Cross-posted at myleftwing.com and progressivehistorians.com
If you want people to exude beauty, to allow it to infuse their every moment, it is necessary to create and sustain a beautiful environment.
What makes for a beautiful environment?
Exactly, that's a good question.
And a profound one.
So profound we've somehow allowed it become banal.
This, to me, represents a social crisis.
A human crisis.
Well, what is the beautiful?
That which inspires a loving awareness of life.
That which allows an individual to feel nobler than they actually are, and consequently inspires them to act more nobly than they would under the force of intertia.
One of the most inpired times in New York's venerable, illustrious history, was borne of the fruits of social dehumanization under the great Robber Barons--Carnegie, Rockefeller, et. al. (I wrote a diary awhile back about Rockefeller and the beautiful society here, for those interested.)
The movement was known as "the City Beautiful."
It was the utopian vision of Gotham that brought you such things as Central Park and the Met and the New York Public Library and Bryant Park and Grand Central and Penn Station (which the heathen tore down in the forties, special thanks to Jackie O. for saving Grand Central) and so many of the public parks, buildings and institutions that makes New York, well, Beautiful.
And inspiring.
A place that inspires Big Ideas, most crass, but many noble as well.
New York still supports a thriving and multi-layered arts community.
Two sides of the same coin, perhaps. The human will to dehumanize one another locked in mortal combat with the human will to glorify itself so that it might genuinely love itself.
Hard to do, eh?
There's only so much dehumanization society can stand before vital and transformative reform movements emerge.
Perhaps that's where we're headed.
Perhaps we're nearing the breaking point.
I don't know, that's a social analysis I can't attempt in this essay.
But the point is, I was musing on the Beautiful and its social power.
One reason I'm so alienated from the contemporary political process is because it is spectacularly without beauty and therefore profoundly uninspiring.
I have nothing to sustain me but my outrage and fear.
No hope.
None.
Zero.
Please don't start enumerating signs of hope because that only proves my point.
Hope isn't enumerated, hope is felt.
Hope is embodied and needs beacons to exude it.
Where are our beacons?
Obama?
I don't know. I want to believe, but that's as far as it goes.
At least there's one person I can genuinely say I want to believe in, but that's not enough, sorry.
I want a Kennedy.
I want a King.
Sorry, that's what I want and what's more, I suspect that's what everyone wants, someone to respond to.
Is that really too much to ask for?
Back to beauty, and this is perhaps the point I'm getting at here: I don't think it's a coincidence that the times are so dark and that we've so lost our capacity to feel and to see. I think it's a product of a trend in banalization.
Christ, what an awful word.
Call it the latest face of the Reformation, the demystification of the here and now, which is to say trading mystery, awe, wonder, hope, love, catharsis, meaning all for the latest give-away that comes with the Happy Meal, courtesy of the child slave you'll never meet.
Or in most cases, even care to know he exists.
But he's not human anyway, so no harm, no foul.
It's all good.
Or in language so loaded that the marxist in me has to recoil, just a little, maybe I'm describing the vulgarization of culture.
The systematic appeal to the general taste, executed by master functionaries in every industry, with laser-like precision.
Some call it the democratization of culture.
So now we're back to my deep-seated reservations about democracy itself, which I've discussed here in the past.
And the basic question, how to make democracy beautiful?
Not as an idea, but as a way of life.
I've been watching a lot more television these past couple of months than I have in a couple of years and after the thrill of watching and flipping starts to subside, I realize just how much mire I've just been wading in.
It's just saturated with distraction.
It reveals a singular and endemic contempt for beauty.
Its goal is manifestly not to inspire us, but to distract us.
Inspiring television moments are few and far between.
Inspiration should be the rule, not the exception.
So I wonder what way might we see the absence of social beauty as a failure of democracy?
The buck's got to stop somewhere, right?, and we're cearly submerged in an epic darkness that can very easily become darker still.
How to create and sustain a beautiful society?
In what way might the absence of the beautiful in our daily lives facilitate our social acceptance of torture?
TORTURE!
You'd think that if there was one thing we should have achieved social consensus about it would be not to electrocute the genitals of another human being.
I think I've just paraphrased Al Franken, come to think of it.
See?
That's inspiring.
I respond to the guy on such an intuitive level that I'm not sure if this is my thought or his.
We need more of that, is all I'm saying.
How do we create the Beautiful Society?
See?
Even to ask that question sounds like mere musing, such have we been conditioned to marginalize beauty.
If I suggest the Democrats as a party should embrace this question, to actually think about politics from this perspective, many of you will probably scoff, and even those of you inclined to agree will still on some level think of it as a lark.
But it's not a lark.
I know what you're thinking, to which I can only reply,
...but I'm not the only one.