Here at the Ministry of Culture, we encourage a boundless appreciation for beauty, and we find that many in the culture at large—on both the left and right of the political spectrum—have, for various complex reasons, an anemic or even hostile relationship with beauty.
Those on the left—the progressives, the modernists—are the more obvious threat to beauty. They control and steer the cultural institutions: they teach at the universities, bankroll Hollywood, support the orchestras and museums, run the government bureaucracies, and increasingly exert influence over the churches. They own the culture, and they are the arbiters of so-called good taste and sophistication. And yet, they have a long history of supporting revolutionary and destructive movements in all the arts. Observe the alien forms of Picasso, the unintelligible gibberish of Joyce, the refuse of Duchamp, the dissonance of Schoenberg, the oppressive brutalism of Le Corbusier, the amorphous monuments of Gehry. It is a long and exhausting list. In the social order, too, they glory in ugliness: declaring that “fat is beautiful,” celebrating when women pierce and tattoo their bodies and dye their hair unnatural colors, pushing for every public event to have a gaggle of garish drag queens marching at the front of the hideous parade.
Yet, it is more complex than all that. They do also produce beautiful things, for the attraction of beauty is a natural impulse in all but the most degraded men, even the modernist. iPhones are beautiful, in a smiplistic technological way, liberal publications and videography have the finest typesetting and the sleekest production values, the best movies have cinematography to make your eyes water from the visual richness on display. Game of Thrones, for instance, was a tour-de-force of aesthetic and storytelling achievement, though suffused with ugliness in its subject matter.
The right, on the other hand, being naturally conservative in their outlook, tend to eschew the cultural degradation of the revolutionaries and instinctively react against the ugliness they promulgate. This is a good first step—the correct instinct. However, despite this, too many on the right seem largely indifferent to beauty. Not that they don’t appreciate it, but that they don’t appreciate its power and importance, its centrality and its essentiality.
They tend to accept, seemingly without much notice or care, the casual ugliness of the modern world. Worse, they participate. How many conservative websites are so bogged down with ugly advertisements and flashing banners so as to be virtually unusable without a good ad blocker? Because one must make money, after all! Beauty is expensive and so we opt for the bland commercialized sameness of our world. Protest drag queen story hour, by all means, but don’t stop there! Protest the endless concrete mazes and bland metropolises of unadorned glass and plastered sheetrock! Do not accept the miles of tawdry billboards that line our boulevards, the artless cheap disposables that litter our homes and lives, pumped out of some monstrous conveyor belt in China. And for God’s sake, quit with corrugated tin worship centers and squat churches-in-the-round that look like a mishmash of hospital and elementary school aesthetic, except less attractive. Build something glorious for God!
But I digress.
The danger for those on the right is not a rejection of beauty based on some revolutionary ideology, but a dangerously anemic appreciation of beauty. Not all, not all. But too many.
I recall a sit-down between Bishop Barron and William Lane Craig, one of the greatest Christian apologists and philosophers fighting the good fight today. The bishop is a strong proponent of beauty and its spiritual power. When he brought up the argument from beauty for the existence of God, Craig more or less shrugged and said he did not find it compelling. I have no doubt that Craig appreciates beauty, but he did not seem to be moved by the force of it. Peter Kreeft in the Handbook of Christian Apologetics presents a simple argument for God from beauty. To paraphrase: “The music of Bach exists. Therefore God exists. You either get it or you don’t.”
And there’s the rub. Many on the right simply do not get it.
Part of this stems, no doubt, from the protestant cultural heritage. There is a strain of iconoclasm, with us from the beginning of the protestant revolt, and enduring to this day. It manifests in unadorned churches, worship services that are more rock concert than liturgy. All that glorious ornamentation was, and is, in the mind of many a protestant, a worldly indulgence, a distraction from the pure gospel, and worst of all a Romish accretion.
Another part, I think, comes down to the snobbery and hostility that many on the right have toward elite culture. It is understandable. After all, the elites look down on them, so they might as well give as good as they get. Many of the elites long ago abandoned their task of preserving and passing on the treasures that they had received and instead became corrupters and ransackers of the tradition and enemies of truth, goodness, and beauty. Again, the instinctive reaction against this revolutionary turn is a good thing, but it misfires when it turns also against learning and education and spurns the cultivation of the western tradition and all the beautiful things it contains.
Think of Marco Rubio dissing philosophy degrees in college in favor of a path of mere economic value—metal welding, for instance. There is nothing wrong with being practical and prudent, but philosophy, like beauty, like culture, should not be cast aside or denigrated.
Appreciation of beauty to some extent is instinctual, but it also requires education. Like the capacity for speech, we have the ability innately, but that ability must be nurtured and formed. One must be taught to appreciate not just a sunset or a pretty face. One must put in the work to be moved by a Mozart symphony or, even better, a hymn by Allegri.
Why? Why bother? Is it not enough to like what you like and let the fancy-pants elite dilly dally with symphonies and art galleries?
No, because beauty has the power to transform.
The transformative power of beauty was once well-known even in popular culture. Consider. The old-timey monster flick “King Kong” ends with the observation: “It was Beauty killed the beast”. Disney illuminated the inverse of that idea by telling the tale of Belle transforming a beast back into a man. While the first tale shows how obsession with an object of beauty, pursued brutishly, can lead to self-destruction; the second demonstrates the power of beauty to heal the ugliness of a sickened soul and restore a twisted nature.
Yet, today it is a commonplace to say “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” by which is meant “Beauty is subjective.”
Though there is a sense in which this is true, namely that the perception and experience of beauty is in the subject, and therefore to some extent is influence by the qualities of that subject, nevertheless the reality being experienced—the beauty in itself—is objective. It is a feature of the world. Were all life to die, the fire of a sunrise over a barren land would still shine forth it’s beauty, though no eye lived to perceive it. If all the world that burned down around Notre Dame de Paris, so that that great Cathedral stood alone on a darkling plane, it’s beauty would still sing out and rise up like a sweet fragrance into the heavens.
What is more, as those informed by the wisdom of Tradition know, beauty, along with truth and goodness, is a transcendental, a category above categories in which all things participate. It is part of the bedrock of reality, and in fact truth, goodness, and beauty, properly understood are the same inner reality.
Truth is reality understood by the mind, goodness is reality enacted by the will, and beauty is reality perceived and enjoyed by the aesthetic appetite.
From this we can see how the moral and intellectual ugliness in our culture is not so distant from the aesthetic ugliness. And it is no accident that those who would encourage gender transition for children also find a Picasso to be high art.
Therefore, if we want to heal our culture, and to heal our politics, we must not merely focus on what is true and good, but we must also bring back a full-throated appreciation of that which is beautiful.
Our future, and the future our civilization, depends on it.