It is now almost one month since the Building Better, Building Beautiful commission, co-chaired by the late Sir Roger Scruton, released its report. The Commission existed to reclaim beauty in architecture, or to use their own words: to advise the government on how to build new housing with high-quality design tailored to the needs of the community. A lot of the UK’s poorer areas are afflicted by ugly communist-like tower blocks for efficiency’s sake. This trend did not hit housing alone. Many churches built in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, can hardly be recognised as such by non-architects who use them.
Both inside and out they reflect the loss of any real sense or appreciation of beauty. Art, architecture and music used to be media through which culture was elevated and conserved for future generations. One need only cast a few glances back at the paintings, cathedrals and symphonies of the past to see that. In the quest for larger profit-margins apparent efficiency has, in a devastating coup, ousted beauty.
The debates over the repair and rebuilding of the grand Notre-Dame in Paris, a keystone of Christian civilization for almost one thousand years, highlight a creeping hostility to conserving our past glories. Some have suggested radical designs, a Rolling Stone article even arguing for it to reflect a supposed ‘multicultural’, ‘multireligious’ and ‘increasingly divided’ twenty-first century France.
The great hypocrisy of such an attitude is that it contributes far more to division within society than a church ever will. The grandeur, beauty and impressive scale of European cathedrals such as Notre-Dame lift our spirits up to a noble cause beyond ourselves, uniting our search for a common good, a common reference point for authority. The architects, builders and financers of the eye-catching superstructure built it out of a desire to reach the heavens, to connect with God and represent the glories of the Christian faith, a faith that would be conserved and inspired for generations. Beauty was something objective to attain, to reach and to harness a culture’s resources.
By contrast, the fractionalising, demoralisation tactics of cultural Marxism serve to fragment and divide. They disregard the possibility of religious conversion or cultural re-identification, assuming these characteristics to be fixed from birth. In other words, there is no need to try to convince non-believers of the profound beauty of centuries-old Christian worship reflected in Notre-Dame’s display. Instead, the rebuild project must merely ‘reflect’ or ‘represent’ what currently exists on the ground in the predominantly Islamic suburban ghettos of metropolitan France.
A thinking conservative would argue that Notre-Dame, Westminster Abbey, St Peter’s Basilica and other Christian masterpieces are not just grand statements from the past, but cultural, spiritual and moral hubs of the future. A society built on the shifting sands of bland, council-owned ‘multifaith’ buildings is not much to conserve at all.
Why does beauty matter? Why are commissions such as the UK’s Building Better, Building Beautiful important?
Such initiatives are important because they anchor our culture to beauty, creating an attractive world in which we want to live and pass on to our descendants. We should learn a lesson from Socrates, who taught that ‘the object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful’. If we educate our children to appreciate what is beautiful, good and true, our society has a chance of changing for the better. If truth, goodness and beauty are so inextricably linked, perhaps reclaiming beauty is the first step towards reclaiming goodness and truth in a world where falsehood and evil abounds. Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin may have been right when he insisted that ‘beauty will save the world’.
Click here to read the commission’s final report.