https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=tw4peTbZtjI
Conservatives love to talk about true and false. Boom, owned, statistic, fact, debunked. Conservatives, used to at least, and to some degree still do, like to talk about morality and ethics, and you should do this and you shouldn’t do that. In my lifetime, conservatives have just really ignored that third transcendental, beauty. Is it because beauty doesn’t matter, or is it because conservatives are just missing something? I think they’re not only missing something, but I think they’re also missing the key to their project, because beauty is that which draws you into truth and goodness. It is the possibility of the world, let’s say, being transparent to something transcendent, but we see that it’s beauty that draws us in. And so the fact that conservatives have been focusing on economics, on let’s say family values, all this stuff, and ignoring beauty means that the other side has captured the world through using those means, let’s say, twisting them for sure, but using the means of beauty has been the loss of the conservatives for sure. Because if I’m trying to win someone over to my side of a political debate, I guess I can make some logical reasoned argument, but that might elude a lot of people, or it might just turn people off, or it might just not be interested. If I make a moral argument, a lot of people these days, when we’re living in an age of materialism and moral ignorance and idiocy, if you don’t mind the bluntness, that’s probably not gonna work very well either. They’ll turn to the Big Lebowski argument, they’ll say, well, that’s just like your opinion, man. Who cares what morality is? But if I show someone a picture of a beautiful sunset, if I show someone a picture of the Sistine Chapel, the Duomo, or a beautiful mountain range, it kind of bypasses the reason. It kind of cuts right to the heart of someone. The power of beauty seems much more widely accessible. Exactly. But it’s also, I think, one of the issues we’ve had in the, let’s say, the last few centuries is that there’s been a movement, especially with the emphasis on reason, there’s been a movement where beauty, or the appearances, are always seen as something which is tricking you, something which is lying, let’s say. And sometimes that’s true, and we see that a lot in advertisement, and the modern media has a lot of that. But there’s a manner also in which, because we believe that the origin of truth and goodness is that which creates the world, it’s that which makes the world, therefore the world is made in a way that reflects that. And that’s beauty, that’s that, exactly, it’s like that moment that cuts through everything, where you’re shaken in your body. It’s not just about up here, it’s like your whole body participates when you walk into a beautiful building, especially. You feel overwhelmed with this sense of awe, right? The hairs on your neck stand up, and you feel like you’re small and that you’re in this amazing presence. These are real, they’re not illusions. These are real feelings, and they’re, you can imagine, like even imagine in the Bible, you imagine the Israelites coming up to the mountain and this mountain trembling, and the glory of God appearing on the mountain. These are appearances, these are things that are seizing people. And I think that we struggle with that, especially in North America, I would say. We do have a kind of cult of ugliness, and also a cult of the banal is the best way to think about it. We love things that are banal, we have the strip malls, we have the electric wires, we have these huge highways, and so we’ve lost our sense of this pattern. We’ve lost our sense of proportion, and because of that, I think our souls are impoverished for that. I totally agree with your point. I was at a wedding in the south of France last year, and I’m walking through these medieval towns, and I was even walking through Paris, and my wife said, how come they get this? And we don’t get to have these beautiful things. So I totally agree, but why? Why do we in particular have this cult of ugliness in North America? I think it’s because North America is really the product of the modern world. It really is a modern country, and it is founded on economic good, on economic progress, on business. These are the values that sustain us, and so when we make these large, these huge glass towers that show power and economic success, but they lack a connection to the transcendent that the older buildings had. So I really think that’s what it is. We’re very practical, we make the best computers, we make the best stuff, but that also has a corollary. And there’s also another aspect, which is that North American society in general has moved away from community as being, let’s say, the thing that binds us together. And so because of that, urban planning has suffered tremendously. Now we’ve basically planned our cities based on cars, and so that totally transforms the space. Traditional towns are hierarchical in the way that they’re structured. So usually you’ll have something like a church in the center, it’s the highest building, the tower. Nothing is allowed to be higher than the church, and everything is aligned towards that church. So there’s a sense in which the entire space, even the streets, the manner in which you walk through, has a human scale to it, and has an orientation. And you think, well, why does that make it beautiful? But it’s about orientation. If you orient yourself properly, then things will lay themselves out almost naturally. The beauty of a medieval village isn’t planned. It is this negotiation, this organic negotiation of humans oriented towards the same thing. Our modern suburbs are monsters. They’re just these layouts of houses and houses and houses with no center, no common project, nothing to bind us together. And so we create, it’s because of the car, we create these huge shopping districts and then living districts, and nobody even knows where, we don’t have places to come together except for maybe entertainment, sporting events, everything. So it’s a very deep, deep problem. And it actually does start with architecture and urban planning, and then everything kind of flows out of that, where we’re used to living in these inhuman spaces. And so because of it, we don’t see beauty as a value that draws us together. Here’s where modern conservatives will push back to, because you’re right, I was thinking, I was walking around this town, Le Beaux, in Provence, and at the very tippy top of the town, there is the old church, and it’s a beautiful church, and the whole rest of the town is kind of descending around that. But a modern American conservative might say, well, well, I don’t give a damn about that church. Who are you to tell me that I can’t build a building bigger than that church? I’m gonna build a skyscraper that’s 10 zillion feet high, and I’m gonna fill it up with a bunch of bankers, and I’m gonna fill it up with a bunch of lawyers and a bunch of businesses, and we’re gonna just make money, money, money. And how, and frankly, forget the office building for a second. If I wanna build my house 10,000 feet high, I’m gonna do that too, and you have no right to tell me otherwise. Well, in the end, that might be true, and that might be fine in the sense that, okay, yeah, but then don’t complain down the line when you see things falling apart. And so don’t complain down the line when you realize that everybody is doing their own thing in terms of morality, everybody’s doing their own things in terms of how they conceive of family, how they conceive of what is good. All these things come together. There’s a reason why Plato has the three transcendentals. It’s because they actually are, you could say something like they’re actually transparent manifestations of something infinite, but you really need all three, or else you can’t have the other ones. Or you can fight for the other ones, but they’re slowly going to disintegrate. It’s difficult to hold that together. But by the way, in the United States, there are counter movements, and there are groups that are trying to think of the world differently. And so there are some cities, for example, Charleston, South Carolina, where there are many groups of developers and groups of architects that are working to recreate human-sized cities. So there’s a neighborhood near Charleston called Ion, where the developer built the whole neighborhood, and the first thing he said is we need a church, at least two, so they’ve got two churches, and then they made everything human scale, and so it’s like the streets are narrow, so you have to wait for the other cars to kind of go, and I’m hearing some conservatives rip their hair out. But there’s something about, let’s say, even how do you deal with the problem of cars? If you have to slow down, and you have to see the person in front of you and negotiate a little bit all the time, then the car doesn’t become this weird bubble that you’re just alone in. It becomes a space of relationship with others. And that’s really what we, so that’s a way in which beauty can create community. And there’s something more human scale and beautiful is actually encouraging community. [“The Star-Spangled Banner”]