There was a thoughtful piece on beauty by Anja Byg this week about things I have mulled over for many years too (and which Ted Chiang wrangled meaningfully in his short story “Liking What You See: A Documentary”.)
For me, the crucial pivot which supports the always-ambivalent weight of beauty is how it makes us behave. Does it enliven the spirit and make us better able to join in with life and with others? Or does it orient us towards control? I would ask, is a particular ideal of beauty putting an entire class of beings / people / art forms under a totalising gaze or controlling behaviour? For instance, the endless sharp tactics of the beauty myth for women in almost any time in so many societies, or the racialised ideas of beauty, whether about body shapes, artistic creations, or the relative position of rhythm to harmony in music.1 Many beauty standards do indeed spring like poisoned streams from colonialism and patriarchy.
And yet, profligate beauty is everywhere to be found in nature and in culture. Certain species of birds and mammals have been shown to have deeply held aesthetic preferences, of course, the bower birds of Australia spring to mind. In human life, intact living cultures are known for their abundance of beautiful arts, crafts, music and dance. The first impulse of authoritarian regimes, from The Puritans in The New World to the Taliban today, is to limit and proscribe some or all of these things, to deface an old culture or to destroy it, to build anew in a prescriptive manner. This happened in the Chinese Cultural Revolution and with The Nazis’ war against so-called ‘Degenerate Art’, or the mass destruction of an entire craft culture during the iconoclasm of the Reformation in Northern Europe, especially in England and the Netherlands where churches were whitewashed and all images removed.
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This podcast was first published with photos, links, footnotes and more on Substack on June 19th 2026.
I don’t use AI in any aspect of my research, writing or creative work. I am a member of Writers Against AI.
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