Our culture is addicted to naked self-expression.
These acts gouge at the very heart of Beauty itself. The late Oxford writer and philosopher Roger Scruton said, “Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.” He called the loss of Beauty in our culture, the “postmodern desecration.”
Scruton chooses his word “desecration” carefully and applies it to what he feels is ruining art. It is a religious word that implies the spoiling of what is sacred.
I couldn’t help but think about Scruton’s words as I scrolled through Twitter comments Sunday night denouncing the Super Bowl halftime “show,” which was sponsored by Pepsi. We did not watch the halftime festivities, but once I saw how it ruffled feathers, I wanted to see what had caused such a stir.
All it took was a few clips, and I quickly fast-forwarded back to the third quarter. This crass spectacle is what we consider to be “artful self-expression” in our culture, I thought to myself? I was appalled.
And yet many people cry out for the right to express themselves however they please. The show to some was the expression of two female “artists” interpreting life as they saw it.
How far we’ve fallen from the grip of the truly beautiful.
A Short History of Desecration
How did we get to this point in which our culture desecrates the beautiful in favour of self-expression?
Before the Enlightenment, says Scruton, artists considered beauty sacred, and it served as the telos (goal) of their work. But Beauty lost its sacred position for the artist and became definable by the person.
We see this movement of thought in the writings of David Hume, for example. In 1757 the Scottish philosopher wrote an essay titled, “Of the Standard of Taste,” from which we get the axiom, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Hume writes:
“Beauty is not a quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible to beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others.”
Hume’s thought is indicative of a time in history when philosophy was changing right along with science and industry. It’s fashionable to blame the Industrial Revolution for much of our secular problems in our current age. But with our growing understanding in science came the call for complete freedom of thought as well. Freedom was the cry of the Enlightenment.
A few decades after Hume, we find the German philosopher Immanuel Kant setting out the intellectual (and moral) parameters of the Age of Enlightenment.
In 1784 Kant wrote an article for the Berlin Monthly titled, “What is Enlightenment.” The manifesto touted “enlightenment” as the process of growing up; to stop relying on the masters of old to dictate what we are to feel, think, love, and believe.
Kant urged people to think for themselves.
“Dare to know!” was the rallying cry, taken from the Latin axiom Sapere aude. “The public use of one’s reason,” wrote Kant, “must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment to mankind.” A cry for intellectual freedom does not pose an existential threat at face value.
But, as in so many things in our world, when taken to the extreme, great harm can ensue. In this case, however, we find the amalgam of the subjectivity of David Hume mixed with the cry for intellectual freedom from Kant and are left with what we recognize as the modern cultural mind.
These turning points in history orient our theological gaze and remind us that the cultural malaise in which we find ourselves in the twenty-first century is part of a progression of thought that leads away from the Divine.
Our Contempt for the Divine
Think about the ramifications of a world that throws off the shackles of authority in their quest for intellectual freedom. Icons of power are treated with contempt, along with them, God and his church.
Just as artists turned inward and defined Beauty for themselves, the philosophers championed the human will over a Sovereign will.
Ethicist Oliver O’Donovan describes this shift as a time in history where “the structure of the creation with its variety, order and reflection of the Creator’s glory no longer served to shape love and action.”
Our moral field was lost, he says, and the “will became the exclusive giver of practical meaning.”
That is to say, as long as a will finds satisfaction within itself, then that is enough; the will of a person is its own end.
We see this movement away from admiration of the Creator and his created order, toward sacrilege in art, and the dimming of Beauty. It’s easy to talk about moral relativism in general terms concerning its impact on truth. Still, we seldom reflect on the destruction of love and admiration of the Good and Beautiful and the effect that has on a person, and a society.
Through self-assertion and self-expression, we’ve turned our backs on the Beauty of the Infinite and invited despair.
The Desecration of the Beautiful
Now in our culture, the naked will asserts itself with almost no conscience. Artists value self-expression over Beauty as an end goal, as evidenced during halftime at the Super Bowl.
The famous philosopher and songwriter, Taylor Swift, once said, while shooting a cosmetic commercial that, “Unique and different was the new beautiful.” Beauty for Swift begins with the self.
For Swift and most of our modern culture, Beauty has turned inward; we define it because its source begins with us.
But Beauty’s fall from something out there, beyond the self, something transcendent, to something originating within human beings, goes beyond mere self-expression. For moderns, transgression has become the vogue position for the artist.
Artists tend to view themselves as outsiders and provocation defines their work. So, anything that shocks an audience is art. The point is to go beyond moral norms, to transgress.
Director Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, The Hateful Eight) is the poster child for postmodern desecration. Tarantino uses extreme violence as a way to transgress the moral norm to entertain his audience.
Speaking at the British Academy of Film and Television, Tarantino said, “I feel like a conductor, and the audience’s feelings are my instruments. I will be like, ‘Laugh, laugh, now be horrified’. When someone does that to me, I’ve had a good time at the movies.”
Tarantino justifies his self-expression by the end goal of amusement. The shallowness of Tarantino’s artistic intent reveals his lack of emotional sensitivities. Meaningless violence is itself, the tool of shock that desecrates the sacred. In this case, that which is sacred is life itself.
What are we to do with the dissonance we perceive between our feelings of Beauty in the world and the constant grating of modern society?
I am reminded of Iris Murdoch’s stinging cultural critique. She says, “We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities which transcend him. We picture man as a brave naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world.”
Ours is an unprecedented time of technological progress, moral bankruptcy, and a loss of the sacred. The world is in desperate need of someone to paint a picture of hope and point the way back to Beauty.
Rebuking the World
It’s not that Beauty is dead, but that our cultural sacrilege has blinded us to it.
So what will save us?
G.K. Chesterton said it is the great paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it the most. Chesterton believed when a generation gets too worldly, it is up to the saint, or the Church, to rebuke it.
The saint is not what the world wants but what they need. A saint, says Chesterton, is someone who runs incongruous with the modern world.
Who will stand and be an incongruous person and help revive the heart of Beauty in our culture?
Tomorrow at 8:30 p.m. I invite you to The Gathering to discuss the desecration of beauty with me. And I also want to think about how the desecration of beauty relates to what we’ve been discussing about spiritual minimalism.
Media, social media, internet programming all affect our imagination. Programs like the Super Bowl halftime show influence young and old alike and normalize behaviours and tastes. Think on this over the next 24 hours, and I’ll see you here tomorrow to discuss. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts!
I’ll send an email out around 8:30 p.m. and kick things off with a cluster of questions.
Until then!
Cheers,
Tim