Some aspects of perception of beauty

In an interview on BBC3, Scruton also commits the Starowieyski fallacy: of course I prefer western art, he says, I am a westerner.

The Starowieyski fallacy is the main line of defense of most conservative thinkers today; they often claim it to be somehow an enlightened form of prejudice; it is enlightened because it is somehow cultural and cultural is good because at least some cultural productions are good (the list is usually dull, presenting the tired, usual suspects: Beethoven's Ninth, Raphael, etc.)

What makes in their eyes the defense of some "cultural" practices -- symphonic romanticism, for example, or, more prosaically, fox hunting in Scruton's case -- superior to the defense of other cultural practices -- slavery, for example, or canibalism is not clear. The ground is slippery. The theory, in my opinion, is simply no good unless it can help us distinguish somehow between good and bad cultural practices. It doesn't.

The argument is also flimsy: yes, they say, values are culturally determined but some culturally determined values are important and valuable and must be defended because without them -- the argument seems to imply, we would be somehow reduced to a valueless existence, presumably somehow animal-like. But the implication isn't obvious: all cultures in the world appear to hold some values. The alternative to cultural value set X is not valuelessness but cultural value set Y.

The Starowieyski fallacy is really no more than an attempt to turn on its head the liberal argument that since all values are culturally determined, therefore one should be free to direct rationally the process of selection of the values to appropriate for cultural determination. Contra liberals, the fallacy claims, it would seem, that culturally determined values cannot be rationally adjusted because cultural determination lies at deeper levels of the psyche than any rational thought; and that rational thought therefore can not help but be culturally determined. Yet, while it is true that rational thought is often colored by cultural values, it isn't at all obvious that pure rational thought is impossible. History of western science provides examples of rational thought time and again breaking the culturally prevalent thought patterns.

The truth is that the theorem of cultural determination of beauty is false and therefore both its liberal and conservative versions are bunk. Our perception of beauty is not culturally determined in the usual sense of the word. Rather, it is hard wired and genetically determined. Our ancestors -- our prehuman ancestors, I should like to add since clearly many other animals clearly experience beauty in ways not very different from us (hens, for example, prefer to mate with cocks which humans also find more attractive to look at) -- have evolved these mechanisms over millenia to help us choose better mates, wholesome food and safer dwellings. We can still use the same mechanisms to evaluate mates, food and shelter today; to large extent our preferences in these matters are strikingly similar; but we can also use the same mechanisms for other purposes, for example, to evaluate paintings or sculpture or theater performances. To the extent that in so doing we misapply our brain mechanisms when we do so, the range of our evaluations in these matters shows greater scatter.

Culture comes into play here only to the extent to which culture provides opportunities for looking because experience in evaluating certain types of objects allows us to improve the accuracy of our evaluations. Those growing up in New York City are, by virtue of their life-experience, better equipped to evaluate skyscrapers, for example, than they are to evaluate Ming dynasty porcelain tea-pots. But these cultural effects can be overcome through experience. Recall the famous Melikian dictum that a connoisseur is only as good as the sum total of everything he has ever seen.