“The beautiful cannot be conceived apart from the good.”
Plato, The Republic
Can a society that has lost its ethics have an aesthetics? At the point we have reached, this question is not merely a philosophical curiosity; it opens the door to a diagnosis that reverberates at the very center of Türkiye’s social life today. When appearance begins to take the place of truth in modern societies, aesthetics starts to produce illusion rather than “beauty.” Today, Turkish society is among the contexts where this is felt most acutely. Dazzling shopfronts, grandiose architectural projects, the glittering images incessantly reproduced by the media… Each of these brings to the stage not reality itself, but a simulacrum resembling reality, that is, counterfeit phenomena in which the copy of truth takes the place of truth. Thus social life turns into a component of a “spectacle.” Truth yields its place to glittering representations. Yet this is not merely an aesthetic problem; it is, in fact, also the manifestation of a profound ethical rupture. For when aesthetics exists without an ethical ground, it produces manipulation rather than beauty, just as in Türkiye…
Plato’s emphasis on the ancient bond between the “good” (agathon) and the “beautiful” (kalon) is not merely a philosophical observation; it is a condition for a society’s very existence, at least, that is how I make sense of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. When this bond breaks, the ugly appears as if it were beautiful, and the false as if it were true. Nor does this rupture confront us only as a theoretical debate. It also means the gradual disappearance of a society’s spirit and imagination. Sadly, Türkiye’s present sociocultural landscape leaves precisely this impression. The truth is covered over by endlessly reproduced images, numbing the public conscience, while a politics of spectacle rivets a deepening mental ghettoization. In a sociology where beauty is hollowed out—emptied, indeed made to be emptied—and goodness is lost in the shadow of counterfeit representations, ethics and aesthetics inevitably drift apart, and society loses itself in illusions. Aesthetics turns into a curtain that conceals truth rather than making it visible. As this curtain covers reality, it soothes society, because to see the truth is to confront it. The reign of appearance anesthetizes the collective conscience and keeps society from asking the most fundamental questions, from criticizing, from creating.
The French thinker Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle, speaks of how the modern world has turned into an order in which glittering representations take the place of reality. His concept of the “society of the spectacle” in fact explains Türkiye’s current condition strikingly well. In our country’s order, where politics and the media are intertwined, we witness the “real” being transformed into a spectacle. What Debord points to is this: the society of the spectacle brings its members onto the stage as both spectators and actors. Thus the “real” ceases to be something lived, and an aestheticized copy of the real begins to be consumed. This is not only an aesthetic crisis; it is at the same time a profound ethical collapse. For any aesthetics produced without ethics creates not beauty but manipulation. It would hardly be wrong to say that in Türkiye today, aesthetics is used not to disclose the truth but to cover it over and re-script it. In Debord’s terms, on today’s axiological terrain in Türkiye we are confronted with an illusion in which the spectacle’s splendor camouflages the naked reality of truth.
One of the strongest theoretical accounts of this manipulation was offered by Jean Baudrillard in his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard’s notion of simulation—presenting a copy of reality as if it were reality itself—is one of the fundamental maladies of modern societies. His further step, hyperreality—that excess of reality which becomes more persuasive than reality itself—keeps people from questioning the truth. Hyperreality is, in Türkiye, especially the most potent weapon of politics; it manages social memory and numbs individuals. Instead of questioning what is real, people acquiesce to the spectacle set before them. Thus the very practice of ethical inquiry becomes superfluous.
Politics is, in fact, both the architect and the chief beneficiary of this aesthetic order. For political milieus and outlets manipulate individuals’ aesthetic preferences and steer them. The choices made at the ballot box are, more often than not, not the expression of a genuine will but the final act of a pre-scripted spectacle. The ballot box ceases to be a space that reflects the people’s conscience and turns into a theater stage. The genuinely autonomous individual (autonomous individual)—the person who generates their own decisions and values—is dangerous to politics. For the autonomous individual is the only being capable of disrupting power’s aesthetic game. Hence, in Türkiye, politics at once instrumentalizes individuality and suppresses it systematically. The education system, the language of the media, and cultural policies shape individuals into obedient masses.
This distorted form of individualization fragments society and alienates people from one another. The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, explains this fragmentation with two concepts: Gemeinschaft, community relations based on warm and intimate bonds; and Gesellschaft which—unlike in Weber—denotes a mechanical society dominated by relations of interest. And what do we see when we look at Türkiye? Neither a community with strong bonds nor a healthy modern society. Instead, a scattered and chaotic crowd of mutually alienated individuals. That is why, as a common ethical ground begins to vanish, we can no longer speak of a shared aesthetic memory either.
The first signals of a society’s axiological—ethical and aesthetic—collapse reveal themselves in “language.” For language is not merely a tool of communication; it is also the bearer of a shared dream and a mode of thinking—in other words, of imagination. A society’s words and concepts reflect, together, its ethical boundaries and its aesthetic refinement. The gravest misfortune that can befall a society’s language is its politicization and the consequent loss of semantic altitude. As language becomes politicized, it comes to be used not to express truth but to annihilate it. Sentences dig trenches rather than building bridges; words, far from expanding meaning, do the opposite and deepen polarization. Among the living figures of the Frankfurt School—who, despite having caused me some partial disappointment with his recent pronouncements on world affairs, still holds a respected place in the intellectual sphere—Jürgen Habermas states in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere that where differences cannot converge upon a common truth, the public sphere collapses. In Türkiye today, especially with the politicization of language, the public sphere has ceased to be a ground for conversation and has turned into a field of conflict.
The linguistic collapse in question manifests itself not only in the public sphere but also in everyday life. We must acknowledge that the slogan-like, shouting tone of social media accelerates this process. We observe with concern communication dynamics in which rudeness finds favor and even confers on a person a counterfeit “respectability” and so-called “authenticity.” Yet I frankly do not think we are aware that this signifies not only the collapse of words but also of modes of thinking. If the “word” and, in this sense, the “concept,” is the dwelling of thought, then we must see that as thought is impoverished, we are gradually losing the mental capacities to grasp that words, too, grow shallow. I am of the view that the linguistic degeneration that began in Türkiye especially in recent years and has today reached an alarm level is—if the expression may be excused—the strongest indicator of mental “ghettoization.” To put it in Hilmi Yavuz’s words, language is one of the most functional bridges between ethics and aesthetics, and when words become “ugly,” a society’s spirit grows ugly as well.
Cemil Meriç, in Those in the Cave, underscores that the hollowing-out of concepts that come alive within a society will paralyze that society’s capacity for thought. Today in Türkiye, not only have words grown ugly; concepts, too, have been cheapened and rendered incapable of bearing truth. This, precisely, is the deepest dimension of mental ghettoization. Alev Alatlı, for her part, notes that such degeneration harms not only the aesthetic sphere; it also renders ethical inquiry impossible in the society in question. This landscape is, for a society, the very embodiment of an axiological (ethical/aesthetic) impasse.
I think we now agree that linguistic collapse is the most distinct harbinger of a loss of level in a society’s collective mentality. What is the most visible and most wrenching consequence of this process? To be brief: “ghettoization.” How, then, should we construe “varoş”? At first glance and with a superficial reading, “varoş-ness” might be taken merely as disorder or material poverty observed on a city’s margins; but in fact it represents a mentality. In its shortest definition, ghettoization is the individual’s giving up the effort to make sense of self and surroundings and taking refuge in ready-made molds. And “ghettoization,” in the social sense, is the spread of this mentality on a collective scale—that is, the homogenization of a society at the spiritual and cultural level. To understand ghettoization better, let us turn to Sartre’s concept of “existence.” Jean-Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, says that existence precedes essence. For the human being is a creature who constructs itself not with identities conferred from without but through its own original choices. “Existence,” for Sartre, is in fact the courage to be oneself. Ghettoization, by contrast, points in precisely the opposite direction. That is, instead of producing the values that constitute the self and the original decisions that make one who one is, the individual consents to live within ready-made images determined by others—even by authority. In this sense, the “ghetto” is in fact an anti-existence: a flight from the possibility of being oneself and a surrender to the aesthetics of the counterfeit. Ethical ghettoization signals an order in which trust is entirely destroyed and relations are founded solely upon calculations of interest, while aesthetic ghettoization reduces beauty to superficial glitter and replaces genuine art—art that emerges from the will to create—with images of advertising and propaganda. In The Morality of Rebellion, Nurettin Topçu emphasizes that morality is not merely an individual matter but, in a social context, the bearer of the spirit. In his view, if morality collapses in a society, art and aesthetics likewise lose their function and become rootless. The unraveling of ethical bonds destroys not only social norms but the very meaning of the “beautiful.” That is, if the bond between what is “good” and what is “beautiful” is severed in a society, what remains is only a superficial sheen; the ultimate outcome is social bankruptcy. Though this sheen may provide aesthetic visibility, it will categorically fail to generate depth. And in an environment where the individual cannot first bring themselves into authentic being, society will content itself with living not a true existence but a merely “as-if” way of life.
I must admit I have painted a dark picture. While this decay and homogenization shape the general outlook of the ethical and aesthetic spheres in Türkiye, let me add that the picture is not entirely negative; but for now… We can, of course, also say that certain veins still resist, that certain precious voices strive to make themselves heard amid the empty noise. In some independent artistic circles and in certain academic and intellectual works, there are efforts aimed at re-establishing the bond between ethics and aesthetics, and they are hopeful signs for putting an end to this deterioration. These efforts often persist through great sacrifices and a quiet obstinacy. Yet it is also true that the weakness of social awareness, the glittering illusions of the spectacle, and the hollow din of ghettoization render these labors invisible and ineffectual. Productions oriented toward truth fail, alas, to find resonance in a broad public conscience, and their impact remains limited. The valuable works that do emerge reach only a particular segment’s attention instead of generating a profound cultural transformation. In this respect, it is quite significant that the situation shows Türkiye’s principal problem to be not a lack of production but a lack of meaning. In other words, we are given over not to the “how” but to the “what.”
To sum up, on the basis of all these views, it becomes clear that it would be incomplete to place responsibility for the unraveling of society’s ethical and aesthetic awareness solely on cultural degeneration or sociological indifference. For it is an undeniable fact that, in Türkiye, political dynamics have long functioned as an engineering power that also directs the ethical and aesthetic domain. I wish to draw attention to the way politics in Türkiye, instead of making truth visible—if we are to use Debord’s term—prefers to veil and camouflage truth with the glittering sets of the “spectacle.” Today in Türkiye, social language has been deliberately, wilfully politicized and instrumentalized not to express beauty and truth and to bring them to light, but to re-script the “beautiful” with newly supplied definitions and impose it upon society. In this way, the constant narcotizing of social memory with perpetually burnished images, the transformation of individuals into the extras of pre-scripted scenarios as they lose the guidance of their own consciences, and hence their “management,” are all made possible. This stage-setting function of politics has hollowed out ethical values and reduced aesthetics to a display of power. The ethical and aesthetic impasse we are living through today is not merely a cultural crisis; it is the product of a complex process of social collapse shaped as well by political strategies.
The conclusion is bitter but clear: for a society that has lost its ethics, the awakening of its aesthetic consciousness and any productive process within it are simply impossible. Aesthetics is not merely the production of what is beautiful; it is also a mirror of the social spirit and the common imagination. Every aesthetics produced without ethics will exalt not beauty but the counterfeit, and the degeneration (indeed, deliberate debasement) of language is the most visible indicator of this counterfeit. The rule is very simple: when words grow ugly, cities and people, too, will grow ugly through ghettoization. For the “ugly” is far easier to control, steer, and manage, because in this way it has been deprived of existential self-confidence and thus of a morality of will. I must say that Turkish society has been deliberately ghettoized. This, alas, is where we have come and the process we behold. As for how this is done beyond the corruption of language—that is the subject of another essay…
