Authenticity Watch: Kingsely Amis

The deafness that we have to our own aesthetic prejudices and biases is closely analogous to our deafness to our own accent. Just as each person thinks the way he speaks is perfectly natural — it’s other people who have funny accents — we all believe that our own judgments about what is ugly or beautiful, delicious or disgusting, reflects real properties in the world. It is other people whose tastes are so obviously conditioned by their culture or their social class.

That’s from my column in the print edition of this week’s Maclean’s...