The Great Swindle: A Provocative Essay on "Fake Ideas" and "Fake Emotions"

Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons, one of the artists Scruton believes
engages in fake art. 

Roger Scruton, writing at Aeon Magazine, has a lengthy essay on the prevalence, in his view, on how "fake ideas" and "fake emotions" have "elbowed out truth and beauty" in modern societies. It's an old argument, though he expresses it well, if provocatively:

... There are fake beliefs, fake opinions, fake kinds of expertise. There is also fake emotion, which comes about when people debase the forms and the language in which true feeling can take root, so that they are no longer fully aware of the difference between the true and the false. ...

... To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included. ... The fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he had created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself was a member. ...

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The most important way of clearing intellectual space for fake scholarship and culture is to marginalise the concept of truth. ...

Scruton makes several errors. For one -- and most importantly -- he conflates truth and beauty. They fundamentally differ. "Truth" can be spoken of in at least a quasi-objective way since there is a measure for truth: the world we inhabit. "Beauty" is always a matter of debate, and people can quite justifiably bring different measures to the conversation.

That "truth" and "beauty" are not equivalent concepts should be central to his argument. For it is in confusing the two that subjectivity has entered so fervently into some discussions of truth (that and a grotesque misunderstanding of the theories or relativity and quantum mechanics). Indeed, it has been my observation -- and I've traveled in all these circles -- that it is among artists, philosophers, and non-rigorous social scientists that subjectivity about truth has the greatest cache (and the more rigorously they are trained, understand, and practice science the less subjective they are about "truth").

A second significant error by Scruton is the assumption that the search or truth and explorations of beauty could not validly undercut the notion of absolute Truth and Beauty, but they have. To speak of truth: we have a measure -- reality -- but we can never know that our measurements are perfect, and our measurements and conclusions are always hinged on assumptions (assumptions we have very good reason to think are correct, but they are still that). For example, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, a common  misused saw, does not say in some vague way "everything is uncertain"; it says that the measurements of quanta are always taken to at least a minimal degree of error (in its simplest form σ_xσ_p ≥ h/4π).  Reality is not subjective and it is not completely unknowable, but it is not completely and absolutely certain in all cases. That it is not absolutely certain is usually of no consequence, yet that it  is not absolutely certain is known to us in numerous ways, and that has been known for a long time (indeed, before Immanuel Kant, who Scruton finds so compelling).

As to beauty, we have known, since the exposure to other cultures, that beauty is not absolute. (I can say this in a way relatively free from cultural bias since all large cultures engaged in cultural bigotry to an extent when isolated and learned from each other when in contact). The non-absolute nature of aesthetics is reinforced by archaeology. Are there some fundamental principles of aesthetics? We can only know that by cross cultural study of the brain not by black box guesses by looking at art.

Scruton is right that both the worlds and philosophy and art have gluts of fuzzy thinking. He fails to discuss the role of a market for that thinking. Picking Koons, for example, as an example of bad non-beautiful art is a mistake, not only because I in fact like some of Koons's art, finding it beautiful (and, indeed, it's wrong to call much of it kitsch, which Scruton does, apparently not knowing what "kitsch" usually means), but because Scruton ignores that people want that art. The market for Koons, is pretty much limited to museums and the wealthy -- one does not find many novelty Koons works at the mall -- Scruton might be better to go after Thomas Kinkade, "Painter of Light," a mass marketed kitschy traditional artist.

The ignorance of Kinkade's audience (and some of Koons's, too, who, one might suppose, are interested in having and displaying the next big thing not in actually appreciating it) is the issue. Likewise, the ignorance of those who would pervert a lack of absolute certainty into belief of complete subjectivity are the issue. And likewise, the ignorance of those who would conflate nature of "truth" and "beauty" is a fundamental problem towards the life of the mind advancing.