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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).
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»:
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.
Never heard of it, but man is it accurate for my inner workings.
Conclusion:
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.
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