For Beauty, More than Ever Before

25 Jan, 2026

A friend and I were talking the other day about just how ugly so many US American cities are, their unwalkable sprawl out from an often cohesive core into strip mall after parking lot after auto parts store, chain after chain after box store, so that one community blends into another down the same trafficky roads, nary a tree or green space in sight, much less any solid, artfully constructed edifice from before circa 1950. The ugliness was a thing in itself to be lamented, but then we mused what the psychological effects might be on a person or a community pounded day after day with the visual declaration that beauty is unimportant. If nothing is worth looking at, why treat it with care?

On the whole, the message of the US city- and suburbanscape is that cheapness and convenience (hence, of course, profit) are life’s ultimate goods. Swerving from that goal is frivolous at best; at worst, a crime against hard-nosed business sense and all the pushy American practicality and structural disinvestment that come with it. For Real Americans, beauty is a luxury for elites, so it’s something we have to stand against. Or there are more important, immediate things to worry about (just look at Minneapolis); to stop and ask about beauty is to let the bad guys off the hook for their harm. And then as the importance of visual or other types of beauty are denied, it’s all the easier to embrace something like attitudinal and behavioral anti-beauty—outright ugliness—as an apparently moral stance.

Herbert Marcuse argued for the liberative value of what he called art (and I’ll include within the larger concept beauty). He was taking issue with the devaluation (Marxism’s in particular) of aesthetics that says there’s no time for art, that in the midst of so much suffering and wrong, concern with everything that we consider art is frivolous, even insulting, and keeps us away from the real work we need to be doing. People’s very lives are at stake, after all. But along with Marcuse, I’m unwilling to accept the banishment of art or beauty from the serious business of chasing down justice and making it work. And along with him, I’m convinced that “art remains a dissenting force,” one that—and here’s the key—[often] “represents reality while accusing it.”¹

To my mind, “accusing” reality involves a demonstration that, to put it mildly, things could be better, that we could be better. The accusation shows, in short, that we’re not doing all we can, or being (to appropriate an old motto of US Army recruiters) all we can be. That summation sounds weak and romantic, as if it had come straight off one of those inspirational office posters meant to dissipate legitimate employee frustration. But isn’t that what all the greed and repression, selfishness and destruction, that human beings embrace and carry out come down to: living out reduced versions of ourselves, living according to something less than our full potential? By potential, I don’t mean full use of our capacities to go for the gold or the promotion or undisputed power. What I’m talking about is something that sounds far less sexy, maybe because it’s a lifelong endeavor that’s much harder to pursue than those particular aims I just mentioned: full acceptance of the essential responsibility for getting past all sorts of ugly mundane distractions we’re encouraged to sink into, and living instead in what Václav Havel called “truth”—by which I mean the never-ending cultivation, joyful even, of a planet whose inhabitants, humans and non-, are all free and thriving.

Beauty demands that we see through, really see for what they are, these distractions, and the justifications we’ve been offered and continue to offer for them, and the ways in which we’ve helped keep them in place. Beauty has a key role to play here, making us pull up short—what art critic David Pagel describes as “giv[ing] pause to business as usual and enliven[ing] me to my surroundings, which suddenly seem to be clearer and crisper and more immediate.”² Whether in shock or awe or some other intense state of being, we’re brought to a halt and forced to recognize the existence of something in our midst working completely differently. The veil has been removed, or at least a corner lifted, and the contrast between what we’re confronted with and our everyday and the assumptions that come with it calls our normal into question. If we attend to it, beauty’s irruption forces us to think; its arrival offers at least a first step toward change: the sort of satori that reveals what’s been hidden from us or what we’ve hidden from ourselves, the cut-rate nature of the consolation prizes awarded for ignoring the “something more” (Havel again!) that pulses behind conventional appearances. And if we take the next step and stay with that surprise, think about it, about the disruption and the dissonance, we might start to make out some paths to take us beyond that world of distraction, injustice, disconnection.

Elaine Scarry gets at this “lifesaving” power of beauty, the way “it brings one face-to-face with one’s own errors… [with] the limits of its own starting place” and of the assumptions we’ve accepted about the world and our place in it. For Scarry, beauty can do this because it draws us in and makes us want to know more about it, about its origins and its mode of being, about how we can keep it in our lives and share it with others. In other words, beauty “incites deliberation.” Scarry illustrates her argument by relating the story of Odysseus shipwrecked on a foreign beach—and gut-punched with the sight of Nausicaa, the only one of a group of girls who doesn’t run in fright when they see him. Scarry alleges that it’s her beauty—so overpowering that it may indicate what Odysseus is really seeing is the goddess Artemis—that makes our hero stop and realize he’d better take extreme care in proceeding here, that his actions could either save or damn him. Initially thrown for a loop at the sight of the girl, Odysseus goes through a mental scramble to situate the reality of what he’s seeing in a more familiar light, finding his bearings, oddly enough, with the memory of a palm tree he’d once noticed “in Delos, beside Apollo’s altar.” It’s the recollection of that particular palm at that particular altar that cued him in to a potential confrontation with the divine, since Artemis was born in Delos. Odysseus’s initially narrow vision of a beautiful (though ordinary human) girl has “led to a more capacious regard for the world.” Whether or not we and/or Odysseus really are dealing with the incarnation of a goddess, that more capacious regard is what allows the hero to pull himself together and proceed with the necessary caution that might just (and does) save his life.³

What I want to take from this story is something more than recognizing that a thing you’d thought was ordinary (or worse) really isn’t—and more than believing only traditionally understood “aesthetic” things, such as poetry, art, views and form, can be beautiful. I want to think about the ways we relate to each other—including especially how well we live into what we call democratic life—might be beautiful and/or make space for beauty and all its decentering and lifesaving power, just as Odysseus’s being slapped with beauty caused him to treat the girl in front of him with more deference and care than would probably otherwise have been the case.⁴ I want to think about how the ways we are together do or do not welcome beauty’s ability to shock us into greater imagination and determination—and how if we don’t offer that welcome, what we might do in order to inaugurate that openness.

Without that sort of openness, we fall into thinking there’s no other way of doing things, sticking with the glumness and/or evil that are at least familiar. As Bifo Berardi said about Europe’s early twenty-first century financial crisis, the situation “seems to me much more of a crisis of social imagination than mere economics…. a crisis of imagination about the future,” where no one was apparently able to think or see beyond the bounds of accepted financial and political wisdom. The only way Berardi could imagine getting out of this impasse was through “the poetic revitalization of language”—making allowance for the destabilizing, surprising power of (linguistic) beauty into social and political life.⁵ Allowing into our language, as Scarry had it, beauty’s predilection for “fill[ing] the mind and break[ing] all frames.”⁶

That disruptive power decenters us, shakes us out of our certainties, shifts us out of some allegiances and into others, or pushes us to live into ones that haven’t been created yet. Hence the reason it should be a source of fear for entrenched norms (especially entrenched authoritarian regimes); that’s the sort of imagination and poetic revitalization Berardi calls for, and which does indeed seek to unseat the reign of the everyday, if not always but possibly those who want to maintain it as well.⁷ And hence the openness to its appearance and the assent to its call also being frightening, especially when moving into that call involves confronting systems or attitudes assumed to be immovable, especially when the fates of those who’ve tried to confront them in the past (whether simple ridicule, professional loss, banishment, or even death) have been anything but desirable. Standing for beauty, then, taking up its summons, might just make us targets of various sorts. In providing different meanings of the word “womanist,” Alice Walker describes one way that sort of governance takes place.

From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, “you acting womanish,” i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered “good” for one. Interested in grown up doings. Acting grown up. Being grown up. Interchangeable with another black folk expression: “You trying to be grown.” Responsible. In charge. Serious.⁸

The label, the warning, probably comes with a desire on the part of the person wielding it against the girl to protect her from the hard knowledge she’ll find and experience—while also reinforcing expectations about the ways women and girls shouldn’t be in the world: committed to her own authority, deeply desirous of and courageous in following the clues and facts wherever they lead—in charge of and responsible for herself and others, serious about her business and herself and taken seriously by those around her. The fact that all of these tendencies and characteristics were (and still so often are) so unacceptable in a girl points to what consciousness-raising groups in the late twentieth century and affinity groups in the present were and still are trying to point out and combat. And the fact that such communities still come in for such ridicule points to why beauty’s disruption continues to be so frightening, and so powerful and important: within the confines of a space designed to be safe, group members are allowed the openness and vulnerability required to help each other figure out what it is, what’s behind what we’re actually being told, and whom that wisdom serves. The questioning and the support that happen in the space set aside for it all to function allow, to alter Leonard Cohen’s phrasing, the presence of the cracks where the light gets in.⁹ The space itself, the way in which it’s been set aside, cultivated, and protected, makes way for the beauty of understanding, confidence, and conviction of one’s worth to break in and say not only yes—Look!—you are willful and in charge, and that’s a beautiful reality, and the recognition of that fact within this space is beautiful too. But that irruption also brings with it the mission to hold to those truths and take them back out into the world and pass their beauty on.

The problem is, we’re often not prepared to see beauty when it arrives, or to grasp what it has to show us. Much like any other form of learning or practice—memorizing vocabulary and grammar tables to gain fluency in a foreign language, or playing scale after scale to develop into a serious pianist—there’s work involved in building one’s ability to sense beauty’s presence and its summons. And Pagel notes that “The effort and energy it takes to put oneself in a place where beauty might happen can be taxing…. It’s a mysterious process of making an effort to make room for something like effortlessness.”¹⁰

And so we’re back again to the problems of cheapness and convenience and so-called efficiency, and all the laziness and indifference fostered by them, especially now that we have digital gadgets to do our thinking, even our taste-making, for us. We’re even back to “what’s the point of arts education in schools, or of college,” when you’re there to learn job skills, and not goof off under a tree with a book while we’re slaving away in blocky warehouses that are good enough for any honest American. We’re at the point of rushing kids through the patient years they should be taking time to figure out what’s important to them, how to approach the world, how to find meaning within it. And we can even look at pre-office park colleges and universities, with their beautiful campuses, yards, quads, and extracurricular traditions and opportunities meant to help a community get to (take the time to) know each other: even these stalwarts are trying to spit young adults out into the world as fast as possible, to get them out there in the same old system making money and propping up or building more cheap strip malls or office parks and wasting no time or unneeded thought in doing it.

There I go again, spiraling back into one of my usual rants about the state of education, maybe because even the shreds of good educational practice we’ve still got are now so viciously under attack. And they’re under attack by a regime that, if you look at it from one angle, is out to destroy what so many of us consider essential-because-beautiful: a healthy planet, a great diversity of minds and thoughts and cultures, the freedom to think and converse and gather. In pushing back against this monstrous autocracy, we somehow can’t lose sight of the beauty of what we’re trying to save, and even more, to imagine into something even better.

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