Americans are divided into factions. The instinct to side with your “tribe” against other factions is strong, and it threatens to prevent us from finding the common good.
Tribal affiliations frequently complicate the same-sex marriage debate. People on both sides of the argument tend to misunderstand those on the other. Opponents of gay marriage too often treat homosexuality as an identity rather than a characteristic. Supporters imagine opponents as Bible-thumping bigots who want to persecute them. There’s a reason it’s spoken of as a culture war.
But the culture war moniker reflects a serious political disorder. Politics is supposed to be deliberation about the common good and how to achieve it. It’s supposed to be about our common effort as a society. The fact that it resembles a war between disparate factions trying to defeat the others — rather than win them over — shows that we’ve lost something important.
What we’ve lost is our understanding of a common human nature that allows us to reach shared conclusions about the good.
Modern culture largely rejects the idea of a fixed human nature because it largely rejects the idea of fixed truth. If there is no right way to live — if we’re each just imposing our own meaning onto a bunch of matter in motion — we can’t find a common good. Because we’ve given up on finding a common good, politics has devolved into a battle to impose our own preferences on others.
Perhaps an increased appreciation of beauty can help us regain an understanding of the common good.
Even when people hold to relativism on an intellectual level and deny that there’s an objective good, they may still be susceptible to beauty, because beauty transcends the intellect. Even those who won’t admit the idea of objective good may realize, for example, that Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” is more beautiful than a work of abstract expressionism.
Beauty awakens noble sentiments. The awe we feel towards beautiful things inspires our respect. United in sentiment by shared awe, perhaps we could learn to overcome our tribal feelings.
How do we take the lessons of beauty and apply them to the reclamation of our political culture?
In the short run, we should focus more on beauty in our rhetoric. Practical arguments are indispensable — those are how we determine how to prudentially pursue the good. But especially when we have so much trouble agreeing on what to pursue, we need to focus on the beautiful as well.
We need to speak of the beauty of families, of the beauty of honest labor, of the beauty of people working together in their communities. If people across the political spectrum realized that, despite our difficulty articulating why some things are good, we can see that these are beautiful, we’d have a better chance of agreeing on policies conducive to human flourishing.
We should work to beautify our culture. Beauty needs to be celebrated and not derided. We especially need to fight the notion that appreciating beauty is effeminate.
The rekindling of our culture’s appreciation of beauty is by no means only a task for artists. It calls for concerted effort on the part of the viewer to really notice and celebrate the beauty he sees in art, in nature, and in other people.
The greater our shared artistic heritage, the more we’ll have to hold us together, especially if the art reflects what it is to be an American. Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” is an example of this sort of art. We need more inspiring depictions of the goods we strive for politically. If the only depictions of American society we see are grotesque caricatures, we’ll have a hard time pursuing politics as the noble endeavor it should be.
Fostering an appreciation for beauty may not be a silver bullet, but it’s a start. If citizens learn to appreciate beauty together, we’ll be better able to agree on common goals. And even though progress in the political system will be slow, experiences of beauty shared between just a few people will forge the personal relationships that are the bedrock of man’s political life.