The world is so full of praise for Beauty that it drowns itself out. The Uses of Ugliness is a theme that seems under-rated to me. And speaking of Ugliness, we have another election season coming. There should be an alternative to the usual choices of watching Media coverage with sour disdain or with numb toleration.
There is a point when Ugliness attacks an irreducible center of human dignity. We simply must defend ourselves in order to live. Here is something that works for me: there have been a few books written over the centuries that say something worthwhile about politics. We have all heard these classics praised, and we say that we probably should read that book someday...
That is the beauty and use of Ugliness. Ugliness can be a sharp sensation felt right now, not just someday. It impels us to action; quite an accomplishment for a "negative" thing.
So instead of following the electoral horse-race on the boob toob I will be rereading Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America." Written in the 1830's, it seems prescient at times and oddly contemporary at other times. He was not a theorist's theorist or the sort of metaphysician who constructs mental cobwebs that lead nowhere. He was a reflective and thoughtful observer who wrote with well-chosen concreteness.
It was surprising how much of volume 1 is dedicated to explaining the plight of Indian tribes and Negro slaves. My personal favorite is chapter 15 on the Tyranny of the Majority.
"In my opinion the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their overpowering strength.
The authority of a king is purely physical, and it controls the actions of the subject without subduing his private will; but the majority possesses a power which is physical and moral at the same time; it acts upon the will as well as upon the actions of men, and it represses not only all contest, but all controversy.
I know no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America.
In America... within these barriers an author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent if he ever step beyond them. Not that he is exposed to the terrors of an auto-de-fe, but he is tormented by the slights and persecutions of daily obloquy.
Under the absolute sway of an individual despot, the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul...but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.
No writer, whatever his eminence, can escape from this tribute of adulation to his fellow citizens. The majority lives in the perpetual practice of self-applause.
If great writers have not at present existed in America, the reason is very simply given in these facts; there can be no literary genius without freedom of opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist in America.The Inquisition has never been able to prevent a vast number of anti-religious books from circulating in Spain. The empire of the majority succeeds much better in the United States, since it actually removes the wish of publishing them."
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