Last week I was at dinner with friends – people who have known me for a long time, and I managed to do something I haven’t done in years – I shocked them. They were visibly shaken by something I said, something which, I have subsequently been forced to ruminate on.
I said that I thought ugly people were evil. Either that they had become ugly because they were evil, or that their ugliness was making them evil.
So let’s dig deeper… Ugly people are probably not evil, but I’ve met enough people to suspect ugliness and moral failure occasionally share a bathroom. Before the professional victims have a panic attack, relax. I am obviously joking. Mostly. I’m not talking about people who lost the genetic lottery and ended up looking like they were assembled like Mr Potato Head in a collaboration between Stevie Wonder, Helen Keller, and Andrea Bocelli. Most of us are fairly average-looking. I certainly am. I’ve never gazed into the mirror and seen Apollo staring back at me through heavenly shafts of Renaissance light. I look like a man who thinks too much and occasionally over-drinks tequila – and I’m happy with that.
What I am, however, is an unapologetic aesthete.
Beauty matters to me enormously. More than personality, often. More than sentiment. Certainly more than fashionable political opinions. I notice proportion instinctively. I care about symmetry, balance, elegance, harmony and style in the same way some people care about rugby statistics or cryptocurrency. I can walk into a room and immediately tell whether somebody with taste designed it or whether it was assembled by bureaucrats who believe grey carpeting is morally responsible – “and easy to maintain!”
Now, I apologize, but again it is important for me to stress that I am not claiming these beautiful qualities for myself. It might seem obvious to you, but I assure you that many people are incapable of recognizing the difference between the model and the photographer. Most people pretend beauty is entirely subjective because modern society has become terrified of standards. But deep down, everybody knows this isn’t true. Nobody travels across the world to admire a municipal office park in Germiston, right?
Human beings consistently respond to beauty across cultures and centuries. We admire symmetry in faces. We build cathedrals instead of concrete cubes whenever civilisation feels ambitious. Beautiful music moves people emotionally without translation. Even children instinctively draw balanced shapes before anybody lectures them about aesthetics. Beauty clearly corresponds to something real.
The ancient Greeks understood this. The masters of the Renaissance certainly understood it. Entire civilisations once believed beauty reflected higher order, intelligence and aspiration. Architecture aimed upward. Clothing celebrated form. Public spaces attempted grandeur. Music pursued transcendence rather than sounding like de-greased industrial machinery. Then modernity arrived and announced that ugliness was somehow virtuous. Thanks to postmodernism, we now live surrounded by aggressively hideous things. Everything is blander, more “accessible”, more function than form and more shit.
Cities increasingly resemble open-air antidepressant advertisements. Glass boxes. Cubes. Concrete slabs. Airports masquerade as apartment buildings, and apartment buildings look like soviet tax offices. All sleek and gray and uninviting. Restaurants are lit like operating theatres. “Luxury homes” designed by people who appear spiritually offended by curtains. Entire neighbourhoods constructed with all the warmth of Mobutu Sese Seko’s speeches.
Now, if you like that sort of thing, I suppose you’re entitled to, but it is worth noting that very often the people who like deranged looking things can be found to be equally deranged.
I am not saying somebody with a potato for a nose is morally compromised – some of history’s greatest geniuses looked like they’d been fucked by a train. What I do think is that there is something psychologically revealing about people who intentionally move away from beauty rather than toward it.
Neon-green hair. Metal protruding from every available facial surface. Grotesque obesity presented as bravery and empowerment. Clothing assembled with obvious hatred for the human silhouette. Tattooing oneself until one resembles a desk at a juvenile detention centre.
At some point this stops looking like “self-expression” and starts resembling aesthetic nihilism – and if you are a nihilist, then congratulations, at least you’re congruent!
People rarely destroy beautiful things accidentally. I get into a furious temper when I see climate activists splashing wall paint and soup on a magnificent painting. Graffiti sprayed across a Palladian building reveals hostility toward civilisation itself. A magnificent public square filled with litter and noise feels spiritually depressing because human beings instinctively recognise desecration when they see it. Even music suffers from this. A sublime orchestral arrangement suddenly interrupted by screaming, profanity and autotuned narcissism feels offensive in the same way somebody playing pornography loudly inside a cathedral would feel offensive. Modern culture seems to have confused transgression with sophistication.
Real beauty requires discipline. Taste requires judgment. Elegance requires restraint. Excellence demands standards, and standards make modern people uncomfortable because standards imply hierarchy. Some art genuinely is better than other art. Don’t tell me the banana tapped to a wall is comparable to Raphael. Some music is superior. Some architecture elevates the human spirit while other buildings quietly persuade you civilisation deserves collapse. Pretending otherwise requires absurd levels of collective dishonesty.
This is partly why contemporary architecture is so offensive. Nothing built after 1914 looks like it’s even trying. We possess extraordinary technology, astonishing wealth and advanced engineering capabilities, yet somehow continue building structures that look like USB chargers. Medieval people with candles and wheelbarrows built cathedrals beautiful enough to make tourists cry eight hundred years later. Modern developers can’t make a door close properly.
How is that progress?
The answer, I suspect, is that modern civilisation increasingly worships convenience instead of aspiration. Efficiency instead of grandeur. Speed instead of craftsmanship. Quantity instead of quality. We consume endless images, endless content, endless stimulation, yet surround ourselves with environments designed with absolutely no regard for beauty whatsoever. And then we wonder why people are anxious, medicated and spiritually exhausted.
I think I’m still friends with the people I shocked at dinner (well the attractive ones anyway) – but even if I lost a friend, it would be a small price to pay for defending beauty.
Human beings need beauty far more than modern ideology admits. Beautiful spaces calm people, elegant clothing communicates dignity. Stirring music reorganises emotion. An orderly, neat and pretty city subtly encourages better behaviour. Entire societies become psychologically healthier when they aim upward aesthetically rather than wallowing proudly in ugliness and disorder.
That is why ugliness unsettles me so deeply. Deliberate ugliness often carries an undertone of resentment — resentment toward standards, proportion, aspiration and sometimes even civilisation itself. There is a strange hostility embedded in modern aesthetic vandalism, as though beauty must constantly be mocked because it reminds people of their own unwillingness to improve. It goes without saying that beautiful people can also be dreadful – and history is full of gorgeous psychopaths. The corollary to my theory is proven by attractive people who frequently get away with behaviour that would earn uglier citizens immediate social exile. Halo effects are real. Human beings are shallow creatures – and pretty privilege is far more real than any other kind of privilege. None of this changes the larger point.
Somewhere deep down, every human being knows the difference between the Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence and a three-star hotel in Secunda.
