A History of Taste: Taste and Morality

A long cry from the shallow debates on trends of our age, in the 18th century, Taste was seen as an expression of morality and goodness.

Taste is at present the darling idol of the polite world, and the world of letters; and, indeed, seems to be considered as the quintessence of almost all the arts and sciences. The fine ladies and gentlemen dress with Taste; the architects, whether Gothic or Chinese, build with Taste; the painters paint with Taste; the poets write with Taste; critics read with Taste; and in short, fidlers [sic], players, singers, dancers, and mechanics themselves, are all the sons and daughters of Taste. Yet in this amazing super-abundancy of Taste, few can say what it really is, or what the word itself signifies.

Mr. Town, Critic and Censor-General, The Connoisseur (May 13, 1756)

Every hour, in a metropolitan area near you, uncreased white sneakers question polished penny loafers (whose squeaks can be heard in apartments in Ridgewood, le Marais and Los Feliz) on the nature of Taste, repeating the incessant question their forefathers begged two and a half centuries ago: What is Taste?

The modern idea of Taste is inextricably intertwined with the concepts of luxury and consumption. When George Coleman published “The Connoisseur” (whence the above quote originates), luxury was the “greatest single social issue” in 18th century Britain. (Sekora, “Luxury”, 1977) There was a genuine concern, at the time, that unbridled luxury would lead to the fall of the British Empire. As E.J. Clery, professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Southampton, puts it “Will material progress result in luxury, effeminacy and decline?” (Clery 2004) One may wonder what Clery would say about the lines outside of the Kith store and the apparently waning power of the American Empire.

Welcome to Taste 101. A new publication by Ruby J. Thélot, attempting to historicize and contextualize our current fascination with the idea of Taste.

Taste is the regulator of luxury, the art of virtuous consumption. Luxury without taste is seen as immoral, “corrupt” and an “outgrowth of selfish passions”. (Clery 2004) 

As historian Paul Langford notes in “A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783”:

“A history of luxury and attitudes to luxury would come very close to being a history of the eighteenth century. There is a sense in which politics in this period is about the distribution and representation of this luxury, religion about the attempt to control it, public polemic about generating and regulating it, and social policy about confining it to those who did not produce it.”

The word “Taste” comes from the French “goût”, which originally denoted the sense related to flavor, usually of foods. The term gained in popularity in the 17th century during “La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” (the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns), a raging debate on art and literature in France between, as the name suggests, traditionalists and “modernists” (not the contemporary definition). 

The Ancients, led by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, Jean de la Fontaine, François Fénélon and Jean de la Bruyère, favored a literary theory anchored on the appreciation of Antiquity, its heritage, and its history. They valued the historical persistence of the great Greek and Roman works that are still read centuries after their writing. They saw culture as cumulative, incremental, building upon the tradition established in Antiquity. To them, modern writers were “dwarves on the shoulders of giants”. 

Across the aisle of the Académie Française, the Moderns, led by Charles Perreault, advocated that the works created under the rule of Louis XIV, our beloved ribboned Roi Soleil, were simply the best, because they matched the King’s divine glory. The Moderns’ argument showcased the extent to which monarchic power impacted not only politics but also Culture.

Louis XIV, the Roi Soleil

The King ruled all and was the de facto arbiter, in France, of taste, literary and otherwise. In order to disseminate his taste, Louis XIV employed the Académie Française, a council responsible for all matters pertaining to the French language. Though the Académie now deals mainly with grammar and the acceptance of new words, at the time, it also decided which books got banned and which authors received pensions, effectively acting as a soft literary propaganda arm for the regent. What the Académie approved was good, naturally: vox Regis, vox Dei.

The Académie Française in Paris

Across the pond, however, the Monarch was losing influence. In 1688, after the Glorious Revolution, the Bill of Rights 1688 limited the powers of the Monarch and established free elections. Slowly, with its political power capped, the British royal court also lost its cultural power. There was no longer a central arbiter, as there was in France.

An 18th-century engraving, based on a drawing by Samuel Wale, of the Bill of Rights being presented to William III and Mary II

Moreover, the 18th century was economically ebullient in the United Kingdom. Bolstered by its colonies, the Industrial Revolution and incorporated trading outposts in India, Africa, the West Indies and South America, trade skyrocketed, minting a new class of wealthy entrepreneurs with seemingly overnight fortunes. This nouvelle bourgeoisie imported goods from China, built lavish estates, and indulged in reckless luxury, which many saw as “decadent”. The lack of a central authority and the rapid increase in prosperity and disposable income called for a “structure of consumption”, a code, a set of rules, to combat the potential consequences of unbridled consumption. It is in this heated and effervescent vacuum that the question of Taste emerges.

Today, Taste has returned as a point of social discourse. Far from the “greatest single social issue” of the 21st century, it is nonetheless an area of contention. As Scott Belsky points out, in the age of AI-generation, Taste will become the critical skill one has to learn to parse through the towering wave of new things that will emerge from technological acceleration. Our situation resembles that of 18th century England. At the eve of a new Industrial Revolution, inundated by foreign products, lacking the central authority of an Elite to dictate and inspire mimesis, we are left wandering in endless store aisles and webpages, wondering how to properly consume.

In the 18th century, Taste sought to be the answer to the meandering, it was the differentiator between the unprincipled garish spending of trade merchants and the virtuous aesthetic decisions of the nobility. Ideas of Taste, good and bad, made their way into fiction, magazines like Addison’s The Spectator and even philosophical treatises. Notably, the figure of the rich yet tasteless individual was a central character in satires such as Alexander Pope’s epistle “Of Taste”.

’T is strange the Miser should his cares employ
To gain those riches he can ne’er enjoy:
Is it less strange the Prodigal should waste
His wealth to purchase what he ne’er can taste?
Not for himself he sees, or hears, or eats;
Artists must choose his pictures, music, meats:
He buys for Topham drawings and designs;
For Pembroke statues, dirty gods, and coins;
Rare monkish manuscripts for Hearne alone,
And books for Mead, and butterflies for Sloane.
Think we all these are for himself? no more
Than his fine wife, alas! or finer whore.

Of Taste, or The Use of Riches, 1731, Alexander Pope (An Epistle to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington)

Pope derided the nouveau-riche’s attempt to seem tasteful. In the poem, the unnamed protagonist selects his art collection based on the preferences of other individuals instead of his own. From the gentleman and collector Richard Topham, he takes his selection of “drawings and designs”, from collector and politician Thomas Herbert, 8th Earl of Pembrooke, his antiques, from medievalist Thomas Hearne, his collection of manuscripts, and from physicians Richard Mead and Sir Hans Sloane, books and scientific curiosities. Nothing for himself, all for others.

Portrait of Alexander Pope by Michael Dahl

Poor taste, to Pope, was exhibited in the lack of harmony and functionality. The tasteless man favors grandeur over restraint.

To compass this, his building is a town,
His pond an ocean, his parterre a down:
Who but must laugh, the master when he sees,
A puny insect, shiv'ring at a breeze!

Pope’s definition of Taste was not random, rather it was inspired by the aesthetic philosophy of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Known as the “first great aesthetician that England produced” (Cassirer 1953), Shaftesbury adduced the concepts of “moral beauty” and “moral taste”. He wrote in his “Reflections”, “It has been the main scope and principal end of these volumes to assert the reality of a beauty and charm in moral as well as natural subjects, and to demonstrate the reasonableness of a proportionate taste and determinate choice in life and manners”. Shaftesbury wanted to prove that not every preference was equivalent, that tastes were meant to be discussed and that “there [was] such a thing as ‘good taste’ in art and morality.” (McAteer)

To Shaftesbury, beauty comes from the proper ordering of parts following the “universal natural rules of harmony and proportion”. His Deistic view of Nature as God led him to conclude that the Order of Nature must be followed and imitated in our attempts to create the Beautiful. Moreover, to create the Beautiful is to be like Nature, like God, thus, beauty and goodness are “one and the same”. (Shaftesbury 1709) He called this harmonious relationship to Nature and Order “moral beauty”.

Consequently, to have Taste was to select things based on their moral goodness. Inversely, tastelessness was a moral affront.

The suff'ring eye inverted Nature sees,
Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees;
With here a fountain, never to be play'd;
And there a summerhouse, that knows no shade;
Here Amphitrite sails through myrtle bow'rs;
There gladiators fight, or die in flow'rs; 
Unwater'd see the drooping sea horse mourn,
And swallows roost in Nilus' dusty urn.

When Pope speaks of the tasteless man’s garden, he describes it as an “inverted Nature” that causes the eye to suffer. Implicitly, he makes a negative moral judgement of his character based on his estrangement from the natural order. Immorality and luxury were characteristics of the decadent effeminacy which worried 18th-century writers and politicians. (Clery 2004)

We hardly think of the consumer as immoral anymore, but our conception of the consumer as the rational deployer of capital or “homo economicus” is a recent idea. As historian John Pocock notes,

Economic man as masculine conquering hero is a fantasy of nineteenth century industrialization (the Communist Manifesto is of course one classic example). His eighteenth-century predecessor was seen as on the whole a feminized, even an effeminate being, still wrestling with his own passions and hysterias and with interior and exterior forces let loose by his fantasies and appetites, and symbolized by such archetypically female goddesses of disorder as Fortune, Luxury, and most recently Credit herself. 

To the 18th century aesthete, taste was the tamer of appetites, the mark of the polite and educated gentleman, a moral action. In their new industrialized age of consumption, they used it to distinguish between wretched commercial spending and virtuous consumption. Philosophers like Shaftesbury believed that you could not just be mere consumers of pleasure, as that would lead to moral decline. They saw the democratization of luxury as an omen for the subversion of virtue. Taste was the prerequisite to an ordered and thriving society. Every penny loafer was a step towards Goodness.

In squeaky apartments worldwide, the conversation has diverged from the moral value of the aesthetic decision. Taste is now deployed as a marker of class and habitus, not virtue. We have wholly succumbed to the passions and appetites which troubled the 18th century individual. This abdication is correlated with the advent of contemporary capitalism and the new business elite it spawned. The growth of the business elite was accelerated, on the one hand, by the free trade policy proposed by political theorists like Adam Smith in the 18th century, which, by the 19th, was implemented, and, on the other, by the repealing in 1825 of the Bubble Act of 1720, which formerly restricted the formation of joint-stock companies unless approved by Royal Charter. The latter allowed more entrepreneurs to raise capital and offer shares in new ventures, and the former reduced the price of commodities while the UK remained a large exporter of manufactured finished goods, thereby creating new members of the industrial business elite. This further increased wealth in the UK, which by the 1850s was dominating world trade. Money was flooding the British economy and its Empire was thriving.

This business elite differed culturally from the British aristocracy, but their influence was undeniable. A slow process of assimilation occured and the original social rift, felt in the words of Pope and Shaftesbury, abates over time. Business elites adopted aristocratic lifestyles, acquiring country houses, and landed estates, which reflected a cultural assimilation into the gentry's values and practices. Nonetheless, they maintained their entrepreneurial activities, and the lines between aristocracy and bourgeoisie blurred. The moral aristocratic tastes of the Earl of Shaftesbury had to adapt to a growing capitalist economy and its demands for consumption, on which its persistence depended. With the assimilation complete, distinction (by Taste) was no longer required.

We are still living in the fantasy of the 19th century Homo Economicus, and Taste has had to adapt to this new reality. We see shoes, sofas, and architectural decisions as markers of financial and social success, exhibited through Taste. Whereas the aristocrats of the 18th prided themselves in being the selectors of the wares that decorated their estates, we often outsource these decisions to influencers, stylists, and interior designers. Our fascination exposes the cultural vacuum we inhabit, without any clear and objective frameworks for Beauty besides price and social legibility.

Maybe this reflects a shift towards the very American belief that success is a sign of goodness (and thus Godliness?). Our culture is notably bereft of any monolithic moral system in the wake of God’s Death. Leaving Shaftesbury, Beauty is no longer seen in the Harmony of Nature but in the amoral Order of Capital.

When uncreased white sneakers question polished penny loafers, begging “What’s Taste?”, the real question asked is, “What’s Good?”