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So earlier this week I tried to have a discussion about the common complaint here that modern, western culture is deficient and should be overthrown because it is extremely bad at creating beauty. I tried to argue that this particular judgement depends on aesthetic preferences that aren't as universal as its makers seem to think and gave a particular example of one of my own preferences (that is shared by many I know IRL) that actually judges it as exceptionally good.
The response was pretty shocking. There are some topics here that I know will provoke a lot of heat---immigration, racial identity, trans issues, etc. I never suspected this to also be one of them. The sheer amount of anger in the replies and the subsequent to emotional arguments and strawmanning was crazy--I really did not know it was this controversial. On second thought however, this aesthetic judgement really is the core objection a lot of the far right has towards the modern world and a lot of their policy suggestions to fix it that otherwise seem bizarre to me make a lot more sense when viewed as based on their particular aesthetic preferences. Therefore, questioning these preferences is really questioning the foundation of their political identity, much more than talking about immigration might be.
I'm therefore interested in polling this forum on the issue. I think it helps with the strawmanning to be very precise and try to clarify it into a dilemma. Pretend god offered you a trade: all future advances in science and math that aren't directly useful for technological advancement will stop. In exchange, the supposed squalor of the modern, western physical environment will be fixed---think replacing all of suburbia with stuff that looks as nice as your favorite ones of these. Would you take the trade? [Edit: maybe a better option would be changing all brutalist buildings to things that are as nice as cathedrals?] Now I know that "directly useful for technological advancement" is a very fuzzy, but please try to answer the question in its spirit---we're trading away only the aesthetic value of these advances, not their material and practical effects.
I would also be very interested in the correlation between the answer to this question and people's political views. I personally would be strongly against the trade (the same as most people I know IRL) and I'm a pretty standard American liberal.
(EDIT: on second thought this was a very unclear post missing too much context. See here for clarification---hopefully this helps to anyone still looking at this).
(I'm not sure if I'm one of the people you had in mind when you wrote this, so this might be irrelevant.) In our last exchange, you seemed content with being surrounded by physical ugliness because you can find beauty in a lot of higher maths and sciences. My objection was, and remains, that leave us midwits who don't have the g to see things the way you do out in cold. That doesn't mean I think all western society needs to be burned to the root, it just means I wish we didn't always go for the cheapest, blandest options.
Further I reject the framing of your hypothetical here too. I don't think it clarifies much. Why can't we achieve new breakthroughs in math and science while still making buildings that are at least inoffensive?
I think the parent comment I made was bad writing and left out a lot of context. So the complaint from this particular segment of the far right is that there is something essential to modern, western culture (they'll use a term like "globohomo") that destroys something aesthetic. I'm currently a little confused about what exactly their aesthetic complaint is---people's living environments, public buildings and spaces, people's bodies, some sort of missing abstract search for glory? However, as far as I understand them, they think that this aesthetic issue cannot be fixed without changing the foundations of western culture. Usually, they argue it necessitates some kind of ethnostate.
I wanted to make a point---even accepting their premise that the aesthetic issue can only and will be fixed by getting rid of "globohomo" culture, it's not actually that clearly an issue. I personally think that the modern, western physical environment is adequate, even though it could be better---airports and suburbia, for example, are moderately ugly to beautiful (visit Changi or walk around Palo Alto to see the good side) depending on how rich the area is. However, in this trade for adequacy instead of greatness (again accepting the questionable premise that culture change would actually lead to greatness!), we get greatness in another place: beauty coming from scientific and technological advancement.
The hypothetical was meant to ask if people think this trade is ok. Obviously there are also other aesthetic benefits from modern, western culture. I just thought this one was most compelling (though obviously I was wrong here).
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