Beauty and Tradition Unmask Nihilistic Modernity
Mark Signorelli recently reviewed Gregory Wolfe’s book Beauty Will Save the World and characterized it as self-contradictory. I could not finish the book after having started enthusiastically, since it did not address my own interests in architecture and urbanism.
Wolfe treats many writers whom I have not read, and the visual artists he embraces strike me neither as particularly redemptive, nor as key players in the great project to re-establish art fit for human beings. Nevertheless, I sympathize wholeheartedly with the book’s thesis: that present-day culture has lost its connection with beauty and with nourishing artistic expression. Wolfe promised to support this truth by digging further and linking it with religious thought. I agree with Signorelli, since I did not find a strong argument here to re-invigorate our current literary and philosophical malaise. Such an argument, I have to say, is present in Signorelli’s own essays.
I’m not going to discuss Wolfe’s book, but rather use this occasion to outline what I believe to be the conflict between true art and elements of nihilism (focusing on architecture). Here, I can broaden the scope and suggest that many attempts to generate nourishing human creations failed because they tried, at the same time, to embrace “modernity.” In my estimation, the widely accepted images of modernity contain the seeds of destruction. Most of us have been brainwashed to accept someone else’s definition of “modernity”: someone with a nihilistic agenda. Thus, anyone attempting to be inclusive by welcoming what has destroyed beauty in our culture in the first place undermines their laudable call for a renewal of true artistic production. One cannot adopt one set of values (generative and creative) and their opposite (destructive and sterile) at the same time. Well, one can indeed, but that only leads to confusion and cognitive dissonance.
Approaching this explosive topic as a scientist hopefully brings in another dimension for debate, outside the usual one of culture as a purely artistic expression. Signorelli is right on target with his characterization of the advent of Modernism as a cultural discontinuity. It was most definitely not the smooth evolution that most thinkers believe it to be (ironically, since some of them are not always comfortable with Darwin!). Every culture is mistakenly thought to transition into another, exemplifying a Darwinian selection and evolution of artistic production and taste according to changing environmental conditions (social, economic, political, technological). This is false. Some cultural movements, and Modernism in particular, are simply cults that organize themselves on a military model. Their aim is, and remains, the extinction of competing repositories of culture. They achieve this aim by sterilizing humanity’s creative capacity.
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