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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31362 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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I see that neither side of the culture war right now focuses on the positive, on something beautiful. Both sides see themselves as righteous oppressed victims fighting against the evil empire of the other side, but for both it is less a Star Wars vision than a Terminator vision. War machines running over skulls at night-time, death and lasers. The culture war is bleak and stark, it has no poetry, no romance. It is a grim attrition war, trenches and minor offensives but few large breakthroughs if by breakthroughs one means reaching one's opponent and convincing him of something. Where are the creative songbirds of thought and word who would transcend this opposition and maybe get both sides to become aware that both are equally stuck in the human condition? Has rhetoric truly reached the limits of its potential power? I have so rarely seen anyone change his mind about anything more than minor details.

It is all so tiresome. Maybe it is possible to move in some orthogonal direction and flank this whole conflict from a side that has the breath of fresh air behind it?

I often think this. Who is building beautiful things these days in the public realm? Beautiful schools, libraries, railroad stations, hospitals, parks, museums, even apartment buildings? Yes, there are always a handful of examples, sandwiched between generic shitty modern buildings or awful pastiche. But not enough. No one’s thinking big. You have to inspire people.

I was watching some shitty talk show appearance by the astronauts who are supposed to be going to the moon again with NASA next year. The commenters on the YouTube video (who I presume watch a lot of talkshow clips) were saying it was the most applause they’d ever seen on the show, the audience were standing up and hollering and cheering and so on. People want to believe in something real. Yes, a return to religiosity would be a good thing, but there also has to be real progress, real improvement, something in the kingdom of earth or whatever the biblical term is that inspires and drives people, that suggests some kind of civilizational progress. ChatGPT is good, but right now it’s unclear how it’s going to improve most people’s lives and if anything most people who look into LLMs get panicked about becoming permanently unemployed.

If I was president I’d organize a huge World’s Fair for the 250th anniversary of America’s founding in 2026. Host it in New York, in Flushing Meadows park where the last big one was, around that giant sphere that once symbolized all the possibility of the late 20th century. Invite all the great corporations, every state, other countries, to come and present their vision of the future. Make it free to visit. Hire Robert Stern to design it in a vaguely mid-century Americana style. Have all the classics - the house of the future, the car of the future, the plane of the future etc. It wouldn’t solve the country’s problems (“the controversy over drag queen story hour in the California state pavilion continues…”), but I think it would be mostly fun and hopeful.

I often think this. Who is building beautiful things these days in the public realm? Beautiful schools, libraries, railroad stations, hospitals, parks, museums, even apartment buildings? Yes, there are always a handful of examples, sandwiched between generic shitty modern buildings or awful pastiche. But not enough. No one’s thinking big. You have to inspire people.

Asians and Arabs mostly.

The new Changi is spectacular, as are all Gulf airports. Chinese HSR stations are gorgeous. There's plenty of innovative, big-thinking public architecture out there. Some of it may not be to your (or my) taste, and in the case of the Gulf, constructed by slaves.

Bold, innovative, and big aren't the American zeitgeist anymore. This is a country that has swimsuit issues full of fat women. The therapeutic-woo culture of America isn't about going out and doing things as individuals. It's a culture of where things "just happen", and society as a group validates how you feel about it.

Who is building beautiful things these days in the public realm?

I'll keep making the same reply whenever I see complaints about beauty---any judgement like this depends on your own, idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences. Personally, I find new ideas in math and science to be the most beautiful thing in the world and the quality and amount of this that is being discovered/made publicly available has never been greater. I am extremely happy to have this even at the possible cost of whatever's going on in our physical environment. I also don't think similar aesthetic preferences are that rare, especially in a community like this one.

So I completely disagree, by a very reasonable definition of "beauty", we are in a golden age of people creating beauty in the public realm (you just have to go beyond physical things).

(you just have to go beyond physical things).

That's a pretty big ask to tack on in parentheses.

I've decided to abstain from responding to you the last time you wrote it, because – as before – I did not recognize you as a good faith interlocutor. (Btw, @2rafa, despite listening to OSTs often I just dislike Zimmer's music and Zimmer personally, but then again I'm not very into Wagner and all that Teutonic BS either). Thinking back on it, you might just find some aspects of the German character amiable. After all, Berdyaev did say in «Religion of Germanism»:

Germans are least of all materialists, if by materialism we mean accepting the external world as material in its objectively real composition. The whole of German philosophy has an idealistic direction and materialism could be in it only an accidental and insignificant phenomenon.
The German is neither dogmatist nor skeptic; he is a critic. He starts by rejecting the world, by not recognizing the externally, objectively given existence as a «critical reality». The German is physically and metaphysically a northerner, and the external, objective world does not appear to him illuminated by sunlight, as it does to the people of the south, as it does to the Romance peoples. For the German, the primary sense of being is, first of all, the primary sense of his will, his thought. He is a voluntarist and an idealist. He is musically gifted and plastically artless. Music is still a subjective spirit, an inner state of mind. Plastics is already an objective, embodied spirit. But in the sphere of objective, embodied spirit Germans were able to create only extraordinary technology, industry, militaristic tools, and not beauty. The tastelessness of the Germans, which appalls in even the greatest of them, even Goethe, is due to the transfer of the center of gravity of life to the inner tension of will and thought. On the side of sensuality, as an aesthetic category, the Germans are not at all acceptable or tolerable. And in the life of feeling they can only be merely sentimental.
A true, deep German always wants, having rejected the world as something dogmatically imposed and critically unverified, to recreate it out of himself, out of his spirit, out of his will and feeling. This direction of the Germanic spirit was determined as early as in the mysticism of Eckhart, it exists in Luther and in Protestantism, and is found and grounded with great force in the great Germanic idealism, in Kant and Fichte, and in another way in Hegel and Hartmann. It would be wrong to call this direction of the Germanic spirit phenomenalism. It is a kind of ontologism, an ontologism of a sharply voluntaristic bent. […] This consciousness is very taut, always disciplined and organized from within, from its own depths, in which lies the foundation of the Germanic will, the strong will. Such a consciousness is imposing but aesthetically unappealing. And it must be said that the tragedy of Germanism is, above all, the tragedy of excessive will, too possessive, too intense, recognizing nothing outside itself, too exclusively masculine, the tragedy of the inner celibacy of the Germanic spirit. It is a tragedy opposite to the tragedy of the Russian soul. The German people are a wonderful people, a powerful people, but a people devoid of any charm.

But, of course, Berdyaev spoke of German intellectuals – mainly as they appeared to him in written media. This would be as naive as judging Anglo Dasein/Umwelt/Weltanschauung by their stiff-lipped Victorian hypocrisy.

I knew normal Germans. To ask of normal people, even Germans, to be satisfied with just this is, at best, a ludicrous demand for universal ascetic monasticism; more likely it is mere cope. You can call math beautiful all you want, but math remains a niche, inaccessible (no, condescending popular renditions don't count) realm, and it doesn't have remotely the dimensionality to saturate human experience for any but the most obsessed, broken specimens. We are physical beasts, homeostatic machines connected to the world through a multimodal sensor array and burdened with demanding natural priors with narrow optimal response ranges, that ensure we can't stop caring about what happens around us. We are grounded in reality, so for our own sanity we should see pleasing sights on the ground level – pleasant faces, buildings, furniture, plants and so on. And in terms of intangible art, it need be grounded in baseline human experience as well – thus, even videogames with narratives touch us more than the most contrived category theory wankery; and the capacity to produce such videogames says more about the people's cultural capacity than having some Hausdorff Center for Mathematics. Some Germans can into math. Great. Math isn't about Germans, though. Math isn't about humans at all. And Germans know this as well as I do.

Suggesting a person take refuge from the squalor of the material world in the work of Peter Scholze is as ridiculous and cruel as telling a hungry person to contemplate some 19th century still-life paintings of peaches or whatever; a person who wants sex to embrace the holy love of Virgin Mary (and we know that this just ends in pathetic perversion). Speaking of, the best mathematicians I interact with have high libido, they seem to need lots of intense, dirty sex. (For more traditionally creative types this needn't even be said). They also care vastly more about art than I do, somehow – some fantasy book series, musical performances, and yes, even video games.

Humans are humans, they are not spirit engines for contemplating toy imaginary structures. With this «what even is beauty, ackchyually» you deny us our humanity. And I suspect you do this to excuse the expropriation of control over the physical world from people who do not satisfy your elitist cerebral standards.

I've decided to abstain from responding to you the last time you wrote it, because – as before – I did not recognize you as a good faith interlocutor.

You are under no obligation to reply to anything, though you also have no justifiable reason to claim that I'm not a good faith interlocutor. It's like clockwork, every time you reply to something I post here it needs to include at least one unjustified personal attack. Please stop.

As for the rest of your comment, this is just a very poetic way to express what it feels like to be confronted with aesthetic preferences different from your own. The point of my original comment is explained in more detail here and the way to argue against it is to discuss why your personal aesthetic preferences are actually universal enough, not post a bunch of poetry about why you think they're superior.

I think my reasons are justified for years now, and you have not appropriately expressed remorse for your terrible faux-rationalist rhetoric back on reddit before continuing it here, so I'd rather you start making arguments in good faith than I stop reminding people of your track record. By the way, putting on a layer of patronizing Brahmin politeness improves your performance somewhat, but not by a lot, I suggest you leave it for your workplace.

the way to argue against it

There is no need to argue against a vacuous truism that something is "true" if we assume an arbitrary classification system where it is true; only an infertile mind of a pedant can be satisfied with such an argument. I of course agree that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and in principle some people can recognize whatever as beautiful, even a slum filled with diseased drug addicts where one gets to read Scholze's papers. And Wittgenstein masturbated to mathematical problems in the trenches of World War I, after all. But the reason we know of this fact is precisely that it is unusual, baffling. Your preferences, if those are your preferences indeed, are marginal, thus prioritizing them would be unsatisfactory to most people; you're free to put the opposite hypothesis to a democratic test and, I'd expect, get the same result as here in any group except self-selected minority of mathematical ascetics.

Though there may be something more here. Naturally this ties in to your general theme that white people ought to welcome being replaced by "elite human capital" like yourself. White people did not think to implement a filter for compatible aesthetic preferences, even as they demanded professional merit and some minimum of adherence to the letter of the law; so now there'll be a marginally greater tendency for their habitats to approximate the noisy, debased squalor of the subcontinent, complete with galaxy-brained equivocation excusing this. Too bad.

I was vaguely amused to see this pop up in the janitorial duties, this is probably one of the most eloquently written comments that's not there for 'Quality Contribution'.

That said, is there really a need for a fallacy in every sentence? The whole first paragraph is just bad blood coagulated into an ugly scab that's regurgitated ad hominem.

Next, I don't see @atokenliberal6D_4 suggesting mathematics is beautiful or a salve for diseased slums, just a counterpoint to the general narrative of decay and deterioration that permeates contemporary (and perhaps all human) rhetoric. You prop up a straw Colossus and then toss it ad populum, for them to supposedly tear apart with their physical, homeostatic hands.

As a crown of thorns for this cute little sophistical sermon, you conjure up some bizarre racial slippery slope whereby lack of aesthetic compatibility is leading to the decay of civilization.

The tone and style had me err on Bad, but after writing this up this I think it honestly deserves a warning it's so grotesquely specious.

Modern architecture is mostly horrific for reasons elaborate upon a myriad times. Usually having to do with architectural schools, snobbery and that the last pre-apocalyptic generations have died.. generations ago.

general narrative of decay and deterioration that permeates contemporary (and perhaps all human) rhetoric

You can't argue we are not decaying. People in 1960s had the entire world at their fingertips. Energy is wealth, always has been, and especially so since the invention of electricity. Unparalleled growth without having to pollute was available.

For the first time in human history, we're utterly free from the need to burn stuff for energy. Yet what do Europeans do ? They erect barriers so that this doesn't happen. According to those nice graphs by German economic ministry, per capita energy production in Germany right now should've been 5x current level. The entire country could have been carbon-free, with electric heaters everywhere and probably enough energy to spare to move to entirely synthetic fuels.

No need for Russians, Americans, Arabs or even strip mining!

Where are we ? Collapsing industries due to energy costs, debt up to almost everyone's eyeballs.. europe is importing dead trees from America to burn in power plants and patting itself on the back for it being low-carbon!

The French were the only one who kind of grasped it yet they hadn't gone far enough. Still they have very affordable power and a great pollution profile.

Modern architecture is mostly horrific for reasons elaborate upon a myriad times. Usually having to do with architectural schools, snobbery and that the last pre-apocalyptic generations have died.. generations ago.

Define modern. The Louvre pyramid for example, widely decried at conception, is now a architectural monument to modernism at the heart of one of the pinnacle achievements of Renaissance work. Niemayer in Brazil? Le Corbusier? Art Deco in the 30s?

You can't argue we are not decaying.

Chill with the consensus buliding.

Collapsing industries due to energy costs

This is temporary nonsense due to geopolitical machinations. Gasoline is more expensive in the US than it historically has been, but electricity has fallen almost 100% since 1900, despite machinery and tools becoming vastly more efficient (not to mention the exponential compounding of computing power for fixed energy use). CPI-adjusted electricity has continued to fall since 2000, from 0.172 to 0.159 $/kWh.

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There is nothing to his «counterpoint» but speciousness. «How could you say Germans don't produce beautiful art any more, they have Scholze!». They used to have Gauss, but they also had Beethoven and Caspar David Friedrich in the same era, and it is not through the former that they had accrued the reputation of people who can do art. We understand that mathematics is a very non-central case of artistic or aesthetic achievement. Worse yet, by cheekily claiming that the mainstream understanding of beauty is «idiosyncratic» (that is, somewhat unusual), he lies and gaslights.

you conjure up some bizarre racial slippery slope whereby lack of aesthetic compatibility is leading to the decay of civilization

Not decay of civilization as a whole, I admit this would be a stretch, but as for the decay of aesthetic standards assumed to be common sense, the causal relationship is trivial enough. South Asian (Indian, really) culture is amazingly tolerant of squalor, dirt and ugliness, not only by White/European/First World standards – nowhere else, in no destitute hellhole, do people care so little to maintain cleanliness and tasteful sights. this has been discussed to death here and elsewhere (I would also say they are near-universally tasteless, more so than Germans, but that's more objectionable). It is reasonable to expect that transplants from this culture, ceteris paribus, will be less demanding aesthetically, and prioritize some other stuff.

We understand that mathematics is a very non-central case of artistic or aesthetic achievement.

How widely appreciated are Beethoven or Caspar David Friedrich nowadays?

the decay of aesthetic standards assumed to be common sense

Consensus building.

I'll bite that many countries in development are less likely to invest in architectural aesthetics and maintenance, but this has always been the case for politically/economically unstable regions. Is there evidence that Indians in the United States who become Americanized (2nd, 3rd generation immigrants) and wealthy continue to neglect aesthetic construction?

Religion of Germanism

Never heard of it, but man is it accurate for my inner workings.

Conclusion:

In a complex relation to the "Germanic idea" stands Nietzsche, who in his spirit and blood was not a pure German. The Germanic spirit, a very strong spirit, wants in the end to produce a kind of Germanic religion of Germanism, which comes into antagonism with Christianity. There is no Christ's spirit in this religion. Now Drewes is an archetypal exponent of this religion of Germanism, as well as Chamberlain. Р. Wagner was its prophet. It is a purely Aryan, anti-Semitic religion, a religion of smooth and unleavened monism, without mad antinomianism, without apocalypse. There is no repentance and no sacrifice in this Germanic religion. The German is least capable of repentance. And he may be virtuous, moral, perfect, honest, but he can hardly be holy. Repentance is substituted with pessimism. Germanic religion attributes the source of evil to an unconscious deity, to the original chaos, but never to man, never to the Germanic man himself. The Germanic religion is the purest monophysitism, the recognition of only one and one nature, the divine, and not of two natures, the divine and the human, as in the Christian religion. Therefore, no matter how high, to all appearances, this Germanic religion elevates a man – it, after all, in the deepest sense denies man as a distinctive religious beginning.

In such a purely monistic, monophysite religious consciousness there can be no prophecies of a new life, a new world epoch, a new earth and a new heaven, no quest for a new city, so characteristic of Slavism. German monistic organization, German order do not allow apocalyptic experiences, do not tolerate feelings of the coming of the end of the old world, they fixate this world in a bad infinity. The Germans leave the apocalypse entirely to the Russian chaos, so despised by them. And we, in turn, despise this eternal German order.

The Germanic world is Central Europe by and large. German ideologists recognize the Germans as the creators and custodians of Central European culture. They consider France, England, Italy, Russia to be the outskirts of Europe. The fate of Germanism is presented as the fate of Europe, the victory of Germanism is understood as the victory of European culture. The religion of Germanism recognizes the German people as the only pure Aryan race, which is called to establish European spiritual culture not only by the efforts of the spirit, but also by blood and iron. Germanism would like to consolidate forever the global supremacy of central Europe, it seeks to extend its influence to the East, to Turkey and China, but it prevents the genuine transcending of Europe and insular European culture. Everywhere Germanism, obsessed with the idea of its exclusive cultural mission, carries its insular-European and insular-German culture, enriching itself with nothing, recognizing no one and nothing in the world.... And these claims of German-European centralism are a great obstacle in the way of connecting East and West, i.e. of solving the main task of world history.

These exclusive claims of the Germanic spirit are exactly that which cannot be borne by the rest of the world. German ideologists even turned the racial anthropological theory about the exclusive advantages of long-headed blondes into a kind of religious Germanic messianism. Instead of "Aryans" they introduced the term "Indo-Germans". The spirit of Teutonic pride has permeated all Germanic science and philosophy. Germans are not content with an instinctive contempt for other races and peoples; they want to despise on a scientific basis, to despise in an orderly, organized and disciplined manner. German self-confidence is always pedantic and methodologically sound. We Russians can least of all endure the domination of the pretensions of the religion of Germanism. We must oppose it with our own spirit, our own religion, our own aspirations. This does not prevent us from appreciating the great phenomena of the Germanic spirit, from nourishing ourselves with them, as with all the great things in the world. But the pride of the Germanic will must be opposed with our own religious will. Central Germanic Europe cannot acquire world domination, its idea is not a global idea. In the Russian spirit lies the greater Christian universalism, a greater recognition of all and everything in the world.

Published in June 1916

Didn't work out well for either party (well, Berdyaev himself did okay, first in Berlin, then in Paris). But Russians got their minute of fame as the standard bearers of the new worldwide Messianic delusion, making full use of German-Jewish faux-materialism.

I don’t think Zimmer is a great composer (certainly not in the pantheon of great Jewish composers). He has suffered from the Inception foghorn becoming a central meme in film scoring, though. It’s quite endearing he posts, aged 65 and probably along with John Williams the single most recognizable name in his field, on niche music composition forums to dunk on his critics though, especially of the “post track, retard” variety.

I like to think that if the other person had dropped something stellar he would have made true of his offer to have them score a major movie.

any judgement like this depends on your own, idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences

This is a false premise not supported by any evidence. There are loads of commonalities that humans find aesthetically pleasant. Things like nature, symmetry, balance etc. Sure, you might be a massive outlier but then who cares? Outliers are irrelevant when it comes to what should be provided in the public realm.

They are beautiful. But I still want beauty in the built world as well. There’s something about a beautiful building that you can’t get in maths. There a sense that people put time and effort into making a nice building and it sort of says that this world or at least this part of it is worth making beautiful.

While I acknowledge your point, I still find this response unsatisfying. As relative mid-wit here, I probably don't have the IQ to truly understand and appreciate the beauty of higher-level maths or sciences. Are me and mine just SOL, no beauty for us?

You might be satisfied by a world of physical ugliness as long as there still remains mathematical beauty, but what about the 99.999% of people in America alone (let alone the world) who can’t appreciate the latest advances in higher category theory? What do you say to them? “Shit guys, sorry, but you should’ve gotten a math degree and/or been born with a 2SD higher IQ lol”? If you’re coming from a position of unrepentant elitism (and I write this without any intent to sneer; I know a good number of people who subscribe to this ideology and would describe themselves as such) who doesn’t care one whit about the aesthetic deprivation of the proles, then this is consistent, I guess. But I can’t get behind this view, and I suspect that most who decry the course that modern architecture has taken think similarly to me in this.

Not every field in math and science is as abstruse and inaccessible as higher category theory. For example, look up any recent breakthrough in biology: MRNA vaccines, techniques for neural imaging, etc. You don't need to be an expert to be in awe of the clever things people had to come up with to make these work. There's also a ton of beauty being created in recreational math---see for example the elegance of something like this. Anyone can understand that! Even better, popular science/math exposition is also getting better and better so even the "serious" ideas are more accessible than they ever were before---even aspects of your example of higher category theory are open to way more of the population than you claim these days.

Sure not everyone is capable of appreciating every aspect, but this is like saying that novels are a super elitist form of beauty because only English professors have a hope of understanding everything in Ulysses.

I kind of see what you're getting at, there is something profound in using our human intellects to engineer away bodily suffering and codify the processes of doing so, or formulate an elegantly simple solution to a knotty problem, but it lacks the aesthetic dimensions that satisfy the more earthly senses.

There are some fairly simple principles to what most people consider beautiful and aesthetically pleasing and they carry across from art and architecture to music and magazine models, and they can indeed often be codified in mathematical terms. Repetition, rhythm, ratio, harmony, symmetry, dynamics, variation, proportion, and other more human or purpose specific ergonomics, plus any embedded textual and subtextual communication. These are not idiosyncratic preferences. They're timeless, real, and to a degree they're intuitive. It's the same things that make clowns and caricatures funny by getting it wrong via exaggeration. We have thousands of years of practice and improvement in these matters, and while cost constraints are a perennial consideration there's no reason to abandon them entirely or pretend they don't exist.

It's a bit like cookery. Only the most wretched poor, prisoners on punishment, or an ascetic monk would be expected to eat plain grains. But on the other end of the scale even the richest royalty aren't eating an entire bowl of pure saffron. There's a Goldilocks balance of complexity to aim for and a lot of post-war culture has either gone for too little (brutalism, soylent meal replacement drinks), too much (3D cinema, "experimental" ""music"", 87 flavours of hot sauce, Times Square, tinnitus level audio amplification, etc) or a ruthless bean-counting (sub)optimising (I don't know, plastic cutlery? or pockets that are only deep enough for your fingertips). To paraphrase Marie Kondo, those things don't spark joy, or comfort, or contentment. They spark under/over-stimulation and alienation, and those make society a sad panda.

I'm a midwit. These videos don't do anything for me. At best, they prompt a "well, that's neat" reaction, and nothing else. Without trying to be dismissive, somebody waxing about the beauty of mathematics comes off as very wanky. I can sort of grok what they're getting at, and understand that their brains are wired very differently from mine. It is certainly very interesting, but nothing that can elicit the same gut punch of awe and appreciation from my favorite film or still image; the ceiling of a well-constructed chapel (I'm not even religious) or the stature of an ancient monument; a quaint Shire-like village in the mountains or a barren desert bereft of human imprint. I can imagine myself and many others breaking down in tears when confronted with any of the above. Somebody moved to mania by a formula on a whiteboard and an accompanying 30-minute Youtube explainer would be... completely alien to me. There's way too much thinking involved for me to consider this beautiful in any meaningful sense, when what I think most people are gesturing towards are phenomenon and constructs that could catch one unawares and demand their gaze and attention.

I'm happy that some people can 'get off' on stuff like this, since I'm not sure where we'd be today if they didn't exist. But I don't see the aesthetics, or what the common man should take away from them other than perhaps an eyerolling "Yes, yes, you're so smart that you don't need the beauty of this material Earth - numbers are totally sufficient." Perhaps that only attests to my aforementioned midwittery, but it is honest.

I certainly wouldn't want such people charged with any attempted beautification project. No offense.

Unfortunately, I’m not able to watch your videos right now, but I’ll give them a look when I can.

In general, while I do appreciate the fact that the beauty found in mathematics and the sciences is becoming more accessible, I still disagree for two reasons. First: as accessible as they might be becoming, I believe that there’s still a large gap between the number of people who can appreciate even a Numberphile video versus the number of people who walk through Grand Central Station and are awestruck.

And that leads me to my second reason: I am inclined to believe that the aesthetic experience that most people get from beautiful architecture is qualitatively different from that which they’d receive from, say, reading about advances in biology. Don’t you think that a medieval peasant is more likely to be floored and filled with the awe of God when they walk into a Gothic cathedral than when they are informed of the finer points of scholastic philosophy? Maybe I’m just typical-minding here, but I wager that for most people monumental and beautiful architecture just hits something primal in a way that more intellectual beauty does not. And if there’s a cross-over point where the latter sort of art does bear greater aesthetic fruit than the former, I would also suppose that it comes at a point inaccessible to the majority of the human population.

I do understand your position. Though I don’t deal in math nearly as advanced as you, there are times when, at the end of a long derivation, some elegant formula will pop out, and I’ll find myself floored. But I fear that it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to find this same joy.

(This is also a reply to @5434a)

I don't think I want to argue that there aren't any aspects of aesthetic preferences that are held universally enough to be objective. I just want to make the narrow claim that the common condemnation of 21st-century Western culture that it is particularly bad at producing beauty is questionable enough that it is completely dependent on idiosyncratic personal preferences that lie on top of these more universal considerations.

To do this, I gave an example of an idiosyncratic preference that I thought was within the bounds of reasonable that also judges modern, western society as exceptionally good at producing beauty. There are others that also suffice, some based on more earthy considerations that may feel more compelling to you. For example, it's not implausible that many medieval peasants may be more in awe of the Manhattan skyline or the Ground Zero memorial than a Gothic Cathedral. It's also not implausible that many might think the dramatically increased accessibility of natural beauty---Banff, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Iguazu Falls, things medieval peasants can't even dream of---is worth the cost of having cookie-cutter suburbia everywhere.

I'm not completely incapable of find aesthetic pleasures in certain weird number sequences but I don't think of MRNA vaccines or neural imaging techniques as beautiful. I think "hey, neat!" or "that's an impressive feat" but beauty never comes top-of-mind for me for a lot of scientific advancements. You and I are probably operating off entirely different definitions of what's beautiful.

Peter Thiel complains about the lack of ticker-tape parades, as the West goes from definite optimism to indefinite pessimism about the future. I wonder about the cause and effect. Again, wtf happened in 1971?

/images/1690311518630543.webp

The US hit domestic peak conventional oil production, which means that they were forced to pay more for energy, and that acted as a tax on the entirety of the economy. I think a lot of the "wtf happened in 1971" questions can ultimately be answered by the declining availability of cheap, domestically produced oil.

Again, wtf happened in 1971?

How about the National Environmental Policy Act, one year earlier?

Who is building beautiful things these days in the public realm? Beautiful schools, libraries, railroad stations, hospitals, parks, museums, even apartment buildings?

Many fewer people than otherwise, because:

(1) ownership of land and the ability to build beautiful things in places where the internet will notice is stupendously expensive (if the construction is private), or locked behind layers of bureaucracy, procedure, and stultifying local politics that few people have the stomach for (if the construction is public).

(2) Many of these things (e.g. libraries, museums) have been rendered culturally obsolete as sites of mass access by the internet.

(3) Most of these other things (railroad stations, parks, apartment buildings) are not worth building beautifully because public administration is unwilling and/or unable to patrol and enforce order in public spaces, and the populace does not recognize public order as a goal worth pursuing and personally-enacting. If everything is just going to be defaced and graffiti'ed and have drug addicts sleeping and shitting on it, what's the point?

(4) Substitution of mass industrial production for individual skills has rendered the construction methods and skills necessary for classical ornamentation styles either extremely expensive or generally unknown.

[edits for format and readability]

(3) Most of these other things (railroad stations, parks, apartment buildings) are not worth building beautifully because public administration is unwilling and/or unable to patrol and enforce order in public spaces, and the populace does not recognize public order as a goal worth pursuing and personally-enacting. If everything is just going to be defaced and graffiti'ed and have drug addicts sleeping and shitting on it, what's the point?

That does not explain why European railway/bus stations are also ugly

Yes it's more of an architecture problem. Often modern buildings when designed by elite architects and using novel construction methods (which big railroad/airport commissions often do) are as expensive as building in traditional styles would be.

Who is building beautiful things these days in the public realm?

Beauty is wasted on the public. It's how we end up with statues that literally look like excrement. Anything for "the public" is such a nakedly corrupt process, it can't help but produce ugliness. And when individuals try to beautiful the public themselves, some megacorp comes along and inverts their charitable efforts with propaganda.

Learn to make beautiful things yourself, for your family. Especially for your children, which you should have. I was talking to someone a few weeks ago about the power and magic that a father's craftsmanship has for their children. Her dad made her all sorts of furniture that she treasures to this day. My wife refuses to let go of a frankly terrible desk that her father merely refinished. I remember being astounded at the relatively simple picnic table and swing set my father made for us. My kid adores the first shitty pine box I practiced making on my tablesaw.

It sure beats filling your home with cheap Chinese bullshit. I swear being surrounded by cheap bullshit manufactured by an evil strategic enemy hellbent on sabotaging your homeland is just bad for your soul.

I agree mostly, but thinking random Chinese factory workers are "an evil strategic enemy hellbent on sabotaging your homeland" might well be just as bad for the soul.

Maybe. Or maybe you can't see the forest for the trees.

Subsisting off the substandard castoffs of an open enemy is the behavior of the conquered. Reject it.

Who is the conquered here, me choosing to pay a tiny amount of my American salary for a perfectly adequate product (rather than outfitting a machine shop in my garage) or the Chinese worker earning ten dollars a day to produce it?

I'm not sure what world you are living on when you consider the tat sold by randomly arranged letters on Amazon "perfectly adequate". Living in a home where every day something is breaking in some way big or small wears on the soul. You can feel the decline. The erosion of order in favor of chaos.

Instead of consooming and giving the store away to our strategic foes, maybe try investing in yourself, and creating something beautiful. That was the headline topic. Creating beautiful things. You cannot do it when you are locked into a consoom cycle. And it adds insult to injury when it's to the benefit of an institution which hates you.

I recently bought some suction cups on Amazon for $10 to hang stuff in my shower. They stick well and I'm perfectly satisfied with the product.

Now, I could have bought injection molding equipment (guess where it's made?) and rubber (guess where it's made?) and steel wire (guess where it's made?) and made some suction cups myself to increase my status in the eyes of terminally online right wingers. But why would I spend thousands of dollars just to make a basic household item like that? And anyway I've got my gym in the garage so I can't set up an injection molding shop. You guessed it, Chinese iron which hasn't given me any problems.

I really am not sure what world you are living on when you grouse about things breaking all the time and unbridled consooming. I don't remember when I had to do a repair beyond changing a lightbulb (made in China LEDs are brighter, better, and longer lasting than anything in from the 90s), nor do I remember the last time something I bought on Amazon broke, unless you count the time I washed my wireless earbuds.

Were you seriously consooming Amazon "tat" at a prodigious rate before you decided to RETVRN? Or do you just imagine that this is how the out group lives?

You seem to think I'm telling you to make everything, when I'm actually telling you to make something. Preferably beautiful.

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Instead of consooming and giving the store away to our strategic foes, maybe try investing in yourself, and creating something beautiful. That was the headline topic. Creating beautiful things. You cannot do it when you are locked into a consoom cycle. And it adds insult to injury when it's to the benefit of an institution which hates you.

I admire your zeal, and I’ve got to admit this made me laugh pretty hard.

When I look around living out here in California, I think there’s nothing out here for me. Living here as a right-winger leaves me feeling like it’s a me against the world proposition. There’s no hope for “reforming” things, apart from waiting around and watching the whole edifice fall apart completely before things can begin anew.

You don’t think your ideas are a little too romanticized and applicable only in your private family domain?

You don’t think your ideas are a little too romanticized and applicable only in your private family domain?

Maybe. They may be.

However, like you, although to a lesser degree, it feels like the entire fucking world is falling apart around me, and I am but one man. I can waste my life's energy fighting the tide in the public square (and losing), or I can pick a set of principles and try to live them society be damned. If I'm super extra lucky, maybe it will instill a similar set of values in my children. And if I win the metaphorical lottery, maybe it will inspire a few people in proximity to me. I'm not one to hope for much more than that.

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Both of you, for you both labor so that your betters can live off you like a tick.

But for real, it is both of you. Even from a non-socialist perspective, you have given up on 'niceness' in exchange for convenience and cheapness; you live the TV dinner equivalent of a life wherever you choose to do this.

Sometimes that is what it is, you don't have the time or spare attention to not live the takeout McDonalds experience, but you should always be mindful on what exactly you are doing and why. From time to time get yourself some craft instead of some kraft. You would not believe how pleased I am with myself for that last line

Kraft means power, and not having to make every little thing yourself and keep a wood shop and metal shop in your garage is what power is.

I appreciate the pun, but there is no flex in living that prol mdf furniture life.

When you pay IKEA 100 for 10 worth of material and labor, you are getting fleeced. Better to pay 1000 for 500 worth of materials and labor.

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Not everything in life has to be bespoke as long as it's not actively abrasive.

If anything, having a baseline of C+ makes one appreciate A+ more when you have an opportunity. Hedonic treadmill and all.

True enough, but most people seem to think that difrent flavors of C+ are A+. They're out there livin that premium mediocre life.

And when individuals try to beautiful the public themselves, some megacorp comes along and inverts their charitable efforts with propaganda.

The Bull won that one, fortunately. Fearless Girl has been moved to where it can only annoy the traders at the NYSE, if they cared.

Wow, I got excited just reading about a new World Fair! That’s a brilliant idea. I hope we can actually have something similar, and soon.

Hire Robert Stern to design it in a vaguely mid-century Americana style.

You can't design anything in a vaguely mid-century Americana style or any style that is older than 1964, because it will be decried as racist. Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture was a stillbirth. Even if the artist were called Sha'neequah instead of Robert, she still wouldn't be able to do this.

Yes, because fuck neo classical architecture. It sucks now and it sucked then.

We have a bunch of home grown styles that are better anyway; eg frank furnace and such. There is no need to make everything an austere roman larp.

And yet people still find eg. the SCOTUS building to be uniquely beautiful in DC.

Uniquely? It's neoclassical, which makes it anything but unique.

(oh, wait, my mistake, it's actually this building)

Yes, it is still neoclassical but great effort was taken with the exterior ornamentation and proportionality to make it truly impressive. The Treasury Dept building in your first picture looks like a standard 1930s or 1940s office building with basic ornamentation and columns, almost like early Stalinist architecture in the USSR. The SCOTUS building looks like an actual temple. It looks worse from above, but from street level the impression given is excellent.

In my darker (and less sober) moments, I wonder if there's an active campaign against beauty itself. On my local city sub-Reddits I often see people complaining about "wasteful" government spending on a modicum of ornamentation on anything. Faux stone veneers on highway support columns? Wasteful. Planting trees along the highway? Wasteful. Apparently brutalism ugly-ass concrete boxes is the only acceptable architectural form these days.

Edited for Gdanning's pedantry

It’s not even brutalist, it’s actively ugly.

Brutalism hasn't been in vogue for 40+ years. See recent Pritzger winners.

Edit: No, concrete boxes are not the only acceptable architectural form. Frank Gehry does not design concrete boxes. Nor does Rem Koolhaas. Nor does Santiago Calatrava. Nor does Renzo Piano. Nor does Daniel Libeskind.

And of course there is a wide variety of styles represented here

I don't like most of the Pritzger winners, I went and looked at each of your links, and everyone except Santiago(whose building all look like different shots of the same building, lots of curves, I hate them all as well) has at least one 'concrete box' building. Sure, maybe it is actually a glass and steel box, and it is on it's side, or a glass and steel trapezoid, but personally, 'concrete box' is not a literally description. I would bet that the average person who complains about 'modern architecture', and 'brutalism', and 'concrete boxes', would also hate everything in Rem Koolhaas's portfolio, even if none of them are technically any of those things. Could you please tell me an acceptable short hand so that I can complain about these things without someone complaining that I am using the wrong terms of art. It is not as simple as all new buildings, the campus in the AIA link is mostly fine, although there are modern(though probably not technically) elements that I think strictly detract from the design. Is there a word or phrase that I can use to properly express my distaste for most (maybe all) architectural trends that have emerged over the last 50-100 years?

I don’t know why there has to be a single word, nor if there can be a single word, that encompasses this and this and this. And if there is a single word, "Brutalist" isn't it.

Moreover, none of those are boxes. OTOH, if, as you say, "concrete box" includes steel and glass boxes, then this counts, yet I dare say that most who complain about post-WWII architecture would find that more attractive than the examples above.

Moreover, most of these are better described as concrete boxes than any of the examples at the top. As is this. Heck, the Empire State Building is essentially a box with spire stuck on top.

And, frankly, if someone said, "I hate Rem Koolhaas because I hate concrete boxes," I would have a hard time taking him seriously.

Upon further reflection, I believe the term I'm looking for is 'inhuman.' To me, those three buildings feel inhuman, ugly, and unnatural. They seem like the creations of a lotus eater who began with a peculiar shape, and then attempted to transform that design into a functional building after the fact, rather than starting with human-friendly, functional spaces and adding aesthetic elements later to enhance their beauty.

These buildings remind me of high-fashion that seldom leaves the runway, worn perhaps only by the designers themselves, or the avant-garde in gastronomy featuring frozen bubbles of crab purée crowned with sea water-infused foam. The objective there isn't to create good clothes or delicious food, rather to create 'art', and in doing so, the primary purpose, and an ineffable authenticity is lost.

When you couple this with the degradation of fine art more generally, I think everything comes together. Modern architects, it seems, are crafting ugly art installations that begrudgingly take on the role of 'buildings' out of necessity.

Yes, that is probably a better term. Though it doesn't capture why. But no single term could.

Though I would take issue with your assumptions about lack of functionality. The first one, as far as I can tell, is perfectly functional. It appears to be, essentially, a set of rectangular boxes stacked on top of one another, just like a regular building. The boxes are just stacked very differently. The Seattle Central Library building is pretty much a standard big library inside. Also, I can attest that when this was used as an art museum, it was highly functional, and clearly designed to facilitate patron flow between galleries. The Walt Disney Concert Hall is renowned for its acoustics and this article by a professional musician says, "I am always speechless when architec­ture manages to support the purpose of the space so congenially."

Finally, as for aesthetics, the first link above evokes a treehouse to me, which is a nod both to nature and childhood. The last, to me, evokes flight or a sense of soaring, which for many people is emotionally resonant. So I am not sure that inhuman or unnatural are entirety fair descriptors; at the very least, reasonable minds can differ.

Heck, the Empire State Building is essentially a box with spire stuck on top.

Oh come now.

The point is that it is no less a "concrete box" than most of what dude is calling a "concrete box." Ie, it is a bunch of boxes glued together. His terminology doesn’t work.

More specifically, I personally think that the Empire State Building is more attractive than the Bilbao Guggenheim, but obviously not because it is less of a "concrete box" as he defines it. Ditto re this building versus Bilbao

Again, his terminology doesn’t capture the relevant differences.

And, I like the Empire State Building more than whatever they are calling the Sears Tower these days, despite having them having same essential form of a bunch of rectangles glued together. The differences lie elsewhere.

Few would describe works such as the 2020 or 2012 winners as beautiful. The term brutal might even be used, of course that would be completely wrong because the academic definition of the word denies any usage by common folk.

Yeah, these are pretty freaking ugly. Like, the whole Brutalist thing made sense after WWII, when European cities were bombed out, industrial machinery was available to a greater extent than in ages past, and reinforced concrete was fairly inexpensive. At least, it made sense to some degree...figuring out how to build cheap half decent buildings out of reinforced concrete is a worthy goal.

This is the usual facile reply to complaints about the ugly architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries. Uh, you complain about the ugliness of modern brutalist buildings, but actually modernism and brutalism are separate architectural movements, and the current-year trend of ugly concrete boxes and geometric turds is called something else.

You don't need to be versed in the jargon of an insular artfield to criticize its output, especially for architecture where this output is forced upon millions of unwilling victims to suffer daily.

Dude, modernism predates Brutalism. The point is not that contemporary architecture is beautiful, nor that is ugly. It is that if you are going to criticize contemporary architecture, then it helps to come across as knowing what you are talking about. Take a look at the newest buildings built in NYC, for example. How many are brutalist?

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It is that if you are going to criticize contemporary architecture, then it helps to come across as knowing what you are talking about.

This is exactly the attitude that fmaa was talking about. Sorry I didn't learn the specifics of what various kinds of concrete boxes are called but that doesn't mean I automatically have to defer to the aesthetic tastes of someone with a better grasp of the vocabulary and jargon. Whatever you want to call it, it's ugly and I hate it.

No one says you have to defer to anyone. But it is impossible to have a conversation unless we have a common understanding of terms. If someone says, "I hate contemporary architecture because I hate brutalism," I would think he would be happy to learn that most contemporary architecture is not Brutalist. Ditto if he says "I hate contemporary architecture because I hate concrete boxes," he should be happy to learn that most contemporary architecture is not concrete boxes. See,eg, Frank Gehry and other "starchitects."

And, guess what? With some exceptions, I don’t like brutalism either. But I like plenty of more contemporary stuff. Because they aren't synonyms.

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Lol, everyone did have a common understanding of the terms - everyone knows what @heavywaternettipot meant, and what they were referring to, even you know what they are talking about. You stopped the conversation and turned it into an endless back and forth on the definition of words, like you always do when people are discussing things you don't like.

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You're not saying outright that I have to defer, but your statement "It is that if you are going to criticize contemporary architecture, then it helps to come across as knowing what you are talking about" certainly carries the implication that I ought to be deferring to those with the right vocabulary.

At any rate, I've edited my comment from "brutalist" to "ugly-ass concrete boxes" because that's what's getting built in my area. As I stated in my original reply to you, my city/county/state certainly isn't hiring Pritzker-nominated architects to design its public buildings.

Edit: Stupid auto-correct.

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I'm aware of the difference. Part of my point was that naming a specific artstyle "modern" and then sneering when people use that word to mean contemporary is just being a condescending asshole and bad at communicating.

The other, bigger part was that no, you don't need to know the jargon to complain about things being forced on you. I'm not going to find lists of NYC buildings, but I think like 90% of that Pritzker prize list is ugly and about half of it is concrete boxes. It really doesn't matter to anyone living in/near them if these particular ugly concrete boxes don't count as brutalist according to architects.

No one says you have to accept anything, nor that those Pritzker winners are attractive. But if you go to your local planning commission and say "no contemporary architecture because I hate brutalism and concrete boxes, you cant complain if this gets built down the street from you.

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Treating bureaucrats and architects like malicious genies might not be wrong, but would hardly make them blameless. Though really the most fantastic part of this scenario would be them caring what you say in the first place.

Not in vogue, you say? (That's the 2020 winner)

And the other 39 winners over the last 40 years?

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I think you are on a loser here. The prize announcement for the 2006 winner says:

The new laureate began his career in the 1950s and was part of what was then considered the avant-garde in São Paulo, known loosely as creators of the Paulist brutalist architecture—practicioners whose work, often using simple materials and forms, emphasized an ethical dimension of architecture. He is widely considered the most outstanding architect of Brazil.

Exposed raw concrete is the essential element of brutalism:

Among his most widely known built works is the Brazilian Sculpture Museum, a non-traditional concept of a museum, nestled partly underground in a garden in São Paulo. He made bold use of a giant concrete beam on the exterior that traverses the site. His Forma Furniture Showroom in the same city is considered an icon of his approach to architecture.

How many winners need to be officially considered brutalist for you to be wrong?

The 2019 winner was Arata Isozaki.

Notable early works include the Ōita Prefectural Library (1966), Expo '70 Festival Plaza in Osaka (1970), Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, and Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art in Fukuoka (both 1974). Several of his works from this era are considered definitive examples of Japanese brutalism.

These works were cited in the Pritzker prize announcement.

I don’t understand why you think references to buildings designed from the 1950s to 1974 refutes the claim that brutalism has not been in vogue for 40 years.

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You asked about the winners of the Pritzker prize. I gave two from the last 20 years who were cited as brutalists by the Pritzker announcements. The award is now a lifetime achievement award, it seems, and they cite brutalist buildings in the award announcements.

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I don't disbelieve you, but it think it's fair to point out that my state and local governments probably aren't hiring Pritzger-winning architects to design and install infrastructure and government buildings. The rational part of my brain knows this is driven far more by cost than aethestics; way less to just slap up an ugly-ass concrete structure without any kind of regard for appearance.

2020 and 2021 both look pretty brutalist -- although that's perhaps overly charitable to 2020, which kind of looks more like a Mexican parking garage, and is a School of Architecture so should get some sort of bonus points.

2020 is a central example of brutalism, 2021 is a related modernist style, 2022 is arguably brutalist. But 2020 is enough to demonstrate that Brutalism has been in style more recently than 40 years ago.

2020 is Brutalistesque, but 2021 is not Brutalist at all. The point is that "Apparently brutalism is the only acceptable architectural form these days" is clearly incorrect.

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"Blocky forms made out of concrete" is brutalist enough for me -- what would you call the style of the 2021 winner?

Also what is "brutalistesqe"? 'esqe' as a suffix usually means 'similar to' -- so if buildings in a style similar to brutalism are winning architechture prizes, I would say this means that brutalism is still en vogue at least to some extent?

Blocky forms made out of concrete" is brutalist enough for me -- what would you call the style of the 2021 winner?

That's what I meant by brutalesque.

What's the difference? Are there some sort of Brutalism Police that we need to watch out for here?

And if there are, do they work for wikipedia? Because wikipedia has the following photos in their article on brutalism:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/16/The_History_Faculty%2C_Cambridge_%282354442890%29.jpg/1920px-The_History_Faculty%2C_Cambridge_%282354442890%29.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1a/Norfolk_Terrace.JPG/1024px-Norfolk_Terrace.JPG

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6d/Habitat_67%2C_southwest_view.jpg/1920px-Habitat_67%2C_southwest_view.jpg

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In the spirit of conciliation, perhaps "Apparently brutalism is the only institutionally-acceptable architectural form these days" is closer to the spirit of the original statement?

But, were that true, wouldn't that be reflected in the Pritzker prize awards? What reflects the institution of the architecture profession better than that?

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I was unclear. Acceptable to the customer-institutions who are deciding on what to have built; not to the institution of the architectural profession. Apologies for that.

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