Traditional architecture is predicated on the ideal of beauty as an objective reality, while modernism exalts subjective preferences.

Timeless Beauty:

 Conservatism’s Modernist Problem

by Joel Pidel

Conservatives who reject modern architecture have reasons to do so. Traditional architecture is predicated on the ideal of beauty as an objective reality, while modernism exalts subjective preferences.

Matthew Milliner’s recent article, “Nameless Beauty: Conservatism’s Architecture Problem,” leaves the impression that conservatism’s architecture problem is the aesthetic equivalent of clinging to one’s guns and religion. The argument proceeds through a personal narrative in which the modernist works of Chicago compel the author to expand his aesthetic vision. It concludes by suggesting that a commitment to beauty as an enduring conservative value should lead conservatism to temper its use of tradition as an existential crutch with which both to defend against and to attack modernism.

I do not begrudge our author his fresh phenomenological eyes in principle, and I know that the article is not a polemic against traditional architecture. It strikes me more as an indictment of a pejorative, if stereotypical, brand of conservatism that closes itself to ever new experiences of beauty, to which new and unfamiliar (modernist) forms can potentially give rise. Traditionalism and modernism are thus played off each other to this effect. However, I believe the arguments presented are so many straw men; furthermore, following them to their logical conclusion would lead one to an equally precarious position of exchanging one’s dogmatic slumber for a certain aesthetic relativism: it is beautiful because Ijudge it to be so.

A rejection of modernism, or of particular modernist works, is not necessarily due to some prejudice or ignorance, or because one has closed oneself off to its beauty, subjectively apprehended. It may simply be that conservatives have seen modernism for what it is and found it wanting. One could just as easily invoke the case that suddenly to find Frank Gehry’s architecture “beautiful” suggests that one’s previous dogmatism regarding the beauty of traditional architecture was never properly grounded in the first place, and thus both pre- and post-“enlightenment” visions collapse into the same unity of personal preference and subjective experience.

Conservatism may have an architecture problem, but if so, this imaginative defect is not confined by political or spiritual boundaries. Practicing architecture, I am as likely to find a conservative, religious person doing modernist architecture as a liberal, irreligious person doing traditional architecture. The same could be said for other arts, such as music. What is most revealing is how few persons still practice authentic traditional architecture. The architectural landscape is overwhelmingly populated by those with a modernist aesthetic mindset—conservative or not.

At the same time, it is quite correct to point out the empty homage that conservatism often pays to beauty, in terms of both time and resources. One need only look at contemporary instances of sacred architecture to see how they reveal both this reality and their modernist tendencies. It may also be correct to suggest that what conservative aversion to modernism and preference for the traditional there are remain largely unexamined by the general populace.

However real these problems may be, I do not think they predominate. They strike me more as symptoms of the larger problem. Contemporary conservatism betrays what I would term a “transcendental schizophrenia.” In other words, conservatism operates within a more or less traditional realm with regard to its understanding of truth and goodness, while unwittingly operating within a more or less modernist realm with regard to the order of beauty in aesthetics.

Much of conservatism at the lived, existential level, if not at the intellectual level, has swallowed the lie—or, rather, the half-truth—that beauty is subjective. Of course it is subjective! The other half of the truth, though, is that it is only because there is an objective reality to be subjectively perceived. Beauty is not whatever I want it to be; it is a reality to be discovered and—dare I say it—conformed to.

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