Can Beauty Make Us Good?

What is beauty? Is it really “in the eye of the beholder,” or is it an objective quality that exists in the world? Is it a mere decorative feature of life, or does it have something important to tell us? These are enduring human questions, but ones that the art world and the academic humanities—the natural custodians of beauty—gave up answering for a long time. In this episode, David Brooks talks to the Harvard professor Elaine Scarry, whose now-classic book On Beauty and Being Just brought the subject back to serious attention 25 years ago. David and Scarry discuss the ladder of loves, the universal appeal of symmetry, and why even prisoners at Guantánamo want to look at pretty pictures. - - - Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at ⁠TheAtlantic.com/Listener⁠. “The Permanent Questions” is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Speaker 01

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pescek and Anna Rattman, Executive Director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:45David Brooks?

  Today's episode is about beauty. The basic thesis of this show is that in our society, we have massive forces of dehumanization trying to shrink us and beleaguered forces of humanization. And nothing could be more humanizing than beauty. We're going to talk about how to cultivate a taste for beauty, how to create beauty, and we're going to entertain the question, does experiencing beauty make you a better person? My conversation partner today is Elaine Scary. Elaine Scary is a very eminent literature professor, humanist. She has a fancy title, a job here at Harvard University called the Walter Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, which is a fantastic professor title.

• 1:25David Brooks?

  Elaine wrote a very important book in 1999 called On Beauty and Being Just. It was an important moment because there was an assault on beauty and the very idea of beauty striking through the academy, through the art world. The idea is we shouldn't create beauty, we should shock people into improving society. We should create ugly things to shock them. And in 1999, Elaine rose up to defend beauty. And I would say 26 years later, she has carried the day. Beauty is back on the agenda in the academy, in the artistic world. Now, you may notice that we are not at our usual set at Yale University today. We are at Harvard University. And I just want to reassure you that our podcasts will not only be visiting colleges

• 2:09David Brooks?

  with gigantic endowments, we're going to be going to all sorts of places. I just happen to have a talk in Boston, so we thought we'd take advantage. I'm David Brooks and this is The Permanent Questions.

• 2:22David Brooks?

  Elaine Scary, welcome to The Permanent Questions. Today, we're going to talk about beauty, which you have, I don't know if you've single-handedly rescued it in the academy, but you've done your part. And I have to confess to you, I am an aesthetic Philistine. I recall when I wrote my first book, which was published in 2000, I wrote it in a dank, unfinished basement of my home with mildew and the smell of mildew everywhere. My desk was a plywood board and my chair was a folding chair and was just me and my little laptop. And I was oblivious. I didn't care. A lot of people were like, I'm not working here. But even I occasionally have these moments when you're just sort of undone by something tremendously beautiful. So I think the thing that strikes you about them is they lift you out of everyday reality for at least a brief time.

• 3:07David Brooks?

  And so you've done so much work on beauty, you must have had encounters of that sort with beauty.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  I have had many encounters. And I think that, I think that over time, the longer one lives, the more encounters one has, not just because they can keep accumulating and adding up, but because one learns to see or one becomes aware of just the astonishing plenitude that's all around one. And for me, a kind of interesting analogy is what happens with color vision. John Dewey says that if you give small children the chance to learn color, it usually takes, I think he says several years of working with color to be able to reliably identify

• 3:54Speaker 03

  color, whereas now researchers say that as adults, the average number of colors we can all see is 26,000. And if you count gray tones, it's closer to a million. And so I, I kind of think that something like that happens with beauty, that you may not be aware of it as a child, or it may be happening to you, but you don't have words for it. My partner and I often read books aloud. And at one time, he was reading Tale of Genji for about 20 minutes each morning. And when he would begin to read, Lady Marisaki's writing immediately lights up your mind,

• 4:39Speaker 03

  that I would begin to have pools of color that weren't even directly prompted by what was said on the page. She's writing about the court in Japan, but at the same time, Genji is always discovering beauty anywhere, in the outskirts and among poor people and so forth. So that kind of experience with, with reading is, is one that I'm sure we both had.

• 5:07David Brooks?

  You know, when you mentioned that the ability to perceive more colors, there's a neuroscientist at Northeastern named Lisa Feldman Barrett, who has a concept of emotional granularity. And she says, some people can only experience very crude emotional categories. They know what's an upstate or a downstate, but some people have the ability to distinguish between adjacent emotions like stress, anxiety, frustration, I guess, fear, whatever. They can make these fine gradations and emotional granularity helps you read your own body and maybe color granularity helps you see the world. I'm going to quote you back to yourself. Beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness to its most acute level.

• 5:51David Brooks?

  Through its beauty, the world continually reconnects us to rigorous standard of perceptual care.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:56David Brooks?

  And I like that phrase perceptual care, that perception isn't just a passive process of opening your eyes and things come in. It's, there's something you can do to make yourself more perceptive toward beauty or receptive, maybe is the better word.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  When you suddenly come face to face with something beautiful, or it suddenly enters your world, you may have been thinking that you were being fully awake and perceptive and listening and hearing and so forth, but it just, one of the effects of beautiful things is to just really raise the level of perceptual acuity. And it then sort of sets a new standard or a new bar with the observer so that you realize that you should be giving that kind of attention to other things in the world that don't necessarily come to you with such glory, but that nonetheless deserve your attention.

• 6:49David Brooks?

  It's almost like an energy is being produced. I took my favorite drive in America two summers ago, down from Missoula, Montana, down the Salmon River to Salmon, Idaho. And it is astounding beautiful. And when I got out of the car, we were, my wife and I were at some crappy hotel or something. And I'm buzzing with energy. Like if you see bluebirds in love, they're like bouncing all around each other. And I look back almost with embarrassment at how excited I was to just have had this astonishing drive where you're going through this valley, curve, curve, and every curve brings apart a new scene. And it's, you're just energized, like almost like puppy love or something, I don't know.

• 7:28Speaker 03

  There's a wonderful poem by Seamus Heaney, I think it's called Postscript, where he describes driving with his wife Mari along, I think it's the west coast of Ireland and the beauty of the, the wind and the water. And he says, no use in stopping the car. I find that same kind of event happens even when you're moving through the world. And Seamus Heaney's poem ends by saying, it blows the heart open, you know? And I think that's very good description.

• 8:00David Brooks?

  It's a weird concept, and we're going to talk about this later, but it bleeds into everything. Like people perceive beauty in a million different forms. And we all call it one thing.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 8:10David Brooks?

  We have a mutual friend, Brandon Varianathan, who's a sociologist at Catholic University. And he did this big study of beauty, talking to scientists. Are you motivated by beauty? And some of them describe beauty in conventional terms, but some of them described it beauty just as understanding, like it had not, nothing to look at or feel. They're motivated by a beauty to understand. And they use that aesthetic language to describe just understanding an engineering problem or a math problem.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I've talked to scientists here and they do have different accounts. My friend Barry Mazer, who's a mathematician, says that every, every solved theory is beautiful. And it's not that it has to be beautiful, it just happens to be the case that it is beautiful. And somebody else in the physics department who works in electromagnetic subjects says that he counsels his students, just because you've got a pretty theory, don't think it's true. Whereas somebody I once spoke with at Yale, who was in chemistry, told me that he thinks

• 9:22Speaker 03

  that if, if a hypothesis that someone has is, is pretty or beautiful, that it increases the chances that it's true. So this- Really a wide range from the one person who thinks that, yeah, I see that it's in every case beautiful, but there's no reason why that should be to somebody who actually thinks it predicts.

• 9:44David Brooks?

  And do you, do you think when we talk about a beautiful landscape, a beautiful face, a beautiful equation, are we talking about the same thing? What is the core concept here?

• 9:53Speaker 03

  I think, I think we're definitely talking about the same thing, even though there's tremendous variation and even variation in, and certainly in the things that most strike people as beautiful. But one thing that they all share and that is foregrounded in the math example is the idea of symmetry or proportion. And it's, it's just so deeply there. I think a text that I love that really makes that clear is St. Augustine's De Musica, where he's talking about equality as a feature of God and talks about the fact that you can see it in human faces. You can see it in dance steps. You can hear it in music.

• 10:37Speaker 03

  He even gives examples like a cake or feeling the softness of another person's body, that what you're feeling is equality, which isn't normally how we would think of smooth skin, but he says that's, that's a quality that you're experiencing. And it's, it's, it's startling. I mean, he's not, he's not making a plea for democracy, but he is talking about proportion. He even says, by the way, that color, like the color of your jacket, the fact that it's a uniform blue or the sky is, it's at least in patches, a uniform

• 11:16Speaker 03

  blue is an example of, of equality and, and the tremendous pleasure that that brings. When you hear scientists, like one scientist who's written a book about beauty in, in science is named Mario Livio, and every example he gives is got, you know, startling symmetry in it. But there are other features as well. For, for example, just the intensity and the vibrancy. And I think that that quality of aliveness is absolutely key and, and key in, in all the examples.

• 11:55David Brooks?

  Yeah. So do you think that our sense of beauty is somewhat evolutionarily baked in? Like symmetry probably has some survival advantages. You want people to have symmetrical faces and people look at body shapes for fertility signs. And that suggests there's some universal sense of what beauty is, that all humans would see a face or something and think, oh, that's beautiful.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  I sometimes have people say to me, well, you know, there are famous faces, famous models who have a kind of asymmetry in their face.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  But the fact of the matter is that that's true, but it's, it's point oh, oh, oh, oh, one asymmetry.

• 12:35David Brooks?

  Exactly.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  And the important thing to realize, as, as you said in, in your description, is that if a face is really non-symmetrical, there's no way that it can be in the neighborhood of beauty. And by the way, I think that that's, that, that is a partial answer to your question about evolution. Yes, it may be that we like butterflies and birds. You know, it's been said of butterflies and birds that they keep getting more and more extravagant because the, the females choose the males on the basis of their beauty and so forth. So I think there is a, probably some kind of reproductive bias, which might also be true of human beings.

• 13:16Speaker 03

  But I think that part of the reason that beauty is so important to us is because it is opposed to injury. It's, it always, it makes us deeply averse to injury. It acts on us so that when we see someone who's injured, we know the first thing you have to do is try to repair it. And it also makes us, or should make us hesitant about inflicting injuries on others. And how could you survive as a species if you didn't overall have a, a kind of aversion to acts of inflicting injury?

• 13:52David Brooks?

  I want to get to the relationship between beauty and morality in a minute because I think that's a central subject here. But I want to stay on the experience of beauty just a little longer because you use a word that I'd like to hear you expand upon. You say beauty is life-saving.

• 14:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:08David Brooks?

  What do you mean by that?

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Well, you know, here's, here's an amazing fact. I mean, first of all, there are lots of poetic statements about that. But something that I relatively recently learned was that in the early eighties, a researcher in Sweden looked at the people in hospitals who were recovering from surgery. And half of them had a window that looked out onto a green grove and the other half had a window that looked out onto a brick wall. And those in the room with the green window got better much more quickly. It makes you realize that we might not have it right about what beauty is, but we better

• 14:54Speaker 03

  try and get it right if it actually leads to people being able to more quickly recover. And, you know, I just think of the fact that every couple of years, the American Society of Civil Engineers gives a report card to our bridges, our highways and our levees, and among other things, our public schools. And I just looked at the one for 2025 because I knew I was going to be speaking with you. And though the general drift of the whole overall report card is to go up, I think the overall grade in 2025 went up from a C minus to a C. The public school, and they're talking not about teachers, but about the physical environment, they give the grade of D plus.

• 15:39David Brooks?

  When I read that life-saving line, I thought of someone I admire a great deal, which is Tina Turner, the singer. And her story is really, her life is really built around beauty. She, she really had this sense. But she grew up in Nutbush, Tennessee to a dad who left her and a mom who was somewhat narcissistic and also left her. And she could sing. And so this guy like Turner finds her and realizes that's my million dollars and basically enslaves her. And he doesn't pay her. He beats her savagely. He commits adultery on a mass scale, has mistresses living in their house with them. It's a brutal life. The wedding that he proposed to go down to Tijuana, no dress, no kiss, just a civil ceremony.

• 16:22David Brooks?

  And then he took her to a poorhouse, basically, and made her watch a sex show. And her life was just brutal under him. And at one point she attempts suicide. She's ready to go. And she wakes up, she's sad in the hospital and she wakes up and he's, Ike is furious at her for upsetting his budgetary plans. But then she decides, what did I want when I was a girl? And she always loved beauty. And so she did, started doing these Buddhist practices and doing floral decorations and keeping a journal. And she built herself up to be the kind of person who could stand up to Ike Turner. And it took her 14 years.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:01David Brooks?

  But she eventually fought back and eventually ran away, eventually had her own career and became a superstar, aged 60, 60, rock star lady.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:11David Brooks?

  And then she got remarried and at her wedding, she insisted there'd be 100,000 roses. And when I read 100,000, I was, that's a lot of roses. Like that must've cost a fortune. But in her case, she had rebuilt her life on the basis of, I'm going to create beauty.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 17:28David Brooks?

  And as a rebuttal to her first Tijuana wedding, she was going to have 100,000 roses.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  You can destroy all fairness. It sounds like her husband had managed to completely eliminate any sense of fairness in their household. It's hard to completely eliminate beauty. There's often something flying by the window. Once when I was in Geneva and talking with International Red Cross, one of the Red Cross workers said that she had asked a prisoner at Guantanamo if there was anything she could bring him, because that's often something the Red Cross offers. And, you know, this one prisoner said that he would like a photograph of a flower.

• 18:13David Brooks?

  Oh, hell.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  And another example of that, Tina Turner's solution to the problem she was in, where, where you're really trying to make yourself believe that there still is symmetry and vivacity in the world. I was once at a conference in England and there was a, a young woman who had studied Romanian prisons. It was a woman's prison that she was, she was studying. And the women would take tiny little threads from their undergarments and weave little tapestries, one inch by one inch, and give them to each other. And, you know, how much they treasured that and survived by means of it.

• 18:53David Brooks?

  One of the things about it, maybe this is wrong, but it seems to me it's, it's not quite controllable, that you can put yourself in the way of beauty.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:01David Brooks?

  But you can't say, I am about to be overwhelmed by beauty the next time I walk down the street.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  Right. I think there are reliably beautiful sources that one can go to. And, you know, like returning to Tolstoy's War and Peace or going to a particular street that you loved in your childhood. But often the beauty does also suddenly vanish. I usually teach a graduate course on beauty, but occasionally I've taught a freshman seminar on beauty. And at one point, one of the freshmen who was very interested in the beauty of design and say, an iPhone or something, surmised that, that the fact that beauty often doesn't

• 19:48Speaker 03

  last forever, it might last three seconds, it might last three years, but it often goes away, that then leads us, as I wrote in, in the book on beauty and being just, leads you to the act of creation, that it's, it's a kind of instigation of creation and a kind of passing on of beauty. So you could say we compensate for the brevity of beautiful things or the short life of, of flowers. Or you could say it's actually an okay thing that it's so short because then that, you know, instigates our own acts of creation.

• 20:25David Brooks?

  Yeah. One more piece of the perception of beauty, and that strikes me as incredibly important these days, is

• 20:33David Brooks?

  Amor Monday, love the world. Imagine if we were surrounded by nature that was hideously ugly. We would feel alienated from the world, like we would feel this is not a home.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 20:43David Brooks?

  But the fact that it is a beautiful place makes us feel at home and love the world. You quoted Augustine, I love Augustine, so I'm going to quote him. "I asked the earth, I asked the sea and the deeps, among the living animals and the things that creep, I asked the winds that blow, I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and to all things that stand at the door of my flesh. My question was the gaze I turned to them, their answer was their beauty." And Augustine is such a poet.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  He is.

• 21:11David Brooks?

  But one of the things that strikes me is important. A lot of young people, I've been at three different colleges in the past week, and at each college, the students in front of me, not with my participation, got in an argument about how rotten the world is. And a lot of them think it's completely rotten, whether climate change, AI, or everything, just the whole world's been ruined for them, something only marginally rotten. But it strikes me, that rotten world syndrome, not loving the world. They may be right, they may be wrong, but it's not a positive way to go through life. If you want to change the world, it seems to me you want to love the world.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:46David Brooks?

  And I think the beauty of the world makes us feel at home. There is a sort of homecoming feeling about beauty, that yeah, this is my home, this is the beautiful place that I've got to spend my life. And I think without that, it's almost hard to have hope.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  One of my students, long ago, back in the 1990s, said, "Beauty restores your trust in the world." So you can be attending to very harsh things, and suddenly you see something, and it restores your belief in the world. Now, I do think students, I mean, they are really facing a triple-decker of problems. And yet, you know, I, like you, think, how can we even have a planet this beautiful? I mean, is it just that we're designed to appreciate it? And those other planets, by the way, has anyone actually noticed what they look like in so many different terrains?

• 22:44Speaker 03

  The earth is almost incomprehensible in how beautiful it is. But I think that gradually, students will be sensitive to that, and will feel some, you know, kind of resilience about what's happening.

• 23:01David Brooks?

  Yeah, when I talk about the students, they're always the hero in my story. Today's students have been put in very challenging circumstances, and they're fighting back the best they can.

• 23:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:10David Brooks?

  But I sometimes think they are too pessimistic about the world. And I say, "Read history." Like, what decade would you go back to? Like, things were always been pretty rotten. But before we leave this, I just wanted to ask you about one concept that I know very little about, but I had a friend who was an opera singer, who was a fan of duende, a kind of beauty that's intermingled with sadness. And we can all think of songs and poems that embody this. So what strikes me about this whole conversation with kind of the perception of beauty? You can go through life with a very utilitarian frame of mind, it's all material. And what beauty does is it reminds you the world is not strictly a utilitarian, material place.

• 23:53David Brooks?

  There's an enchantment, at least in our perception of it.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  Many poems, for example, like the music you're describing, might be about subjects that are sad, like the passing of the year in Keats' Ode to Autumn, it's also so unbelievably gorgeous. Or many elegies that are obviously full of sadness and yet are very beautiful. I think it's Aquinas who says that even something ugly, if rendered in a beautiful artwork, can be beautiful.

• 24:23David Brooks?

  I was at my folks' home, and they had some guests coming over from France. And there was a woman from Paris, and this was her first trip to New York. And they said, "How'd you find it?" And I love New York, I'm a New Yorker, I love New York. She said, "Oh, I didn't realize it'd be so ugly."

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Oof.

• 24:41David Brooks?

  And I was like, "Oh yeah, it is kind of ugly, but the ugly parts are the parts I like." And if you love the ugly parts of your place, you love the place.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  I guess you have to find a good path in, because usually when I'm coming in, you know, get out at LaGuardia, and then it just seems like I'm always coming down a very tree-lined street with, you know, brownstones or something. And I think, gee, this is a very beautiful city. But your story puts me in mind of a friend who always loved New York, who went to Rome and suddenly would have nothing more to say good about New York.

• 25:20David Brooks?

  Washington, D.C., where I live, is so street Paris. And when you go to Paris, I think, oh, we got a long way to go. I'm not endorsing Donald Trump's arch, by the way.

• 25:35Speaker 00

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• 27:03David Brooks?

  I ran across the work of an anthropologist named Ellen Decineyaki, I guess she would pronounce it. And she wrote a book called Homo Aestheticus. And she makes the claim that human beings have a natural desire to make special. And she means to make special sacred occasions, to, you know, when you go to a fancy party, you dress up, you want to make it special. When my wife gets home, the first thing she does is get out her Trader Joe's flowers, which she has just bought. She lights eight million candles, she sets the table, even though she hasn't cooked the meal yet, she wants to make the occasion special.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:40David Brooks?

  This is something in us. We want to have special occasions, rituals, and we use beauty to create them. It seems to me like that's what a wedding is all about, or anything else. I don't know what you make of this impulse towards specialness.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Well, it sounds immediately convincing. One recognizes it in practice, and also, I think I understand how it works. I mean, given the tremendous pleasure that beauty brings, you just want people to have that pleasure when they can. There's a statement by Kant who says that there are a lot of different things that give pleasure, but they have an endpoint, like you're hungry, you have a good meal, and so forth. But he says, "The pleasure of beauty is inexhaustible. You never get tired of it, you never have enough."

• 28:29David Brooks?

  Yeah. This reminds me, I think you've also done some work in your career on Boethius?

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 28:34David Brooks?

  I was reading his book, The Constellation of Philosophy, and he's got a passage on what you should orient your life toward. And it's like, if you want money, you'll always feel poor. And if you want power, you'll always feel weak. If you want status, you will always be the victim of other people's opinions. And so he's really saying, don't want these finite goods, want infinite goods. And then there's a famous commencement address by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College. And he says, "Everybody worships. But if you worship money and power and status, you'll always feel inadequate. If you worship looks, you'll die a thousand deaths before they bury you." And when I read that, David Foster Wallace, which I've read many times, I've had the thought, you must have read Boethius.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  He probably did.

• 29:20David Brooks?

  But it is a good way to orient our lives. If you orient toward finite things, you will run out. But beauty, belonging, competence, respect, significance, meaning, these things are infinite goods.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:34David Brooks?

  And it's probably a good idea to orient your life toward the infinite ones, because you'll never run to the end of them.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  I was just having a conversation with my brother Joe and his partner Rachel, who's a pastor, and saying something kindred to what you were saying. And she quoted this passage that I didn't know from Philippians, Chapter 4. Paul says, "Finally, brothers and sisters, when you come upon something excellent, or something kind, or something lovely, or something true, think on it, and the peace of God will be with you."

• 30:12David Brooks?

  Now, I want to get to one, I think, your more most daring claim, maybe, or one of them, which is that beauty contributes to virtue and to better behavior. Now, I desperately want to believe this, but when I think, like, some of my favorite periods of art are Italian Renaissance art, and there's a lot of beauty being produced. But I wouldn't say, when I go back to the city-states, the history of it, that the people were necessarily living in a more just and fair and kind way. And Picasso produced a lot of beauty, but what I know of his life, he was a bit narcissistic. But a lot of people who organized their lives around beauty don't seem so great to me.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, the same problem can be seen in in literature sometimes. I mean, there are cases where people are known to have been just good, kind people, like John Keats, but then there are other examples where they're known to be closer to Picasso. But I think that the way that beauty brings about morality is not necessarily so one-to-one, you know, this person at this moment sees something or creates something beautiful, therefore, they're good. However, there certainly are cases like that all the time. And, you know, one thing, when I read that study that showed the way that your physical health is improved if they're in the presence of beauty, you know, I began to wonder, is

• 31:33Speaker 03

  that also true for moral health? Because certain places, like in Denmark, they actually put prisoners in lovely spaces, very antithetical to the kinds of prisons that we often have in the United States. And the assumption is that if you want people to be able to grow or to change, they have to be in a lovely space, which I think goes along with one of your favorite writers, Simone Weil, who says that, you know, you are decentered by beauty. And that that is a profound effect, that you actually undergo this launch from what

• 32:14Speaker 03

  you thought was the center of the world, off to the periphery, and you're really happy about it. That's the amazing thing. Because there are lots of things that make us feel ecstatic, and there are lots of things that make us feel subordinate. But usually, at the moment you're being made to feel subordinate, you don't feel ecstatic. And so, you know, but but back to the kind of example you give, you know, I just think that it's it's a more drifting process, that having beautiful things in the world has an overall effect of, for example, diminishing the urge to injure. I'd have to really look at those specific periods to see if I agreed that they were

• 32:58Speaker 03

  ruthless, because sometimes people make that argument about historical periods where I just think it's completely false. For example, people will often say Hitler loved beauty. And, you know, one of two things is true. My own view is, it's a scandal that this many years from World War II, any of us is saying Hitler liked beauty. I mean, that is not somebody who liked beauty. People seem to have accepted his self-definition, which to me, I use the metaphor of saying, if you had somebody who actually broke the legs of a hundred ballerinas and then held

• 33:40Speaker 03

  up a postcard of Degas and said, "I really love ballet," you wouldn't for a moment say, "Oh, person loved ballet." You'd say, "I think the person didn't love ballet."

• 33:49David Brooks?

  Yeah, I would say, from what I know, is aesthetic sense, or Robert Schvier, the architect, it's, it was, it was pretty representative of his, his belief system. The urge to dominate is in the architecture. It's meant to be overpowering and not exactly subtle. You know, you mentioned Simone Weil, and we've taped, I don't know how many, episodes so far, and she, her name has come up more than anybody else's. And it's not only because I'm projecting out unconscious Simone Weil vibes, that I want people to talk about her, but something about her attention to attention as the ultimate form of generosity, and then the way she inspired Iris Murdoch to see the act of attention as the primacy of morality.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:33David Brooks?

  And she writes, "You can grow by looking."

• 34:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:36David Brooks?

  "The seeing is a moral act, even though it's on, you're not even touching anybody."

• 34:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that is a wonderful passage. There's another moment where she talks about feeling self-absorbed, feeling that she's not being treated well enough by her colleagues, and then seeing a bird, like the bird that came into the presence of your friend, and suddenly just undergoing this unselfing. I think people don't realize, when they, when they don't see generously, that they're also doing themselves harm, you know, that they're, they're really hurting their own soul.

• 35:13David Brooks?

  I've always been struck by the fact that the philosophers and writers who emphasize attention most, that was Weil and Murdoch, but I would also throw in Edith Stein as an example, and I would also throw in Marilynne Robinson as an example, whose book, Gilead, the novel, is really a description of somebody looking. And for those who haven't read it, and I highly recommend you read it, it's about a guy named John Ames who's old and dying, and he's married a much younger woman, and they have a little boy, a nine-year-old boy. And he, he wants to leave a letter to the boy so he knows his dad, because John Ames knows he's got weeks or months to go. But all he does is look at him. The novel is really just John Ames looking at this wonderful creature, an ordinary nine-year-old boy.

• 35:58David Brooks?

  And there are two passages, quick passages, from John Ames writing this letter to his son that he'll get after he's dead. "I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder if you, what you've done with your life, and everyone does one or sooner or later, you've been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. I can tell you this, that if I married some rosy dame, I'd have trouble getting through this, and she had given me ten children, and they had each given me ten grandchildren, I'd leave them all on Christmas Eve, on the coldest side of the world, and walk a thousand miles just for the sight of your face and your mother's face." It's just, it's a, it's just a description of, "I'm looking at you, and I'm overwhelmed."

• 36:43David Brooks?

  And the, it's a beautiful book because of this guy's capacity to look.

• 36:47Speaker 03

  That's an extraordinary passage.

• 36:50David Brooks?

  It really is. But the, the question I have is, I've thrown out four names, Murdoch, Weil, Edith Stein, and Marilynne Robinson. And is it a coincidence that all women? These bachelor male philosophers like Kant, they thought morality was action, and the women had a quieter, "Oh, no, it's perception."

• 37:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, the labor of perception.

• 37:13David Brooks?

  It doesn't strike me as obvious that it's a mere coincidence that.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  No.

• 37:18David Brooks?

  And there were other, among Iris Murdoch's philosophy circle out there in England in that World War II era, the famous group of women philosophers.

• 37:25Speaker 03

  It doesn't seem an accident that they're women. Now, you know, there are men who, I think, see in the same way. I, you know, I've mentioned Seamus Heaney, and Thomas Hardy, I think, is another person whose perceptual acuity and recognition that perception is, is everything. You know, I, I do have to report that some of the most ethical people I know in my life have been men. So I, I always have to stop short of.

• 37:59David Brooks?

  Blanket condemnation of my male self-loathing. Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that, but I think all generalizations go away. So the first argument, that it could make you a better person, is the fact of decentering.

• 38:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:13David Brooks?

  That you're looking outward, and as you said, feeling marginal and wonderful at the same time.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:19David Brooks?

  But the second argument would be, and you've made this argument, that there's something about the shape of beauty, that the symmetry, I think Aristotle has some concept of justice as a cube or something like that.

• 38:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:31David Brooks?

  And so there's something almost about the shape of it that gives form to goodness.

• 38:35Speaker 03

  And I think it is the symmetry issue. And, you know, because every concept we have of justice, that is, every theory I can think of that's about justice, stresses that idea of symmetry. The best-known theory today is John Rawls' theory of justice, and he says that fairness requires a symmetry in all our relations with other people. Plato talks about how you have to have punishment that is symmetrical to the crime. And here we are, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years later, and we haven't figured out yet what is, what is the right, the right kind of punishment for a crime?

• 39:14Speaker 03

  Or people talk about how you have to have a kind of equal pay for equal work. And it always involves that idea of symmetry. And with, with beautiful things, it's effortlessly there in, in many, many manifestations. And by the way, many people say to me, "Well, there are wonderful paintings that are asymmetrical and so forth," and that's certainly true. But there are two things about that. First, the fact that we can feel so secure that we can go on to discover beauty in something like an asymmetrical abstraction, that is a kind of celebration of how sturdy the foundation already is.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  And then, the second thing is that, and here you may not agree with me, that.

• 40:05Speaker 03

  We've so lost the ability to think symmetrically in the United States. I mean, the idea that we went after Iran for having, for thinking about making a nuclear weapon when we have thousands of these. We have between 800 and 900 military bases in the world. And we, we report in our newspapers, oh, China's getting another military base. And of course, wealth, you know. I think that if we ever had to start stressing symmetry, and I believe we should start stressing symmetry, we would have to change a lot about, about what we do. The distance between the richest and the most poor people.

• 40:46David Brooks?

  So you're saying the, just the asymmetrical nature of American power or of concentrated wealth, or I could say even of status in this country, you're asking for trouble.

• 40:55Speaker 03

  You're asking for trouble. You're making it harder and harder for people to act, act well. I mean, Aristotle says, a just society is a society that makes its population care to be just. And, you know, we can argue about whether the government in this country is just or not, probably we wouldn't have a big argument. But the, a real question is, do we as a population care to be just? You know, have, do we really worry about the asymmetries?

• 41:23David Brooks?

  Yeah. What about the argument that, say, I'm Sergey Brin or Larry Page, these Google guys, I created a search engine that produced such an enormous amount of good for the world that the money I earn is symmetrical to the amount of good in the world that I've produced?

• 41:47Speaker 03

  I mean, certainly you hear many variations of that. That one, you know, if somebody has made a great invention, then it's, it's at least a momentarily plausible argument. But I guess you'd have to begin by saying, there are many versions of that that just say, you know, I'm the one who, as the executive in this company, is putting in all the value. I mean, this was Marx's argument, that of course, the surplus value came from all the workers and yet was appropriated by the owner.

• 42:19David Brooks?

  And then I'd say, when we talk about beauty, we're not only talking about symmetry. We're talking at some sense about reciprocity, proportion, beauty's, like proportion is super important.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:30David Brooks?

  And then the one other thing I'd mention that, I'm going to stretch a metaphor really far, which is, we love movement without change. And so I have a place on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, and I love to watch the water. And it moves, it ripples, but it doesn't really change. And there's something I find tremendously attractive about watching the ripples of the water stay the same. And it's the same when you look into a fire. The flames of the fire flickering, but they're the same.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  I remember a passage in Rachel Carson where she's in the sea around us. She, of course, talks about great movements of water in these big circulating tides, but also talks about whether, in these wavelets, whether the water is actually moving or whether it's passing something on. And I have kind of the equivalent for that. I don't think I have the steady access to bodies of water, although I should. I live about a block from the Charles River, so I'll have to rethink my daily habits. But I have something of the same with wind. Just being amazed by the fact that in one willow tree, one rope of branches is doing

• 43:41Speaker 03

  a kind of motion like this, and another is doing a very different kind of thing like this. And there, there are about 15, even within the small micro world of individual pockets of branches, and it is extraordinary. And I guess it would fit your model, since the willow tree itself doesn't move up the block.

• 44:00David Brooks?

  Right. That would be scary.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:03David Brooks?

  Yeah, maybe we should hire artists to look at society and do a, an analysis of where the symmetries and reciprocities and proportions are. So that leads me, you had said something a few minutes ago, which I find to be the most persuasive argument of how an aesthetic sense can lead to better behavior. What you said, which strikes me as very accurate, is it's, it's not like you look at a Vermeer painting and then you go out and save, save a kid who's drowning or whatever. But it has a gradual effect over years of, you know, you throw yourself in the way of beauty, you see a beautiful mountain, a sunset, you go to an art museum. I think it has a gradual ennobling effect. It would certainly seem obvious to me if you put crappy art in front of somebody for their whole life.

• 44:47David Brooks?

  It would have some degrading effect on their inner nature. And that some beautiful effect would have it more illuminating. And you're, you're looking upward, you're, you're yearning for something that's beautiful. And we use the phrase moral beauty just as much as we use the phrase physical beauty. And so it has a slowly ennobling effect, I would think.

• 45:05Speaker 03

  I think that's absolutely right. Yeah.

• 45:08David Brooks?

  You know, we, we say somebody has a beautiful soul.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:12David Brooks?

  And I think what we need by that is somebody is kind and forgiving and warm. And so it's funny how we use this word across so many contexts.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  There's a book by the historian Lynn Hunt that talks about the effect that novels had in the 18th century, when suddenly people would read a novel and realize that the maid servant had this whole inner life that had just never occurred to them before. A kind of real perceptual revolution came about by, you know, the, the widespread reading of novels.

• 45:47David Brooks?

  Yeah. You know, Harriet Beecher's show gets a lot of criticism these days for Uncle Tom's Cabin, but it did have a pretty amazing effect.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  Well, it doesn't get better than that in terms of trying to repair a massive asymmetry and a massive ongoing injury.

• 46:11Speaker 05

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• 46:58David Brooks?

  I think also, beauty can arouse a desire to lead a more beautiful life. That if you surround yourself with beautiful things, you may not automatically become a deeper person.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 47:10David Brooks?

  But it, beauty arouses, you keep using the word vitality, I want to come back to that word. Beauty and desire go together. And almost by definition, beauty is a thing we desire and take innate pleasure in. And so to me, it would have a, a form of lifting your life up, just because you, you're used to looking upwards, basically, at things you admire. You mentioned how older people have maybe a more refined sense of sight sometimes.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  I don't know if it's more refined, but I think that they're struck by beauty more often. When you're my age, it's hard to get from A to B without thinking, oh, my gosh, you know, you suddenly see something you hadn't seen before. For example, it's only in the last couple of years that I've noticed that when leaves start turning, there are certain leaves that sort of recreate the shape of their own self in a little portrait of a different color on the leaf.

• 48:05David Brooks?

  Oh, really?

• 48:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's not every tree, it's only certain species, but it's, it's heart-stopping when you, when you come upon it.

• 48:14David Brooks?

  Yeah. Did, do you think earlier in your life, you were just in too much of a rush, or?

• 48:18Speaker 03

  Not a rush, no. I don't, I don't know what it is. I think I liked beauty and sought beauty, and that's what brought me to the humanities, no doubt. It's what makes me love glass, beautiful colored glass, whether it's in a cathedral window or in my own window in a little vase. You know, as a gardener, I'm, I'm willing to be the servant, happy to be the servant of the flowers. But I'm just saying, there are many more objects, many more people. I mean, sometimes I look at, you know, a room full of people or a class of people, you just think, how can every face be this beautiful?

• 49:01David Brooks?

  Yeah. There is research on where they have younger adults and older adults look at crowds, and they follow their isocades to see where they're going. And the younger adults are looking at the threatening faces, and the older adults are looking at the happy faces. It sort of makes evolutionary sense. The younger adults are out there to protect the community, and the older adults have passed that responsibility on.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:24David Brooks?

  And so, but it's one of the reasons that emotional health improves with age. You're much more open to positive emotions.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:32David Brooks?

  Now, we've talked about the aspect of having taste. And we've talked a little about how it's formed, probably influenced anyway by, by evolution, that we like symmetry, we like these things. But it can't only be that. There must be a way to educate your taste. Do you agree with that? Do you think there are ways to improve the way you see a piece of art or anything, or even taste a glass of wine, like? Sommeliers talk about wine, I'm like, I don't, I don't know. I don't have that, the concepts that they have to describe what a nutty glass of wine is.

• 50:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:04David Brooks?

  So there must be a way to educate it.

• 50:06Speaker 03

  So many instances of beauty come, just as you described earlier, in a way that surprises you, come out of nowhere. But then there are things that are difficult. One of Plato's dialogues called Greater Hippieus, or we think it's by Plato, ends by saying, "Beauty is difficult." And there are a lot of forms of beauty, or instances of beauty, that are difficult. Not everyone can, can pick up Marilyn Robinson and immediately see the power of it. And many, many books, many, many classrooms are dedicated to that process of trying to discover the beauty of the thing.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  By the way, I, I agree too, that somebody can teach me to actually taste what's in the wine in a way that I can't unless they begin to describe it to me. But I think that one reason why I, I am a little uncomfortable with the word taste is just because it implies that there is a right way to respond. And I think that the beautiful things in the world fall into two categories, which sounds like a ridiculous statement, but for the moment, you have to allow it. There are some things that are universally beautiful. Like, there's no one on earth who has not noticed a sunrise or a sunset. Same with the moon.

• 51:27Speaker 03

  And they therefore give us the idea that beautiful things are going to be universally adored. Whereas that simply isn't the case. We each choose a different partner, and therefore we've each come to see the beauty of that person's face that other people won't agree with. It wouldn't be good if we all chose the same person. I call all the plural objects the myriad variables and ones that are, are universally shared, the constants. I think that, that by educating one another's taste, in addition to the sheer pleasure and, and whatever growth or care comes from that act,

• 52:07Speaker 03

  that it also is making us take one tiny step closer to believing that we could on earth settle our, some of our differences that are causing so much strife. To find an object that I at first didn't see and that you showed me, or vice versa, means that you're, again, restoring faith in, in that capacity for shared consent.

• 52:33David Brooks?

  It strikes me, there's two ways that might work, one of which I would approve of and one of which I'd be skeptical of. The one I'd be skeptical of is just the statement, "Well, different strokes for different folks." That beauty is in the eye of the holder. It's all subjectivity all the way down. And, and then, and therefore we should be tolerant. I think that's sort of an unrealistic way to think you're going to have a harmonious society. If somebody came up to me and said, "You know, my garden gnome is a more beautiful work of art than your Vermeer." I would have a negative view of them.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 53:05David Brooks?

  And so, and I think I've been trained by my culture to have a certain aesthetic standards that some things genuinely are more beautiful. That the, the beauty of a Vermeer painting is not in my eyes, it's in the painting.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 53:19David Brooks?

  And that therefore, a community that has a shared aesthetic order is healthy in the way a community with, has a shared moral order. We agree, we sort of agree, you know, we're all different, but we agree on what's right and what's wrong.

• 53:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:32David Brooks?

  And it seems to me that's a better way to regard aesthetics as something which does have a hierarchy.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  But here's the thing. Each, each little object along the way is just leading to a larger vision. I'm also opposed to garden gnomes, but, you know, if, if somebody gets the next step by doing that, I mean, that's, that's Plato's ladder, that eventually you go on to being able to see and to create laws and literature and all kinds of, of marvelous things.

• 54:04David Brooks?

  Now, you mentioned something that's one of my favorite concepts in philosophy, so I just want you to describe what it is. You mentioned Plato's ladder of loves. So if you could just describe what, what Plato was saying there.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  Okay, this occurs at the end of Plato's Symposium, where everybody who's there has just given their account and kind of written a praise poem to love. And then towards the end, Socrates gives his account and shows that actually love often entails lack. And he then tells that his own teacher is a woman named Diotima, who explained to him that you begin by, through the beauty of your beloved, falling in love with one person, but that eventually you learn to see the beauty of all men and women. And so we pass from Eros to Caritas.

• 54:53Speaker 03

  And then you also love a lot of things like education and legal treatises and many other beautiful things.

• 55:03David Brooks?

  I'm a big Augustineian, and his whole moral system is built around that there's an order of loves. And if, if you, if you tell me a story in private and I blab at a dinner party, I'm putting my love of popularity above my love of friendship, and that's disordered love. If you lie to make money, you're putting your love of money above your love of honesty, that's disordered love. So it's a useful way to think about what wrong behavior actually is. I'd like to talk to you a little about desire and beauty. Because there's a couple, the Arons, they study relationships. And one of their theories is the thing that gives us greatest pleasure is self-transcendence. The idea that we incorporate otherness into ourselves and we grow.

• 55:46David Brooks?

  And that we have this fervent desire to keep growing. And their theory is that the, the rush of excitement you get when you fall in love is you're incorporating another person into your psyche. And that process is intrinsically interesting and intrinsically exciting. And I like this concept of desire as self-transcendence. Because when you look around, whether people are reading a book or going to a museum, we're, we're trying to grow, and there seems to be some intrinsic pleasure in that, aside from the beauty of whatever painting we see, the act of learning is its own aesthetic thing. And I, I think that's one of the most, more holy desires that we have.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:23David Brooks?

  Let's take the problem of beautiful people. One could say we've been praising beauty, but we already overvalue beautiful people. We pay them or we attribute all sorts of positive attributes which they may or may not possess. And so beauty can be a seduction to overvalue something for superficial reasons? Would that be fair to say?

• 56:45Speaker 03

  That would be fair to say, but I think that we, we could develop a more positive picture of this. Only when you're talking about the beauty of persons does it start feeling a little bit problematic. Often, there's a kind of impatience with the person because he or she doesn't have the same kind of inner beauty. That is, we assume the person will have inner beauty, and then if they don't, we feel this is a sham. But, you know, if you stop and think about it, the, the fact that the person is lovely, and, and by the way, I think that there's a certain species benefit to the fact that we have great instances, like Helen of Troy or Dante's Beatrice. When the elders of Troy are sitting on the wall

• 57:30Speaker 03

  and Helen comes out to describe the Greek soldiers, they all say, "It's true, she was worth it." The fact of the matter is that, that often we feel very uncomfortable if it turns out the person does not have inner beauty. And yet, in some ways, it was his or her physical beauty that made us care about the person's moral beauty. And the fact that we are now recognizing that what we really want to see is inner moral beauty then might make us aware of another person who is incredibly kind and good and so forth. And it might be that that person does or does not have physical beauty.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  But in, in any case, what we've learned is that we really care about the inner beauty. I also think that we're kind of...

• 58:26Speaker 03

  Incoherent on our objections to the physical beauty. That is, we say we don't like it because the person was born with it and they don't deserve credit for it. And yet, people all the time have abilities that they were born with and we don't discount them just because there was no way for them to actually author it themselves. You know, and on the other hand, if somebody is artificially beautiful and it's all through clothing and makeup and having an expensive hairstylist and so forth, we don't like it because it's artificial and yet, we have to as human beings have a deep reverence for

• 59:11Speaker 03

  the capacity for artifice. So I, of course, myself, share some of these feelings of, wait, there's something unfair here. And yet, I think it is a little bit unfair to the person who has that physical beauty.

• 59:26David Brooks?

  As you were talking, I'm thinking of how so many children's stories are about this problem of how to deal with beauty or ugliness, like the ugly duckling, Beauty and the Beast, Shrek. And then there are a lot of cold queens in Grimm's fairy tales. So children are trying to figure out, oh, you can have a cold beauty or you can have Beauty and the Beast, the beast or Shrek is an ugly thing but has a beautiful inside.

• 59:50Speaker 03

  You know, a really good example of that is the novel Jane Eyre, which has influenced many, many people and many first generation feminism, second, third, et cetera. And the book is very concerned with Jane Eyre's plainness. One of our students, long ago in the 90s, did a senior thesis about the number of times the book reminded you that Jane Eyre is plain, even after she grows up. Her former servant in the mean household in which she used to live comes to visit her and Jane asks, have I improved in looks? And Bessie says, no, I'm sorry, you haven't. As this student said, her name was Amanda Lyden, the student, but she said, Jane is

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  not going to give up her love of the beauty of the world just because she herself isn't beautiful. That is, I think, something that is reiterated in a number of novels. For example, Jane Austen's Persuasion. It opens by telling us that Anne Elliot has lost her bloom.

• 1:00:48David Brooks?

  George Elliot was famously not that great looking either.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:00:51David Brooks?

  And she said, there are beautiful things in the world and we must love them.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  That's absolutely right.

• 1:00:56David Brooks?

  Let's talk about the argument you make, which is not intuitive to me, the connection between perceiving beauty and the urge to create beauty. I have managed to resist this urge my entire life because I don't create beauty. But why did that point seem important to you?

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  Well, it's something that philosophers say, dietima, in that ladder of love that we talked about, certainly says that, you know, when you see your beloved, it gives rise to the wish to bring children into the world, but also to bring legal treatises and poems into the world. So that's a very direct statement that it leads to the urge to create. And Wittgenstein says, when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it, which is probably a response we've all had. What the statement says is that it leads to the urge to create. You know, probably people would include some of the things you invent as beautiful,

• 1:01:53Speaker 03

  but even if that weren't the case, even if we asked people and they said, no.

• 1:01:59David Brooks?

  That's writing is ugly.

• 1:02:02Speaker 03

  I think that the idea of invention is a good, because Hume said that ordinarily, when you look at a virtue, you have to show that the virtue has some good outcome in order for it to be a virtue. But creation, anything that awakens in you the capacity for creation, is automatically a good in itself. Because we can't bring about better relations in the world unless we've got the capacity for creation.

• 1:02:30David Brooks?

  Yeah, no, that feeds into what I think you had said earlier, that it's a glimpse of a better world. I grew up in New York City, nobody had a lawn, and so I developed in a weird passion for beautiful lawns. And I moved to suburbia and I had a nice lawn and it felt like that, yes, I finally made it in America. I've got a garage door opener on my visor on my car and I've got a beautiful lawn. Somehow, I think I hungered for that when I was a kid, growing up in the city.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  Well, don't forget the hospital people who want to see green.

• 1:02:59David Brooks?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  You think you should excuse yourself.

• 1:03:01David Brooks?

  I'm always excusing myself. You had mentioned artifice in a nuanced way. So if you read a beautiful poem and then you learned it was written by AI, that it was an artificial intelligence creation, would you enjoy the poem less, having learned this?

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 1:03:19David Brooks?

  And why do you think that is?

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  I think that, you know, the fact that it kind of feels dead in one's heart shows that whether we realized it or not, the fact that this poem emanated from a human being is absolutely crucial to us. You know, I was once asked by a philosopher in England, Michael Hoskeller, he cited to me a statement by Nick Bostrom, that in the future, things may be so good, so much beauty might be created, that Mozart will come to sound like apartment store music or something. That's just, I think, a very, a wrong idea. Because we don't give up objects of beauty, there's endless room for more beauty.

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  But I think that it does have to have a live referent.

• 1:04:09David Brooks?

  Do you think there's a danger that is, that belief, which I share, is a function of our generation? That if you grew up with replicant AI friends, you may have a different attitude toward AI art and AI poetry or whatever?

• 1:04:25Speaker 03

  That's a hard question. That's a very hard question. I mean, I suppose if a young person were able to show to another young person the virtuosity, kind of nuances in the rhythm, or the modifications of the metaphors you go along, that they could, they could really love it. I think that, I mean, that's an interesting thought experiment. I have to think a lot more about that.

• 1:04:57David Brooks?

  I, maybe, again, because I grew up before AI, I do think you need to feel the pain that went into Van Gogh's paintings and that nobody wants to watch two AI bots play chess against each other.

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:08David Brooks?

  You need to have the human in there, but we could be the last of the Mohicans on that. Now, I want to conclude, which really with an argument that I think is really at the center of why you wrote the beauty book, which was, there had been a war on beauty in the humanities and in the arts too. And I think, as you've pointed out, and I put this topic toward the end, because I don't think this war on beauty ever hit the outcast world, but I do think it hit the academy and it hit the art world. I have a friend named Mako Fujimura, who's a Japanese-American painter. He creates these astonishingly beautiful paintings. He has been fighting this war in the art world as a professional painter to defend beauty, which he feels he's lonely.

• 1:05:51David Brooks?

  You would think artists all love beauty, that's why they become artists.

• 1:05:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:54David Brooks?

  I was watching one of his shows at a gallery in New York and he had a big, blue, wall-sized painting and it just looked blue to me, just a canvas of blue. And he said to me, David, stand there for 20 minutes, look at it for 20 minutes. And I was like, I do the Louvre in 20 minutes, I'm not going to stand for one painting for 20 minutes. But I did. And by the end of the 20 minutes, I saw not a blue painting, I saw 800 different kinds of blue somewhere in there. And somehow, the eye adjusted or something, I just saw depth and depth and depth. But the fight he's been fighting, and I suppose I haven't talked about this specifically, you know, there's certain artists of a slightly earlier generation who, they produced ugly

• 1:06:38David Brooks?

  art, and so there really was this attack on beauty.

• 1:06:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42David Brooks?

  And so tell us where that came from, what was wrong there?

• 1:06:45Speaker 03

  By the way, I know your artist and I met him shortly after I wrote this book. And you're right, that it isn't just universities, it was the art world. When I wrote the book, it was because of what was happening in the universities. And then I was surprised to find Jim Kuhn, who was the curator at the Fogg Museum at Harvard, invited in the directors of many museums and we had seminars about it and they all talked about having been under a taboo. And I think once, when I gave a talk on beauty at MoMA, I was given and still have a lifetime pass.

• 1:07:20David Brooks?

  Oh, nice. I've got to get that in, boy.

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  The other place was, architecture schools felt, I mean, how could you not want beautiful architecture? And individual artists have said that they were under tremendous pressure not to succumb to trying to do something beautiful. So that is an important thing to stress because it can seem as though the complete source of it must have been the university. I'm not sure that's the case.

• 1:07:49David Brooks?

  Summarize the argument that they were making against it and what you found objectionable about their arguments.

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  One argument was that, that when you look at something beautiful, you reify it, you turn it into an object. And, you know, this, this has some true instances, like if you're an eagle and you focus on a rabbit, you probably, it is probably prelude to some injurious act. But that isn't what people are normally doing when they look at people. And so it was strange that it became the model. And even stranger was the fact that it began to be said even about inanimate objects. You're going to painting and you're just reifying the paintings by standing there looking at them, you think, but isn't that why, aren't the paintings made to be looked at?

• 1:08:38David Brooks?

  This must have grown to some degree out of feminist thinking that the male gaze was objectifying.

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely, it grew out of that. And it's not as though the people who were complaining about the male gaze are necessarily wrong, but the effect, it, you know, was to begin to blanket everything. And you would be sitting in a seminar where, of course, you want to look at one another and talking about how lethal it is to look. So that was one thing. The other thing was the idea that there's, you know, a lot of problems in the world and it's diverting our attention away from those problems. And there's no way that you could ever convince me that by attending to beauty, you become less aware of problems. To me, they are opposite ends of a pole.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  And when you are in the presence of something beautiful, it's helping to nourish your recognition of what is intolerable and cruelty is intolerable. And vice versa, when you see cruelty, you long for, as at Guantanamo, the photograph of the flower. So I think there were incoherent arguments and I, I think that they were also mutually exclusive. On the one hand, one argument was saying, Our acts of vision are destructive. You hurt the thing you're looking at. The other argument was that by not looking at something, by ignoring something, you produce harm in it. And even if you go to the locus of the problem,

• 1:10:09Speaker 03

  the idea that there are cases when the male gaze is used violently, even then, it is something that can't plausibly be generalized to males looking at women or women looking at men. Because if you go back through time, it's the perceiver who is always vulnerable. It's Dante, whose knees are buckling when he sees Beatrice. And that occurs all the way down the line. It's like Sappho's "Raise High the Roof" being carpenters. You have to make the doorways taller to accommodate the person. You have to fill the hillside with flowers. It goes back to the earlier conversation we're having

• 1:10:52Speaker 03

  about how the kind of growth or enlargement of perception that comes by being in the presence of beauty.

• 1:10:59David Brooks?

  It seems to me there's one other argument that the war on beauty folks could wage, which is, I see it in my own profession in journalism, which is they think in order to... Well, there are two things going on. One is middle-class Americans or the bourgeoisie are overly content. You need to shock them out of their mediocrity. And the other is that in the media, our theory of change is if we can explain what's wrong, we've done our job. We have a strong bias toward negative news. And we don't have to explain how to fix it. We just expose the sin. And I think it's been proven that this approach to promoting social change

• 1:11:42David Brooks?

  by shocking people or by reminding them of how awful things are is a pretty rotten way to motivate people to do change. You can't just say, this is rotten, this is hopeless, this is terrible. You have to provide an alternate vision, which is what beauty is literally.

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  I agree with that. In fact, have you seen this new documentary called Josh's Wedding? You watch the computer generate its own poem. And then you also see it give its opinion of human beings, which is that we're contemptible, we're small, we're worthless. And perhaps that is just one of a thousand things that AI would say about human beings. But it suddenly began to make me and Philip Fisher, my life partner, worry. Wait a minute, these computers are being trained on all these books and newspapers that report only the negative. And yet, for every act of cruelty,

• 1:12:38Speaker 03

  there are probably, that day, a million acts of kindness in the world. The kind of fear that AI might inflict cruelty by unleashing a nuclear weapon or whatever path always seemed odd to me, only in the sense that what would be the motive? Well, if the picture we have of ourselves is so negative, that might be a reason.

• 1:13:00David Brooks?

  Yeah. Now, so you published this book 26 years ago. And when you did it, the anti-beauty movement was at full force.

• 1:13:08Speaker 03

  I think that's right, yeah.

• 1:13:09David Brooks?

  And now, what's the update 26 years later?

• 1:13:13Speaker 03

  I think that gradually, things have been restored. I mean, I see conferences on beauty. I think that students, even in the 90s, students... I taught a course, this course on beauty in the 90s, and certainly, students took the course. But I think that there are lots of signs that that is much less of a problem. Now, somebody who is in art history told me that that is still the case in art history departments. But I didn't question him enough to know if that is absolutely the case. I just know that it's something that I shouldn't so blithely think, yeah, we're out of it now, we're out of danger now. Maybe we're not.

• 1:13:55David Brooks?

  These things take a while. As they say, intellectual history travels by hearse. You have to lose people to get to, to lose certain ideas. Well, thank you for this time. I'm reminded, a friend of mine named Jenny McShane, who I've known since I was 10, made a movie called The Quilters about guys in a maximum-security prison who quilt. And that's the center of their life. And they're in there, they're never coming out. And they just want to create beauty. And among people like that, beauty never went out of fashion. They had an instinctive sense. Elaine Scarry, thank you so much for joining us on The Permanent Questions.

• 1:14:28Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:14:32David Brooks?

  So I leave this conversation just reminded again that beauty is everywhere. We talk about moral beauty, physical beauty, intellectual beauty, mathematical beauty, a beautiful tennis shot. And I really was persuaded by Elaine that it is all one thing. Beauty is one thing, one sensation of symmetry, reciprocity, of just something that's innately pleasurable. I'm also reminded that perception is so much of what we do. We used to have this idea that perception, you just open your eyes and reality floods in. And the real mental action up here was thinking, was cognition, cogitation. But I think we're understanding, as the cognitive sciences bring us along, that perception is thinking. And most of our thinking is actually in our perceptions.

• 1:15:17David Brooks?

  You don't have to think about whether you're seeing a morally admirable act or a morally degrading act. You just see it and you know immediately in the way you know a painting is beautiful or not beautiful. And so I think we got a little glimpse on that process. And then I really walk away persuaded that even though I can think of a lot of artists and poets who are not wonderful human beings, I do think the constant act of experiencing beauty over years, over decades, does enlarge the soul and does make us kinder towards others, more considerate towards others, and greater in our longing for the good. So thanks so much for joining us for this week's conversation with Elaine Scarry. The Permanent Questions is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University.

• 1:16:02David Brooks?

  New episodes of The Permanent Questions drop each Sunday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic's YouTube channel, on Spotify, on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener. See you next week.