Beauty as resistance

Good visualization design is an act of liberation

Albert Camus at the Nobel Prize ceremony

The Art of Insight begins and ends with quotes by the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus. Camus’s novels and essays, his anti-authoritarian stance, and his hedonistic and liberationist morality are as relevant today as they were more than half a century ago. The book that I’m writing these days opens with a passage from Camus’s Nobel Prize banquet speech (1957):

In all circumstances of life, in obscurity or temporary fame, cast in the irons of tyranny or for a time free to express himself, the writer can win the heart of a living community that will justify him, on the one condition that he will accept to the limit of his abilities the two tasks that constitute the greatness of his craft: the service of truth and the service of liberty. Because his task is to unite the greatest possible number of people, his art must not compromise with lies and servitude which, wherever they rule, breed solitude. Whatever our personal weaknesses may be, the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression.

That applies to writing as much as it does to journalism, visualization design, and many other creative endeavors. The nobility of our craft(s) depends on articulating and revealing our best understanding of what the truth (lowercase “t”) is, and on promoting widespread liberation.

In Camus’s thinking, one cannot separate truth from liberty; truth feeds liberty, and liberty is the soil where truth flourishes. Truth and liberty are entwined in a self-reinforcing loop. When we design a good visualization we aren’t just conveying our best understanding of a truth; by sharing our contemplation of that truth, we’re also making ourselves and our readers freer.

Camus’s “refusal to lie about one knows” has Orwellian resonances. It’s the duty to speak firmly, and frankly, particularly when facing power, and to call things what they are* based on reasoning, evidence, and sympathy towards the downtrodden. Here’s Camus again:

The writer’s role is not free from difficult duties. By definition he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.

Camus’s “resistance to oppression” is the duty to advocate for equal and universal liberation, which involves both negative liberty (freedom from coercion) and positive liberty (creating the conditions and resources for anyone and everyone to live life as they wish, within reason.)

Key components of positive liberty are freedom from ignorance and the ability to acquire trustworthy information. Education, journalism, information design, and visualization, when conducted professionally and ethically, are instruments for liberation.

For that reason, they are also engines of beauty. On November 6th I shared the following on Bluesky, the platform where the visualization community is regrouping:

I write this as someone for whom the results of this election are a direct threat: Despair today if you must; after that, get back to work, and work harder. Protect others. Do good. Create beauty. As those in the past who survived much harder times showed, that's the way we endure.

Work harder, protect others, do good, and create beauty. Camus inspires those words. Your work matters; you matter. Doing ethical, beautiful work—visualization work, or any other creative work—and putting it out there for others to learn, enjoy, and inform themselves to live better lives, imbues a meaningless world with meaning. Any expression of beauty is a rebellion against darkness, a repudiation of ugliness, and an act of resistance against ignorance and malice.

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*Coda: Here’s an example of Camus’s “refusal to lie about one knows”: Trumpism is a form of neo-fascism, as it fulfills most, if not all, of the characteristics that define fascism. A corollary to this fact is that whoever votes for Trumpism is supporting fascism, either deliberately or unknowingly.

We may like this fact or not, we may believe that writing it or saying it plainly will be felt as an insult by millions, as it surely will, but that doesn’t make it less of a fact, and a critical one to grasp what we’re about to endure and shall resist.

What I’ve been reading

Tamara Muzner’s fundamental Visualization Analysis and Design (second reading.) If there’s a visualization book from the past few decades or more that deserves to be called a classic, it’s this one.

Antony Unwin’s Getting (More Out of) Graphics, a comprehensive guide to interpreting visualizations, particularly exploratory and analytical ones.

Paul Kahn’s Global Information Design series (four articles so far). Paul reminded me of it after he watched my keynote at VISAP. These articles are an ambitious and admirable syncretic effort; they tie together a myriad strands of information design, and go beyond narrow and Western-centric views of the field. Here’s the first article in the series.

David Spiegelharter’s The Art of Uncertainty. If you enjoyed his previous The Art of Statistics, you’ll love this one. Simon and I are interviewing David for The Data Journalism Podcast in just a few days; I can’t wait.

Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom. Snyder’s Bloodlands is one of my favorite books about World War II. On Freedom is a reflection on what it means to be free in a world that favors autocracy, oppression, numbing entertainment, and intellectual laziness caused, in no small part, by social media and generative AI.

Leonardo Padura’s The Man Who Loved Dogs (in Spanish). Having heard about Padura for ages, I don’t know why I had never read any of his books before. This is arguably the most popular one. It’s a gripping fictionalization of the events that led to the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, and it’s excellent.

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I leave you with Anjani’s Blue Alert, written and produced by her long-time collaborator—and, for a time, boyfriend—Leonard Cohen; two people working together to create beauty, a spark in a barren world: