, Andreyev, tried to find a balanced view by putting the positives on one side of the seesaw and the negatives on the other. Nabokov and Bunin just winced squeamishly and ran for their lives.
The intellect can be fickle, whereas good taste tends to be infallible – even when judging matters of the mind and spirit. If blessed with good taste, atheists wouldn’t remain atheists; Lefties wouldn’t remain Left; the woke wouldn’t remain woke.
And, of course, the 2026 BBC Proms wouldn’t make Henry Wood spin in his grave by including such highlights as Marvin Gaye: Prince of Soul, Under African Skies from Simon’s Graceland, and Enchanted: Alan Menken’s Music for Disney.
That catering to popular tastes destroys art is easy to show, but it isn’t especially hard to demonstrate a similar tendency in every walk of life, including politics. Diana Vreeland must be smiling proudly, wherever she is. Her view of life has been amply vindicated.
P.S. Speaking of rotten taste, could someone please explain to our hacks that ‘fortuitous’ isn’t the posh way of saying ‘fortunate’, ‘risqué’ isn’t the posh way of saying ‘risky’ — and saying ‘posh’ isn’t posh. Also, girls trafficked by Epstein were his ‘victims’, not his ‘survivors’. He didn’t try to kill them.
P.P.S. No one with good taste would have forced King Charles III to deliver that awful speech at the Opening of Parliament. But more on that tomorrow.