https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/15/we-cant-have-nice-things/
Editor’s Note: This is a version of an essay that will appear in Up from Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right after a Generation of Decay, edited by Arthur Milikh, forthcoming from Encounter Books.
“Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.”
— Kingsley Amis
I thought about organizing this column around Kingsley Amis’ seemingly simple remark. How much forgotten wisdom is contained in those seven short words? And what profound application do they have to a moment in which ugliness has not only triumphed in our culture but is everywhere held up as something one must embrace as attractive? How many more fashion ads featuring hideous “fat-positive” females do we need?
On second thought, though, I realized that I could give an abbreviated answer to the question implicit in my title in just three words: indifference, capitulation, kitsch.
Let’s start with the indifference. Conservatives in the West long ago ceded culture to the Left. Culture, they felt, was not really serious. You can’t eat Rembrandt or the Ninth Symphony or Paradise Lost. You can’t make a payroll writing poetry or studying Botticelli or Herodotus. True, in 1780, John Adams wrote that “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy . . . in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” That sounds noble, but who still believes it? Not paid-up members of Conservatism, Inc. Quote that passage to them. Then watch them smile.
It is the same smile they display when you quote Andrew Breitbart’s observation that “politics is downstream from culture.” They might nod. They might say they agree. But how do they act? More or less like Medea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “Video meliora,” said that unhappy damsel to herself, “proboque, deteriora sequor”: “I see the better path and approve: I follow the worse.”
Back in 1973, Irving Kristol wrote an essay called “On Capitalism and the Democratic Idea.” In the course of that essay, Kristol touched upon the conservative indifference to the claims of culture. “For two centuries,” he wrote
the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas—until one day they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society. The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society—the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions—are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions. The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will—perhaps slowly but nevertheless inexorably—twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape.
