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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'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 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.
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.
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