https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=wiM2OG5rnrE
What do you see the role of beauty playing in the meaning crisis in general? Because, you know, we both are probably in a similar position. In the words of people that are coming at it and are learning about orthodoxy, it seems like beauty is also part of how they find a kind of solution to the meaning crisis. Which, what would have seemed surprising to someone, you know, even 50 years ago, we’d say that one of the solutions to nihilism is beauty. But if you want to tell us a bit about how you see that functioning. There’s so many levels in which to answer that. And I, you know, there’s more philosophical, more theological. I mean, I’m just starting with basic biology, which is that, you know, most living things out there are, do not have a cerebral cortex. And yet they’re making decisions just fine. And they’re surviving and they’re propagating. And they are able to discern, you know, the structure of the world, you know, to the extent they need to, and to respond appropriately. And so, you know, how are they doing this? They’re doing this through sensation. And if you go down to, you know, the most basic cellular level, it’s somehow at the level of chemistry that, you know, things are, you know, the paramecium, the bacteria is out there sensing and reacting. So to imagine that human beings, you know, unless you are an exceptional theist, I mean, not even a theist, but a gnostic, then to imagine that human beings can divorce feeling from knowing or divorce knowing from feeling and sensing is really ridiculous. I mean, it’s just nuts. Everything is out there making decisions and flourishing without the brain. I mean, just some things have brains and then that’s another story. Why do you formulate it as beauty? Because, you know, the way that I would formulate it originally is I would talk about goodness, you know, in the way that Dante talks about goodness or in the idea of that which is desirable, maybe even just that, like the idea of moving towards that which is desirable. You know, and so why is it that you feel the need to formulate it as beauty? Well, didn’t Aristotle say that the beautiful is the radiance of the good or something? So to survive, we need to remember again how to think visually, how to think in terms of holes. We’re trying to design a new major right now at the college and I can’t say what it is, but the thing that convinces me that it’s worth doing is the beauty of it. And then the question has arisen, well, is that a sufficient grounds? It isn’t, maybe, but maybe it is because a feeling for beauty or for harmony is, you know, it’s the fastest way often to discern the health of a situation. And health, you know, is a cipher for that underlying, you know, good functioning. So we’re not computers, we are, you know, we’re biological beings. And we’re, you know, we’re just, that’s, we have that capacity and we don’t have the possibility of thought without that capacity. Yeah, I think that’s right. But there’s an intuitive aspect to the way you’re presenting it, which is that, you know, our capacity to perceive health is a good, it’s a good way to talk about beauty in a way that might stretch people. You know, we’re not computers, we are, you know, we might stretch people, you know, when I look at someone, I perceive health very much so because I’m so, my whole being is there to detect that, to know, even in terms of like infection, even something like that, or to understand the situation I’m dealing with. And a lot of our markers for physical beauty are really just health markers and symmetry markers, to be able to tell, you know, how aligned someone is towards reality. And so we can then, we can then understand that humans have that capacity in general, not just towards people, but also towards situations. You know, when you enter a room and there’s disorder, you know, if people are moving in ways that is not normal, like, you know, let’s say you walked into a room where people have just had a fight, you will be able to detect that intuitively without thinking yet because there’ll be, things will be laid out in a manner and the movements of the people will be happening in a disorderly way and you’ll catch that really fast, even before you’re thinking. And so, you know, I think that’s an interesting way of talking about a very, very immediate manner in which beauty matters. There’s so many aspects of this and one of them is, you know, I think, you know, the pivotal chapter for the 21st century is chapter 22 of the death and life of great American cities by Jane Jacobs, my friend and mentor. And that’s the chapter where she presents Warren Weaver’s summation of the past 360 years of science, you know, science since we’ve had the scientific method. And he says, although science, you know, is vast and does a lot of things, in fact, there are three kinds of problems that we know how to solve, three, you know, as a genus of problem, there’s only three. And one of them is the problem in organized complexity. And what Jane Jacobs does, you know, the problem with a living system, it’s an organism. And society is like that, the economies are that, cities are that, families are that, institutions are that, you know, companies are that. And when you are in that realm, Jane Jacobs gives you, here are the tactics for understanding those kinds of systems. And in chapter eight of my book, I lay this out and I add several tactics of my own that are implied in her work or that I’ve, but an eye for beauty, training in beauty or training in grammar, because, you know, for me, beauty, goodness, truth is the trivium of grammar, logic, rhetoric, but training in pattern is the best training for understanding living systems or just systems. And you’ll, a person trained, they know in a flash. And Jane Jacobs specifically says this, all the statistics that you can compile about, and in this case, it was Boston’s North End, just, you know, they don’t tell you the full story, but to go there and observe un-average clues, now you said, well, we better look for different statistics. Yeah, yeah, I mean, that’s, and I think the city example is a great example in the sense that you know, and I mean, everybody’s had this experience, it’s like you’re walking in a city that you don’t know, all of a sudden you take a turn, and then all of a sudden you realize that you’ve taken the wrong turn, and that now you know that you’re not in a place you probably should be, or that you’re in a place where all of a sudden, the risk has gone up, you know, substantially. And you can tell that even if there’s no people there, like even if there aren’t people there that are suspicious or whatever, you can tell by a myriad of signs that are coming together in a pattern, you know, that is saying that to you. You know, and that I think is a great example to understand. And you can understand how sometimes, you know, the cliche of fixing a city by saying we don’t want broken windows, right? That kind of cliche where it’s to say that if you actually transform the pattern of the city itself, you can’t even transform the culture that people live in. Because if I’m walking through a dump, I know that I can just toss something on the ground, and it doesn’t matter, even if you, I might even not do that. But if I’m walking through a place that is cared for and pristine, and is full of care and attention, then even my worst habits might be reined in by the space in which I’m in. I mean, that’s a powerful testimony to beauty right there. So, yeah, I think training in the liberal arts or the fine arts, you know, is vital for people to acquire wisdom or to lead at a big picture level. Like, you shouldn’t trust leaders who don’t have a good aesthetic sensibility. And anyone could see that our approach to farming, this like highly centralized, government-subsidized, the cargills and all this, and the, you know, the erasure of the family farm and of rural culture and the chemicals and, you know, of different kinds, the fertilizers and the pesticides and all this, that compared to regenerative agriculture, anyone with a liberal arts degree will know one is sick and one is healthy. But people with, trained in the other kinds of science, reductive or statistical, will not see that. And they will push us to the point of collapse. And that brings us eventually now or later to Ian McGillchrist, the master and his emissary, because what he’s doing in that book is saying, you know, is basically saying that the brain hemispheres really are meant to unfold in a beauty goodness truth sequence. And that we’ve lost that, we’ve lost the right hemisphere, we’ve lost the feeling for holes, and we are reflexively repeating things, you know, that are good, that are driving us to exhaustion and destruction.