Justice & Law Quote by Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis is skewering a familiar modern superstition: that whatever can be marketed as "young" must be morally fresh, politically brave, aesthetically new. The sentence turns on a neat rhetorical trap. He grants Youth a "divine name" - not just a demographic label but a sanctified alibi - then quietly flips the blade: many acts performed under that banner are, in their real motives, the very habits we claim to be escaping.

The phrasing "if they showed their true colors" suggests camouflage and opportunism. Youth here is a costume older forces put on to pass inspection. Lewis is pointing at a cycle where institutions, movements, even avant-garde art borrow the glamour of renewal while practicing the conservatism of self-protection: risk-aversion dressed as rebellion, social conformity sold as disruption, cruelty repackaged as honesty.

"Belong rather to old age" is not a cheap insult toward the elderly; it's a jab at "old age" as a psychological category: fear of change, nostalgia for hierarchy, the desire to police taste and behavior. Lewis, writing in a century obsessed with the new (from Futurism to mass advertising), distrusts the way modernity turns generational identity into religion. His intent is diagnostic, not sentimental: to expose how easily "youth" becomes a moral laundering machine.

The subtext is cynical and bracing: beware the politics of vibes. If something needs Youth as its justification, Lewis implies, it may already be spiritually exhausted.