Writing
Ludovici's writing was varied, and took traditional conservative stances on social issues. Liberalism, Socialism, Marxism, Christianity, feminism, multiculturalism, and the modern culture of consumerism and revolt against tradition constituted Ludovici's main areas of attack.
He wrote "I have long been an opponent and critic of Christianity, Democracy and Anarchy in art and literature. I am particularly opposed to 'Abstract Art,' which I trace to Whistler's heretical doctrines of art and chiefly to his denial that the subject matters, his assimilation of the graphic arts and music, and his insistence on the superior importance of the composition and colour-harmony of a picture, over its representational content." He was an early critic of Jacob Epstein, attacking him in The New Age, to which he contributed as an art critic before the Great War.
In his A Defence of Aristocracy (1915), Ludovici defends aristocracy against government in popular control. In The False Assumptions of "Democracy" (1921), he attacked the democratic idea and the liberal attitude in general, as having originated in specious philosophy, wholly opposed to nature. A Defence of Conservatism (1927) defends tradition as not only a policy of preservation, but of discernment in change, writing "Man is instinctively conservative in the sense that probably millions of years of experience have taught him that a stable environment is the best for peace of mind, present and future security, automatism of action…and a ready command of material and artificial circumstances. It is the repeated introduction of new instruments, new weapons, new methods, and needs for fresh adaptations, that makes automatism impossible. And it is the complication of life by novel contributions to life's interests and duties that makes a ready command of circumstances difficult."
For Ludovici, egalitarianism in all its forms constituted a denial of the innate biological differences between individuals, the sexes and races. He criticized what he saw as the sentimental coddling of the mediocre and botched.
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Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only
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