Harvard philosopher Elaine Scarry contends that beauty awakens generosity, gratitude, tolerance, a passion for justice and many other positive traits. Our sense of beauty seems connected to harmony and what we consider beautiful may be an evolutionary development—we are attracted to landscapes and designs that seem life supporting or life affirming, while those—like oil spills, strip mines, etc. appear life threatening, in a visceral way—as wounds on the body of the earth.
As with people, physically attractive landscapes can be deceiving—that lovely golf course may be a non-native monoculture, kept alive by high concentrations of fertilizer, pesticides and precious water. That’s why ecologist Aldo Leopold said things are right when, along with beauty, they preserve and enhance the integrity and stability of the environment.
And beauty offers another potential—the possibility of creating bridges across our current political divides and social divides. My organization, AND BEAUTY FOR ALL, seeks to build on that hope. We are seeing small but significant steps in this direction. I’m especially impressed by what Mayor Bob Sampayan and others are doing in Vallejo, California, perhaps America’s most diverse city. I’m also pleased to see similar suggestions regarding beauty’s power to bring us together in conservative publications such as The American Conservative and The Front Porch Republic. They point to Dostoevsky’s claim in The Idiot that “Beauty will save the world,” a claim repeated by Solzhenitsyn, and even the conservative Pope Benedict.
Young Lake painting by Rebecca Holland