Beauty is immanent

In times of Inquisition, or under totalitarian regimes, attempts are made to control and direct beauty. These attempts fail, because beauty is realised within the human consciousness, both by individuals and groups. It can be realized in a sensory experience, through vision, sound, touch and possibly taste and smell, and it can also be realized in awareness, emotion or sudden intuition or vision. The last can be purely intellectual and emotional or related to a sensory experience.

The beauty can be created by our interaction with a single natural object, such as a flower, a bird, a tree, or a whole landscape. It can be created by our interaction, or ‘transaction’ with a human being, a loved one, a child, or by a product of art, literature or drama. Music alone can create it, as can a walk in the woods or mountains.

Through sight alone, beauty can be perceived and experienced in the body of another person. This may be the predominant human experience of beauty, followed closely perhaps by music. Of all the human bodies that can give rise to a sense of beauty, paramount must be those of beautiful young women and children who are naked or partially clothed. Both women and men share this view.

Before the current phase of the sexual moral panic, a common idea was that the human body provided the greatest opportunity for humankind to express and enjoy visual beauty, indeed provided the material for the creation of what we could consider to be the acme of visual perfection and beauty. Common models down through the ages were young male athletes and dancing or artfully posed young women. From Lewis Carroll onwards, with the discovery and new possibility of extended childhood and virginal teenaged years, and boosted by the invention of photography, the beauty of the bodies of younger women and pre-teen girls was discovered and celebrated.

When the sexual inquisition began, the crimen exceptum of child sex abuse and the discovery or creation of the bogeyman of the paedophile, empowered the censors to strike not just at the bogeyman, but at the object of beauty itself. The naked bodies of young women became objects of fear and loathing. For the ‘ordinary man and women’, the world became a dangerous place, as they now saw it ‘through the eyes of the paedophile’. Initially, there was an illusion that they had to see the world thus to protect children, but two developments revealed the lie in this. First, as with all past repressions, instead of reducing the possible tendency towards the recognition of child sexuality, the measures taken increased it, the most spectacular example of this being the huge public interest in child pornography that had been fanned by those very measures. Second, the growing and often dismaying awareness that industries such as fashion and music encouraged and exploited ourawareness of child sexuality, and cynically manipulated the children themselves. Industry had already acquired ‘the eyes of the paedophile’.

The response of society and the current Inquisition was to proscribe the depiction or the possession of images of naked young people. The main excuse given was the crimen exceptum of child sex abuse in the form of child pornography, but what has not been acknowledged is that all depictions of naked young bodies, including those considered to represent the acme of beauty, have been criminalized – indeed made to be seen as objects of evil and loathing – their very opposite, thus suppressing one of our primary manifestations of beauty.

This is what the zoologist and anthropologist, N.J. Berrill, said about beauty in his 1955 book Man’s emerging Mind. “We can shut it out or kill it, and to that extent we die ourselves, but it is every man’s birthright and children recognize it instinctively in its simpler forms.” He goes on: “We know it when we meet it and we create it when we can.” He then says, “To destroy or repress the growth of body or spirit or recognizable beauty in any of its manifestations is evil. I believe it is the only evil that we know – that instinctively we acknowledge the supreme values of the emergent quality we sense within us and recognize without in all of nature, and insofar as we realise it and hinder its expression we feel guilty of sin, the only sin there is.” If after reading these words we read or re-read the section on hatred under ‘Threats to liberty’ in the menu, it may help us appreciate that the hatred of child sexuality and child beauty may come less from the child than from within the hater.

Berrill properly links beauty with liberty. “Freedom begins here. The freedom to think untrammelled and to speak accordingly, the freedom for thought to soar if possible, and the freedom of the mind to be for the sake of being, in the sense that a thing of beauty is a joy forever and needs no other sanction.” As he quotes Keats here, we might remember that the young poet also said that beauty was truth, while the Greeks believed the same in an intellectual sense. But Keats’s beauty was loveliness.

Near the end of his book, Berrill returns to the light within which beauty dwells and asks, “Who quenches it?” His reply: “I suppose chiefly those who have already lost it.”

We return to where we began. Yes, it can be suppressed and criminalized, but beauty is immanent, and while it may be repressed during the lifetimes of individuals, its immanence will ensure its reappearance. Immanence is the fact or condition of being immanent – indwelling, inherent, actually present, abiding, remaining within. Under the Inquisition, while adults may learn to curse and despise beauty, children unable to read the rules will cry out in joy upon beholding it. Until they also have been taught the rules.

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