On Beauty
transient, but its transience is what makes it beautiful. And what’s more, there is beauty in the transience itself. Who does not feel an unexpected rush of excitement at the sight of winter’s first whirls of snow, though they mark the end of autumn’s auburn brilliance? Who is not thrilled by the roaring engines and sudden weightlessness of an aeroplane in takeoff, though it may leave behind beloved places and people? Change is so wonderfully electrifying because it carries with it the promise that instants and instances of beauty, that we cannot yet know, await us in the future. These may come as magnificent new discoveries, or, more subtly, as surprising realisations of beauty in something or someone quite unexpected – for instance, in La Bijou’s tragic, challenging gaze. Her beauty has not faded. It has simply changed.
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almost unduly vicious hostility. In the 17th century, Galileo was tortured and imprisoned for daring to advocate the view that the Earth revolved around the sun, and at one point it looked as though he might lose not only his liberty, but his life. Something as huge as that, taking away our position at the centre of the universe, deconstructs not just our assumptions about life, but the fundamental sets of principles and beliefs that we build our assumptions upon – and faced with something so immensely destabilising, we lash out. Examples like the treatment of Galileo are commonly dismissed as the relics of a less tolerant and more conservative age: nobody today likes to think that they could be as closed-minded, or as brutal. Yet what we forget is that Galileo’s vitriolic attackers didn’t see themselves as irrational – all they saw was
one unknown figure trying to tell them that everything they knew about their world and themselves was a lie, and in their fear they did everything in their power to silence him. If that power included imprisonment and torture, then so much the better: any method is permissible to silence a revolutionary thesis. I believe that today we still see that silencing impulse everywhere – it’s in our newspapers, in our schools, in our political systems. Journalists have the power to shout and be heard, and they use it to viciously crush anything that threatens the world as they know it. For example, Ben Goldacre, “Bad Science” man for The Guardian, has waged a media war against complementary therapies like homeopathy and acupuncture which is almost unbelievably hostile. Ignoring the testimony of huge
numbers of people who have benefited from treatments other than conventional treatthe-symptoms medicine, Goldacre blindly brands the whole alternative therapy
BECAUSE HE DOESN’T UNDERSTAND HOW THEY WORK. Goldacre’s spectrum as bogus -
responses are understandable, even inevitable: he feels challenged, destabilised, and if the only way to stop that feeling is by screaming loud enough to drown the therapists out, he will do it. So next time you find yourself overwhelmed by scepticism, ask yourself why it is that you feel so strongly. If we as a society can maintain self-awareness, if we can take a step back and look at the reasons behind our hostility to new ideas: then can we call ourselves truly open-minded, and look back at Galileo’s critics with real disdain.
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OOKS, THINK OF PUNS TO SHOW OFF LATER, MINESWEEPER, CHOOSE WHAT TO WEAR THAT
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