C. S. Lewis on "Good Taste" and Snobbery

Is good taste a scam?

Scott Alexander recently wrote a post on the subject of aesthetic “good taste”. He tried to square the circle between the idea that taste is subjective and the idea that ordinary people have “bad taste” while trained artists and experts have “good taste”:

Many (most?) uneducated people like certain art which seems “obviously” pretty. But a small group of people who have studied the issue in depth say that in some deep sense, that art is actually bad (“kitsch”), and other art which normal people don’t appreciate is better. They can usually point to criteria which the “sophisticated” art follows and the “kitsch” art doesn’t, but to normal people these just seem like lists of pointless rules.

But most of the critics aren’t Platonists - they don’t believe that aesthetics are an objective good determined by God. So what does it mean to say that someone else is wrong?

Scott then outlines seven potential explanations, none of which seem satisfactory. Most of them bottom out to people playing status games, using rules that are known to educated individuals (but based on arbitrary principles) to assert their superiority over others and show that they belong to a higher class.

I agree with Scott that if aesthetic taste is subjective then there is no world in which one could reasonably judge another for having “bad taste”. If taste can be “good” or “bad” then that implies an objective standard of some sort that someone’s taste is either failing or succeeding to appreciate. If beauty is something that exists apart from human preferences, then it would make sense to judge someone as being better or less able to spot it: but if it’s all subjective then we’re just playing social games.

Scott considers the possibility that there is some kind of objective standard that taste can correspond to; if not “determined by God” then perhaps determined by human biology or something. Yet the idea of an objective standard brings a new problem. As Scott puts it,

…the whole mystery is that taste isn’t universal. It seems perverse to dismiss the sort of art that untrained people like, proclaim other art which they hate to be better, then plead that you’re basing your judgment in “human universals”.

So, if good taste is purely subjective then it means nothing and if it is objective then why don’t most people have it? These are excellent questions to ask, and naturally C. S. Lewis has written on the subject.

Objectively Beautiful

What would it even mean for “taste” to be objective? It can be difficult to understand for postmoderns like ourselves, who have been taught as children that things which can be directly measured are “facts” and everything else is merely “opinion”. Yet our own culture is historically unusual in that respect. In olden days before WWI children were taught something very different. Lewis explains in his book The Abolition of Man:

Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it — believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt. The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more ‘just’ or ‘ordinate’ or ‘appropriate’ to it than others. And he believed (correctly) that the tourists thought the same. The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions. But for this claim there would be nothing to agree or disagree about. To disagree with This is pretty if those words simply described the lady’s feelings, would be absurd: if she had said I feel sick Coleridge would hardly have replied No; I feel quite well.

With this in mind educators from ancient Greece onwards believed that part of education was helping the student recognize what reactions objects merited, and cultivate the propensity to actually experience the appropriate reactions.

St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful. In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.’

Which brings us back to Scott’s question: if aesthetics are objective, then why do they have to be taught? Why aren’t they universal? It’s a good question! After all, we don’t need to teach people from a young age how to see or hear. We don’t need to guide them into knowing that bad smells smell bad, and good smells smell good. If ordo amoris needs to be taught then might it not be objective at all, but rather an arbitrary system of rules?

Perhaps. On the other hand, even if there is doubt whether possessing ordo amoris is universal one thing that certainly was universal was the idea that ordo amoris exists. Besides Greek and Roman sources Lewis cites the same idea in Chinese philosophy and Hinduism as well.

This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’. Some of the accounts of it which I quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself—just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind.

Snobs and Prigs

Okay, let’s take for granted that aesthetics are objective, and therefore “good taste” actually means something. Does that mean when 90% of ordinary people like something, but 90% of experts and critics don’t like it, then the ordinary people are just mistaken? If I’m enjoying a painting and a trained artist with degrees and awards comes along and tells me its trash, should I just agree with him? Can I be wrong about the thing I like being good?

Well, yes, you can. However Lewis also had quite a bit to say on the subject of how the mere existence of good taste can lead to people using good taste to justify their own superiority to others. When this happens the whole point having good taste is lost. In his essay “Lilies that Fester”, Lewis explains:

To be constantly engaged with the idea of culture, and (above all) of culture as something enviable, or meritorious, or something that confers prestige, seems to me to endanger those very “enjoyments” for whose sake we chiefly value it. If we encourage others, or ourselves, to hear, see, or read great art on the ground that it is a cultured thing to do, we call into play precisely those elements in us which must be in abeyance before we can enjoy art at all. We are calling up the desire for self-improvement, the desire for distinction, the desire to revolt (from one group) and to agree (with another), and a dozen busy passions which, whether good or bad in themselves, are, in relation to the arts, simply a blinding and paralysing distraction.

In other words if you are busy being concerned about whether you have good taste or not you will not be able to judge, appreciate, or enjoy art. Yet appreciating and enjoying art is the only good reason to try to develop good artistic taste in the first place! When we see artistic elites lambasting the tastes of others it is no surprise that we will be tempted to believe that the whole idea of good taste is a racket. Once good taste becomes a mark of status then people will strive to acquire the status without ever experiencing the taste. Lewis understands the natural revulsion this produces in “uncultured” people:

Suppose you had spent an evening among very young and very transparent snobs who were feigning a discriminating enjoyment of a great port, though anyone who knew could see very well that, if they had ever drunk port in their lives before, it came from a grocer’s. And then suppose that on your journey home you went into a grubby little tea-shop and there heard an old body in a feather boa say to another old body, with a smack of her lips, “That was a nice cup o’ tea, dearie, that was. Did me good.” Would you not, at that moment, feel that this was like fresh mountain air? For here, at last, would be something real. Here would be a mind really concerned about that in which it expressed concern. Here would be pleasure, here would be undebauched experience, spontaneous and compulsive, from the fountain-head. A live dog is better than a dead lion. In the same way, after a certain kind of sherry party, where there have been cataracts of culture but never one word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside. For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested. I should have hopes of that boy. Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books. The organs of appreciation exist in them. They are not impotent. And even if this particular boy is never going to like anything severer than science-fiction, even so,

The child whose love is here, at least doth reap

One precious gain, that he forgets himself.

I should still prefer the live dog to the dead lion; perhaps, even, the wild dog to the over-tame poodle or Peke.

Possessing (or aspiring to possess) good taste is always a temptation to snobbery. You have good taste, while they are blind and stupid. Yet, as Lewis also points out, having good taste by no means makes you morally superior to someone else, any more than being good at baseball or gardening would make someone else superior to you. Lewis himself was, in his own words, a “Prig” for much of his life. In his autobiography he explains how he became a snob as a young student at Wyvern College¹:

Never in my life had I read a work of fiction, poetry, or criticism in my own language except because, after trying the first few pages, I liked the taste of it. I could not help knowing that most other people, boys and grown-ups alike, did not care for the books I read. A very few tastes I could share with my father, a few more with my brother; apart from that, there was no point of contact, and this I accepted as a sort of natural law. If I reflected on it at all, it would have given me, I think, a slight feeling, not of superiority, but of inferiority. The latest popular novel was so obviously a more adult, a more normal, a more sophisticated taste than any of mine. A certain shame or bashfulness attached itself to whatever one deeply and privately enjoyed. I went to the Coll far more disposed to excuse my literary tastes than to plume myself on them.

But this innocence did not last. It was, from the first, a little shaken by all that I soon began to learn from my form-master about the glories of literature. I was at last made free of the dangerous secret that others had, like me, found there "enormous bliss" and been maddened by beauty. Among the other New Bugs of my year, too, I met a pair of boys who came from the Dragon School at Oxford (where Naomi Mitchison in her 'teens had just produced her first play) and from them also I got the dim impression that there was a world I had never dreamed of, a world in which poetry, say, was a thing public and accepted…a world in which a taste for such things was almost meritorious…What had been "my" taste was apparently "our" taste (if only I could ever meet the "we" to whom that "our" belonged). And if "our" taste, then--by a perilous transition--perhaps "good" taste or "the right taste". For that transition involves a kind of Fall. The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost. Even then, however, it is not necessary to take the further downward step of despising the "philistines" who do not share it. Unfortunately I took it. Hitherto, though increasingly miserable at Wyvern, I had been half ashamed of my own misery, still ready (if I were only allowed) to admire the Olympians, still a little overawed, cowed rather than resentful. I had, you see, no standing place against the Wyvernian ethos, no side for which I could play against it; it was a bare "I" against what seemed simply the world. But the moment that "I" became, however vaguely, a we--and Wyvern not the world but a world--the whole thing changed. It was now possible, at least in thought, to retaliate. I can remember what may well have been the precise moment of this transition. A prefect called Blugg or Glubb or some such name stood opposite me, belching in my face, giving me some order. The belching was not intended as an insult…If Bulb had thought of my reactions at all, he would have expected me to find his eructations funny. What pushed me over the edge into pure priggery was his face--the puffy bloated cheeks, the thick, moist, sagging lower lip, the yokel blend of drowsiness and cunning. "The lout!" I thought. "The clod! The dull, crass clown! For all his powers and privileges, I would not be he." I had become a Prig, a High-Brow.

I believe that some things are objectively beautiful, and other things are not. I believe that you can be right or wrong about an aesthetic opinion, and that good taste is something that can be cultivated and developed. With that in mind, it is essential to approach such things with humility and always with the value of the work itself in mind. It’s easy to get distracted by the temptation of snobbery, and of using “good taste” as an excuse to lord yourself over others. If an educated elite claims that something most people find ugly is actually beautiful it is possible he is right and they are wrong: but it is more likely that he’s just a prig!

In other words, if good taste is objective then the snobs might just be wrong about it.

1. Despite the name “Wyvern College” was the equivalent of American “High School”, though a private and fairly elite one.