If you were to toss a crate of lego blocks across the floor, not only would you be making a painful mess of plastic caltrops, but you would be creating chaos. Aimless, scattered rooms conjure an aura of muted despair. However, if one takes the time to build something out of these foot maiming toys, then there is something to look at and admire. Chaotic randomness is the natural state of how things will fall without an outside observer’s handiwork. As such, to find beauty in life, we must impose a certain order in the chaotic and meaningless disorder that too often creeps into the many aspects of life and society.
Bumpy and stained pillows suggest that a couch has only a utilitarian value; how it appears or how it fits into the room seems to mean nothing at all. Sheets shoved off a bed, never to be made properly, belie a certain malaise that permeates the owner’s life. There is a subtle nihilism, despair, or exhaustion that gets caught up in the mess. When we take a room and straighten it out, we impose order, an attitude that distinguishes us from most of the animals. Our ability to see something and deem it to be incorrect, then to not only correct it, but mold it into a graceful creation, suggests a higher will than the purely natural or material lives within us.
When we look at the messy highway interchanges of a city like Charlotte, NC, rarely is there anything to look at except for the death seeking motorists sans exhaust pipes weaving mindlessly between lanes. The city skyline, the highlight of Charlotte, rarely presents itself from the roadways. Compare this to the Blue Ridge Parkway. Here enjoying the beauty of nature’s glory consumes the viewer. Meandering roads are easy to drive along; several rest stops offer the more contemplative or sight-seeing oriented traveler time to stop, breathe, and appreciate the grand landscape of Appalachia. Here, the order and design of the roadway helps to highlight the available beauty. Even in a city without the benefit of the Appalachian Mountains, there are opportunities to design roadways to highlight the beauty of the skyline or parks.
As I have spent time in Raleigh the last eight years, I have noticed the ever growing presence of trash, litter, and homeless camps. The slothful and liberal tendency to let people live however they want slowly erodes the order and beauty of city blocks and their outskirts. Order is required for beauty to exist in a naturally chaotic and degenerative world. It requires a strong authoritative will from leadership to impose this order. If this is not handled by our democratic impulses, then we will open the door for something more compelling and perhaps less democratic to take up the responsibility instead.
License to create an ugly world through neglect and apathy does not honor our republican tradition of liberty. If we value our culture, we should exercise our liberty to impose a corrective vision upon a landscape of ugliness. Liberty, the freedom to live and act rightly, must be informed by a vision of Truth, Goodness, and Beuaty. It is these virtuous ideals that make our freedom worthwhile. Liberty and Order are not opposites. It is the laws from an ordered world view that allow for us to possess meaningful freedom in the West.
History suggests that the republican model of government possess a great many benefits when managed properly with subsidiary proclivities. However, it must be noted that this form of government does not half a long shelf life historically. If we let ugliness and chaos become the markers of our republican or democratic sentiments, then we tacitly deny the excellence of our cultural history and political model. In order for this kind of government to continue to exist, then we must have a higher ideal than politic as our guide.
If we consider the Christian view that God designed and ordered all of creation perfectly--perfectly Beautiful and perfectly Good, then we must understand that this is the ultimate Truth of what the universe is meant to be. As rational beings with capacity for longing for the ideal, we aim to reach towards that ideal. When a child draws the sun, blissfully happy and warm, bringing joy and mirth to his family by a tree, we see the vision of a Beautiful world.
The child does not need someone to explain to him that the sun, nature and his family are good things. On the contrary it takes effort to dismiss ideals from the youth. We do this through reducing the world’s evident wonder and majesty into mere material during education. “The sun cannot be happy or nice, it is just a ball of gas and plasma.” Clearly this is true in an empirical sense. However, to say that the sun has no higher place in our lives outside of its material and atomic composition is to deny the apparent joy it brings to people. In doing this, we remove a respect for the Beauty and Goodness of the created order. It is an utterly apathetic entity; even as a natural order, it gives us no meaningful order to live by. It should not surprise us that a healthy respect for Beauty across society has become replaced with an apathetic acceptance that we are just to get and spend for ourselves.
I am not arguing that the pathetic fallacy is actually a reality of all of the universe. Instead, it is that the spiritual relationship we have with God, who made all things with purpose, should instill a sense of wonder and imagination to see that the world around us has a certain order to it and that this order is a Beautiful thing. To instead believe that this universe has no telos to it except to be, then we open the door to the degenerate perspective that all is meaningless. You can give yourself soft soap to soothe yourself with if you do believe that the universe ultimately has no purpose. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, in the end you will have despair if your fundamental position accepts that there is no Truth, Beauty, or Goodness to creation.
We once imagined that the stars were something more than balls of light, that dragons lived in the sea, and that spirits, goblins, and other fantastical creatures affected daily life. It is not that goblins and other monsters really exist or that the stars are not plasma, but that reality has an infinitely majestic breadth and depth. We have lost wonder because we do not experience the Beauty and Fear of nature people once felt commonly. We have achieved amazing feats of engineering but we take it for granted. We have seen pictures of Mars, but we do not wonder at the cosmos.
Naturally, we have come to lack a beautiful imagination in our public works and architecture. The ugliness of a city’s skyline or design does not do anything to lift the human imagination towards the idea that the place is worthwhile to live in or care for. Public art has become purely political and ugly. Old artistic monuments have become objects of offense and we have replaced them with bizarre sculptures. Trappings like bars and restaurants may cover a multitude of visual sins, but they offer chiefly consumption whereas our architecture should offer us something to marvel at. When we are bombarded with visual catastrophe and aesthetic idiocy, we cannot be surprised when apathetic selfishness becomes the mode by which we consider how to care for our neighborhoods and cities.
If we desire a Good society that cares for its health, wealth, and beauty, then we must make an effort to show it in the visual realm. The abstract emotional desire to “love the city” means little if it has no substantive backing. We clean our homes because we care for them. We buy art because it changes a blank wall into something to look at. We renovate our homes to improve the experience of living there. Should our public policy begin to recognize something that many European cities have not neglected, that the place we live in matters and has a cultural and aesthetic identity, then perhaps some aspects of the malaise that grips us may subside.
However, to begin to approach this goal, we must value these things in our own lives. In the same way that Paul says
“And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?” Romans 10:14 ESV
How are people to understand something beautiful if they have not seen it? Beauty belongs not only to the esoteric, intellectual, the wealthy. It belongs to the bearers of the most beautiful image that exists, the Image of God.