The British Museum, owned by the University of Cambridge, recently overhauled its art exhibitions and introduced new signage warning that paintings depicting the British countryside could provoke “dark nationalist sentiments”. Another sign in the exhibit says, “Landscape painting has also always been intertwined with national identity. This part is true. Certain people live in certain places, and a beautiful depiction of that place can speak powerfully about their identity and sense of belonging.
What’s interesting is how often the left feels the need to warn us about the dangers of beauty. Our progressive ruling elite has created a world that is small, ugly, and artificial. It is natural for them to fear the power of natural beauty to shatter that illusion.
Beauty cuts through our nonsense excuses and demands that we become worthy of it.
Like many people, I have lived most of my life as a thoroughly modern philistine. As a forward-thinking and sophisticated person, I often ignored beauty as a value and considered unnecessary decorations to be flashy waste that hindered efficiency.
I was a Christian from a young age, but I had a very Protestant understanding of sacred space, even in my relationship with God. Why build huge cathedrals when God’s people can gather in shopping malls and warehouses and donate the rest of their money to the poor? The concept of beauty as the exaltation of the human spirit has always been treated as an outdated, outdated concept held by self-respecting aristocrats in the late Enlightenment era.
Because we consider ourselves to be very rational, it can be difficult to realize how important aesthetics are to the way we live. If what we see every day is beautiful, if it touches our souls and connects us to God, it grounds us in ways that are hard to describe.
Beauty confronts and condemns us in unpleasant ways. Things that are undeniably beautiful have an intrinsic value that reminds us that the hierarchy of nature is real, good, and inevitable. Beauty reminds us that there is a right way to do things. We may not have arrived at that right way yet, but we must remain oriented towards goodness and truth.
In short, beauty demands that we cut off our nonsense excuses and become what we deserve.
The world the left has created is completely artificial and requires an incredible amount of abstract nonsense to maintain the illusion. Progressives hate the concept of hierarchy, humanity, and unchosen bonds. Everyone must be equal, everything must be replaceable, everything must be disposable. Gender, marriage, family, community, and every other aspect of human identity can be redefined in an instant. The urge to flatten every aspect of existence is driving the left to sever the natural connections that define every human being so that they can be completely remade. For all people to be truly equal, individuals must be isolated from their natural support systems and completely dependent on the state.
The more artificial and abstract the systems progressives build to support a culture of lies, the more dangerous the truth becomes.
The best way to keep people in an artificial environment is to deny them knowledge that alternatives exist.
The left in the West, for whatever reason, is destroying statues, destroying precious paintings, and burning down magnificent cathedrals. In a sense, this radical act of cultural destruction is like a defensive ramming of a wild animal. Progressives reflexively attack and damage what is beautiful in order not to incriminate their own base existence.
But there is a deeper method to this sordid iconoclastic madness. The key to the Cultural Revolution is to break the continuity between past and present. If the left can successfully bury the beauty of the past, people will lose the memory of what made them great and will instead be sculpted into grim monuments of mediocrity designed by our progressive elites. there is a possibility. Brutal and depressing modern architecture, abstract and absurdist modern art, and stylized, soulless modern cinema are all designed to never give us a glimpse of what makes us fully human.
Trigger warnings for landscape paintings may seem comical, but museum staff recognized the true power of such works of art and the threat they posed to the current progressive order. Although the left has worked hard to eliminate works of architectural, artistic, and musical beauty that could profoundly stir the soul, natural beauty still remains. Even if our entire culture is stripped of the truth of beauty, the very rocks around us still scream.
One of the reasons progressives feel compelled to drive populations into inferior cities is their disdain for the natural beauty that keeps rural populations firmly connected to reality. In both the Soviet Union and the United States, the left always criticizes independent farmers. Independent farmers are self-sufficient, cannot be controlled by the manipulation of systems on which they are not dependent, and are too deeply rooted in natural reality to be subsumed into absurd and artificial abstractions.
More than anything, progressives fear beauty because it threatens their way of life. The more artificial and abstract the systems that progressives build to support a culture of lies, the more dangerous the truth becomes. Cultural revolutionaries instinctively attack what is true and beautiful. Because they see it as an attack on the small, ugly, plastic world they have built. Those in power are eager to erase all remaining examples of beauty in our culture, but ultimately fail.
As long as rolling countryside, towering mountains and sparkling coasts remain, the power of beauty and truth will still persuade us.
