Vulgarity as Virtue | City Journal
Not having visited Edinburgh for ten years, I was appalled by what it had become in the intervening period. It was now filthy; narrow passages smelled of urine; empty beer cans cluttered the gutters. In many places, the trash had clearly lain undisturbed for a long time. No one seemed to care: so much for the Athens of the North.
The last time that I was in the city, the building known popularly as the Golden Turd had not yet been built. This appalling structure now dominates and ruins Edinburgh s skyline. It is part of a hideous $1.25 billion redevelopment scheme known as the St. James Quarter, which replaced the equally hideous 1970s brutalist building, the St. James Centre. One can see it as the very embodiment of modern intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic vacuity. The main building is a giant hotel, a round building wrapped in a bronze spiral that points meaninglessly skyward. Nothing could be more emblematic of the implosion of Scottish (and British) taste than the incapacity of modern architects and government officials to build even a minimally pleasant building on, and appropriate to, the site in a city whose elegant but simple Georgian architecture is world-renowned.
Modernist architects, retained by patrons such as the University of Edinburgh, have worked for a long time to destroy the city s fabric. Between 1960 and 1963, for example, the university constructed a 14-story building in George Square that would not have seemed out of place on the outskirts of Novosibirsk. With a kind of shameless impudence, they named it David Hume Tower about as appropriate as naming an abattoir after Jane Austen. Even more impudently, the building has now received a preservation order as a monument of Scottish modernism as if such an order could disguise or excuse the ugly banality of the building on the grounds that it once represented the future (as, alas, it did).
But with the surefire misguided aim of modern intellectuals, university students and staff recently objected not to the building itself, but to its name, because Hume had written a few passages that do not fully accord with modern views of race. Never mind that he also wrote, in 1758: Those who pass the early part of life among slaves, are only qualified to be, themselves, slaves and tyrants; and in every future intercourse either with their inferiors or superiors, are apt to forget the natural equality of mankind.
Theodore Dalrymple.