Can Beauty Save the World?

Dostoeveskey, the greatest writer of all time, once cryptically exclaimed: "Beauty will save the world."

What did he mean? What could it possibly mean? If anyone understood the power of beauty, it would be Dostoeveskey, so ignoring his words would be rather foolish. He must have known something us lowly peons didn't.

Solzhenitsyn, probably the greatest writer of the 20th century, offered his best interpretation. He thought perhaps Dostoeveskey had realized that beautiful art has an unnatural power to unveil the deepest truths about the nature of mankind, life, the universe, God, and everything. Somehow seeing it directly leaves us blind, but looking at it through the shutter of a well written novel, well directed play, or well painted still life, gives us the power to see the Truth, all the way down to the primordial beginning. From this angle, you could say that Truth will save the world, and Beauty is the path to enlightenment, so Beauty will also save the world.

I wonder if that's fair though. Truth, Beauty, and Love are all connected, true, but they're also all distinct. They are like a venn diagram that overlaps but not completely. There are beautiful things that aren't true, and true things that aren't beautiful. Some philosophers forcefully conclude: "All that is, is beautiful." But can a cockroach, or a disease, or suffering, really be beautiful, no matter how you look at it? I think losing the power of rejection is the same as losing morality itself. There have to be things we hate if we love anything, because we should naturally hate that which harms what we love. Blindly accepting everything in a sort of zen trance is just giving up on living as a human, as a moral being, as an arbiter. Life was meant to be lived actively, not passively.

Perhaps beauty will save the world by empowering Truth to save the world. But I think more fascinating is the idea that Beauty, all on its own, through its own secret powers and hidden resources, can transform mankind into a benevolent, loving, harmonious whole that naturally transcends the former nature of our barbarian, brutish past.

Imagine some brute who drinks all day and beats his wife all night, walking into a church one day and being overawed by the architecture, and stunned by the organ player into submissive silence. Is it impossible? I don't think so. Most everyone has a human heart beneath all the grime. Some things are so beautiful, whether it's a woman's face and figure, or the Taj Mahal, or Mozart, that everyone is overcome. There simply aren't many people who can close their hearts off from something truly beautiful, something beyond their imagination Good.

How many peasants in the past lived ugly, wretched lives? None of them were rescued by Truth -- they all lived the lie of Christianity, they all led meaningless, unfree lives toiling for nothing and to their own disadvantage. And yet they went on. What could have been empowering them? I doubt it was love. Romantic love was basically unknown, and familial love was kept to a minimum. After all, when more than half your children die before the age of 10, what parent can afford to love their children? And when there are so many children per adult, what child has time to bond with their parents? With people so commonly hungry, diseased, dirty, exhausted from manual labor, and otherwise put out, I find it hard to imagine a house full of love and merriment when the sun went down. More like everyone silently collapsing into a big flea-ridden straw mat and going to sleep wishing they weren't in so much pain.

The best explanation is they were saved by Beauty. The beauty of their cathedrals. The beauty of their folk music. The beauty of their dances. The beauty of their lasses. The beauty of a natural countryside barely touched by Man, and the stars that floated above shining down on us unhindered by the artificiality of electricity. The beauty of their grain fields they worked so hard to grow and they got to watch develop every year before their eyes with the promise of life and health bursting inside each stalk. The beauty of the hymns they sung in Church, or the plays the Church put on describing biblical scenes. If there was anything good about peasant life, it could only come through their connection to Beauty. Beauty was the only redeeming factor in the their lives, the only reason they could point to that says 'we should be alive' rather than 'we are alive and there's nothing to be done about it except mechanically soldier on under the weight of our burdens.'

No one is pining for peasant dances and folk music over the contemporary entertainment industry, so this means there must be more Beauty in the world today than existed in the age of yore. Therefore, more people can be redeemed more fully through the power of Beauty than ever before. Is it possible that a world bereft of love -- where couples break up every couple months, and families are endlessly splintered apart by divorces or just estrangement -- in a world bereft of truth -- where uttering certain unpopular realities about racial IQ differences, sexual IQ differences, the unhealthy behavior of homosexuals, etc can land you in jail -- that we are back to being redeemed, if we are to be redeemed, by Beauty and Beauty alone?

Can we be happy if we seek out Beauty? Can a critical threshold of people be saved in an age that offers nothing else through the happiness they gain beholding Beauty in form after form, grace after grace, until it washes all the dirt from their souls and leaves them more than alive?

Let us define the various factors that should be included if the world is to be 'saved.'

A) The majority of mankind should be happy.
B) Those who possess Beauty feel no great urge to accumulate further possessions, and are content with their station in life.
C) Too many people are entranced by Beauty to participate in war or strife, creating a harmony between all peoples, races, religions, ethnicities, etc.
D) Those who are touched by Beauty are kinder to the people around them, more forgiving of faults, more sympathetic to their troubles. They are gentle, loving, caring souls aware of the fragility of Good compared to the power of Evil to destroy it.
E) Those touched by Beauty have a greater urge to create something beautiful of their own, or at least share what they find beautiful with others, creating a constantly rippling pond of interactions like a lake in the rain.
F) And let's not ignore the power of Beauty as a means to interpret the world. Using allegories back to well known stories, connecting things through metaphors or similes to artistic narratives, or just deciding that a fundamental truth lies at the bottom of some artistic wells, can help people communicate with others and better understand themselves.

I submit to you that if there were enough art, it were good enough, and people had enough access to it, Beauty could save the world. In fact, at this point, it is the most likely force to save the world. Love requires too much sacrifice for people to handle anymore, and Truth requires too much hardship to entertain much less pursue. ((Just look at that poor Harvard law student who mentioned the mere possibility of genetic IQ differences between the races.)) But no one yet has been persecuted for their beauty. No one has been attacked for loving something beautiful, listening to beautiful music, staring at a beautiful form, or appreciating the inner harmony of a cause-and-effect plot or mathematical equation. Basically, our minders have spared us Beauty, like the lords spared their serfs in the past. They weren't allowed to believe anything remotely true, and were burned at the stake if they did. They weren't allowed by the sheer ferocity of famine, disease, and poverty to genuinely bond with their family or lovers ((most everyone was a widow or widower if they lived past 30!)), but like Pandora's Box beauty was left alone.

For this reason, amending copyright laws and laying down broadband internet isn't just giving people a well deserved luxury device. It could literally be our salvation. This is because Beauty has the power to transform mankind's soul, one person at a time, in ways so beneficent to society that the price to make it happen pales in comparison.

Imagine how powerful Beauty must be! In World War II, the German general defending Paris was ordered to raze it in order to slow down the allied advance. But the general could not stand the thought of losing Paris -- the Eiffel tower, the Arc De Triumph, the Champs de ly Says, and instead just retreated quietly leaving it in the same condition they had found it when they arrived. At a time when people's fiercest instincts of destruction were raised, when hatred dominated all thinking and massacring civilians was seen as no big deal, Beauty still conquered someone's soul and made him desire a gentler, more harmonious world.

We see today through events like the Olympics and the World Cup, the beauty of great athletes performing well bringing the whole world together in peaceful celebration and competition. Don't underestimate how much these sports have meant to us! Canada's riveting and beautiful overtime victory in the gold medal hockey match against the USA was basically their most watched event in national history. They won't forget it even in fifty years. Sports matter.

How important is it that Hollywood movies are appreciated in Hong Kong, and Hong Kong movies are watched in Hollywood? Could this radiation of goods bring people greater awareness of what's good in foreigners, create more communication and understanding, and ultimately drive away the wish to conquer or destroy because we can just trade beautiful stories instead?

What does it say about mankind that anime and video games are made primarily in Japan, but enjoyed by the whole world? Could this be the beauty that makes enough of us happy, gentle, understanding, peaceful, and content? When something as beautiful as Clannad After Story is made, does the world need any other Redeemer to come down from the heavens?

Set aside all the potential technological gains the world could make to improve our standard of living. Let's assume we all stay at the average wealth of the world today, 10,000 per person per year. Beauty could fill in all the gaps. Beauty-touched souls could smile and shrug at such a fate and say:

"Others have suffered,
worse than I,
and for less reason."

Because undoubtedly, they watched a beautiful person suffer and die in a beautiful artistic work, that showed them how noble someone can still be despite the unfairness and despite the pain -- and undoubtedly, that person would want to be more like the character depicted.

Suppose all the races, religions, and classes were shoved together into a giant mosh pit -- but they all got together when the football game began, or the movie started running, or the concert started playing. What's to stop them from overcoming their differences? Beauty is universal and absolute -- there's no one it can't overcome. No culture has ever rejected the beauty of a woman's face or voice, no one has ever mocked the beauty of the sky or sea, no one has ever jeered at the beauty of dance or poetry. If it is done right, beauty can spellbind a crowd of young and old, male and female, religious and materialist, rich and poor. Shakespeare did it.

Every time someone's frustrations boil over about the economy, or their love life, or the lies circulating throughout society -- couldn't they still be happy if a new artwork came out to distract and diffuse their tensions every time? It could, it definitely could! Because beauty's potential is limitless. It is as powerful as we let it be. With enough beauty in the world, all its faults slip away, and we are left with the concept of a singing, blooming meadow, perhaps with a brook rushing nearby, and the words:

"God is in his heavens,
All is right with the world."

A distraction? Some sort of mind-numbing drug, no more worthy than heroin? Should we avoid beauty and constantly dwell on pain and destruction because it's more 'real'? What is real? Real is whatever your brain focuses on. Everything passes through the brain, and is interpreted within, before existing in any of us. Therefore reality is whatever we make of it, no more or less valuable than virtual reality. All reality is a virtual simulation inside our own skulls. With enough information density, art can become more real than reality. So long as it creates more mental stimulation, and more mental simulation, than the dry and commonly dull world around us, why should we care what is real and what isn't? As a survival mechanism? But the problem of survival has been solved by the green revolution. What people need now isn't to live, but a reason for living. Beauty has more to offer than gruel.

In summation, Dostoeveskey was right. Beauty can save the world. Within mankind's current artistic output, the potential already exists to redeem the vast majority of people into happy, peaceful, contented, gentle, understanding souls. Therefore, all the world's ills can be ameliorated, and eventually eliminated, through the power of Beauty alone. The sooner we amend copyright laws and lay down broadband fiber, the sooner this beauty can be funneled into the heads of every last disadvantaged, deprived peon, the sooner Beauty's potential could be realized.

Australia has already come to this conclusion, it's laying down a public infrastructure project to deliver broadband internet of 12 megabytes/second to practically all Australians, with monthly prices of $35 a month. When will America join the modern world?