Something ugly this way comes

There is something ugly about mendacity and something pleasing about honesty. Even the most brutal honesty may be pleasing once the honesty of it is accepted. Mendacity is never pleasing. In many ways this kind of discrimination is just as much an aesthetic experience as an exercise in reasoning. Reasoning is often driven by the powerful aesthetic appeal of honesty.

Suppose we need to justify a view that much of the UK is grossly overcrowded. Anyone may formulate reasons why this is so but we may just as easily formulate reasons why it is not so. We may point out that the UK clearly supports its current population and why even in cities the land is not covered in concrete.

Some time ago Mrs H and I visited the second floor café of a Derby shopping centre. It was a clear day and as we sat by a high window overlooking four lanes of city traffic we could also see a church spire and green fields miles away beyond the city limits. Where would we prefer to be? Where we had chosen to be at that particular time was the café on the second floor of a city shopping centre. We were not strolling through those green fields and yet…

And yet there is an aesthetic aspect to complex social questions. Aesthetically many people seem to feel that the UK is grossly overcrowded but that isn’t all there is to it. There is reason mingling with that aesthetic judgement, because to say the UK is not grossly overcrowded can be both entirely reasonable and not entirely… Not entirely what?.

Here in the overcrowded island question there is a strange domain where reasonable is sometimes blended with aesthetic compromise. Reasonable but unattractive perhaps, because we may reason unattractively. Does it matter? We are not reasoning machine so we need all the clues we can muster. In which case, perhaps it does matter.

For example, the UK government coronavirus debacle is ugly. It is a ghastly, inconsistent draconian mess. Not because government actions have been wholly unreasonable but because of the mendacity intermingled with the specious reasoning. The arguments go on and on and will go on and on long after the draconian shambles has morphed into whatever the end game turns out to be.

Yet the ugliness of the coronavirus debacle cannot be erased, just as the ugliness of UK overcrowding cannot be erased even by reasonable reasoning. The draconian political response to a less than critical pandemic cannot erase its own ugliness. Almost as if aesthetic failure is where political failure really resides. Maybe totalitarian is always ugly. Maybe ugly is always a clue.