Money can’t buy you taste

The other day I mocked the unspeakably vulgar way many women dress these days, which admittedly was an unsportingly large target to aim at.

However, the questions I strive to answer begin not only with ‘What’, but also with ‘Why’. The target then becomes harder to hit.

But it’s worth a try for, as Plato postulated, the small things we can see give a clue to the big things we can’t see. And, in our thoroughly politicised world, nothing is bigger than politics.

Hence it’s appropriate to remark that political democracy fosters majority rule in everything except politics.

This isn’t as paradoxical as it sounds. For politics in democracies, including Britain, isn’t about the demos ruling. It’s about the demos tricked into believing it rules.

The actual power resides with the apparat, no matter how many or few parties it comprises. And the apparat always places self-perpetuation at the top of its priorities.

Therefore it jealously guards its bailiwick against alien trespassing. An outsider has little chance of slipping through the vetting net cast by party selection committees. And, as Trump is finding out in the US, if one does get through, the apparat joins forces against him irrespective of his party affiliation.

In Britain, the Tory machine is geared to filter out any parliamentary candidate who could be described as a conservative in any real, as opposed to virtual, sense. While a Labour victory is regarded with relative equanimity as only a temporary setback, a real conservative may well endanger the apparat itself.

Conservatism is consequently ostracised, and the demos, in whose name the apparat supposedly governs, is denied a choice of political philosophies. At best it can choose among various shades of apparatchik socialism, from the scarlet red (destroy Britain completely – today’s Labour) to the light pink (okay, preserve some of it for the time being – today’s Tories).

Such is the real situation, but our comprehensively ‘educated’ masses settle for make-belief and swell with pride over being politically equal to anybody. In fact, they’re only equal to one another, not to the demiurge apparat looking down on them from its Olympian height.

However, though denied real political power, in every other area the majority rules  with relentless despotism. The sham equality of political democracy steadily gains in reality the farther away it veers from politics.

Politically, the apparat has replaced an organic hierarchy with a contrived one. As collateral damage to that process, organic hierarchies have collapsed in every other walk of life.

Deprived of real political equality, the demos makes up for it by enforcing equality in areas hitherto governed by hierarchies of taste, learning and intellect. Decisions in all such areas have been implicitly put to a vote, with the majority carrying the day.

Voting is a show of hands, each holding a wad of cash. The 12,000 prepared to pay for Wembley Arena tickets to a concert featuring tattooed, drug-addled plankton easily outvote the 500 attending a chamber concert at Wigmore Hall.

This isn’t to say that at some point in the past there existed a golden age of refined tastes and high thoughts. In this world we aren’t blessed with earthly perfection.

However, until relatively recent times, refined tastes and high thoughts set the tone. The tasteless and thoughtless majority was welcome to indulge itself, but it was prevented from imposing its will on society at large.

These days, though the majority’s political power is illusory, its power to impose its crude tastes is absolute. This is exerted either directly or indirectly.

For example, the anti-musical cretin howling nihilistic lyrics all the way to the bank before courageously dying of AIDS or drug overdose has spun a whole industry around himself. That industry has become a giant dwarfing real music and imposing its own mentality on it.

If in the past tastes were formed by sublime musicians, perceptive critics, music-loving impresarios, patrons who were often musicians themselves, and an aesthetically educated public, today’s classical scene is shaped by the same crass, tasteless commercialism that’s part and parcel of pop.

As a result, classical music has collapsed as a serious art, one that perhaps better than any other expresses the spirit of our civilisation. There’s no point striving for excellence if the paying public can’t appreciate it and could easily be offended by it.

Serious music demands a serious effort from the listener, not just the performer. And the modern public doesn’t want to make such an effort – it’s after easily digestible entertainment. Today it may get this from a Beethoven symphony, tomorrow from rap. There’s little fundamental, as distinct from technical, difference any longer.

Thus it’s almost impossible to hear a proper classical performance, a state of affairs of which I was reminded at Christmas when attending a production of The Magic Flute at Vienna’s Staatsoper, one of the world’s premier opera houses.

Neither the orchestra nor the singers produced a subtle musical phrase in the whole evening. None of the singers had a voice that would have been regarded acceptable 50 years ago – and this is the norm, not an unfortunate exception.

If a drugged, vaguely satanic AIDS sufferer has become the paragon of today’s music, the hooker is now the paragon of women’s fashion. “What the hell happened to allure? The accentuated, but hidden?” asked a reader in response to my piece the other day.

Accentuating by hiding? Next thing you know he’ll demand subtlety and taste, and then we’re all in trouble.

Even little girls, never mind their mothers and elder sisters, today dress with the sartorial elegance hitherto only found among ladies plying their trade in London’s Soho, Paris’s Rue Saint-Denis or Amsterdam’s red-light district.

My problem with that sort of thing isn’t so much moral as aesthetic. Never mind allure: the sight of bluish, goose-pimpled slabs of cellulite spilling, top to bottom, out of hooker dresses can turn one off not only sex but even food.

There’s nothing wrong with women sporting décolleté dresses on formal occasions, and I for one happily steal stealthy looks. But the hooker ideal creates a gravitational pull attracting even women reading TV morning news.

There isn’t much wrong with their flesh – in fact, they’re evidently selected mainly if not solely on that basis. But neither they nor their paymasters realise that the same openness and transparency that are appropriate at eight in the evening come across as gross at eight in the morning.

As ladies in the aforementioned urban areas can attest to, money can buy you love, if the term is used in a narrow sense. But money can’t buy taste – vulgarity is the merchandise it’s really after in today’s world.