The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

In his last set of published essays, the late British philosopher, Roger Scruton, bemoaned the state of modern architecture as aesthetically distasteful. But the modern monstrosities that have sprung up in the West are synecdoches of the general ugliness that characterizes Progressive society.

There are many aspects of the present culture that I find unattractive but Scruton reminded me that my distaste is as much aesthetic as it is intellectual. Consider a President who is a doddering crooked politician, a Vice-President who laughs inappropriately every time she is challenged, the constant lying by members of the present Administration, the incessant false claims of racism, the incompetent handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the endless chaos at the Southern border, a media that is incapable of honest reporting, the BLM and Antifa riots in our cities, the support for late term abortions, virulent “Tweets;” these all evoke a visceral response of disgust within me, and hopefully others, not merely because they are irrational but because they are ugly.

It is difficult to appreciate the so-called ethics and social justice agenda of the Left because it is aesthetically displeasing. True morality is beautiful because it is just, and it is just because it reflects, rather than conflicts, with the truths of nature. As Keats noted, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all.” Our sense of aesthetics is largely rooted in nature and man’s creations reach the apogee of beauty when they reflect and engage cooperatively with natural surroundings. The Left has apparently lost touch with the notion of beauty. Its ideas and practices conflict with nature and consequently are aesthetically unpleasing.

Progressive/Marxist ideology, at war with human nature and nature at large, attempts to impose man’s will on his surroundings and has resulted in much of the great ugliness of the last 100 years. Bread lines, mass exterminations, gratuitous violence, all in the name of creative destruction, reflect the hideous minds that created them.

One thinks of Thomas Jefferson, reduced by today’s Progressives to a “racist,” but who was a prime example of the 18th century Enlightened mind. A polymath, Jefferson was as adept in sculpting an inspiring document as he was in creating the classical symmetry of his home in Monticello. Similar things can be said of John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and many of America’s Founding Fathers. Compare these aesthetes with todays leadership; how poor the latter are by comparison.

The present culture needs to ponder this dilemma. We are currently bombarded by innumerable images of ugliness generated by our political leaders, the media, the movies, popular music, and even our modern “art” museums. It is not possible to achieve a pleasing aesthetic when surrounded by ugliness. But beauty is arguably the highest achievement of a civilized society and in its absence, society is degraded.