iamse7en on July 8, 2009 at 4:05 AM

You cite polygamy in Muslim countries while denying that women and offspring are treated as property. For shame, to deny the abuses heaped upon girls and women in Islam.

No one yet is arguing a limit to how many children with you.

Closer to home, Lost Boys from Southern Utah should give you pause.

You bring “commandment from God” as a directive for polygamy. I don’t recall Abraham having been commanded by God to take Sarah’s handmaiden, only Sarah’s suggestion being barren herself. I seem to recall that God was unhappy that David and Solomon took on concubines, particularly as David betrayed his best military officer, sabotaging him to death in order to abscond with his wife, having lusted after her. I also don’t recall Muslim’s having been commanded by God to take on extra wives so much as permitted. It seems a uniquely Mormon trait to use God’s commandment to idealize polygamy, even if “only practiced by a minority”.

maverick muse on July 8, 2009 at 5:54 AM

We live in a loveless culture that desecrates beauty.

Roger Scruton
Beauty and Desecration

The current habit of desecrating beauty suggests that people are as aware as they ever were of the presence of sacred things. Desecration is a kind of defense against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims. In the presence of sacred things, our lives are judged, and to escape that judgment, we destroy the thing that seems to accuse us.

To yield to this temptation, however, we must first remove the chief obstacle to it: the consecrated nature of the human form. We must sully the experiences—such as death and sex—that otherwise call us away from temptations, toward the higher life of sacrifice. This willful desecration is also a denial of love—an attempt to remake the world as though love were no longer a part of it. And that, surely, is the most important characteristic of the postmodern culture: it is a loveless culture, determined to portray the human world as unlovable.

That suggests a simple remedy, which is to resist temptation. Instead of desecrating the human form, we should learn again to revere it. For there is absolutely nothing to gain from the insults hurled at beauty by those—like Calixto Bieito—who cannot bear to look it in the face. Yes, we can neutralize the high ideals of Mozart by pushing his music into the background so that it becomes the mere accompaniment to an inhuman carnival of sex and death. But what do we learn from this? What do we gain, in terms of emotional, spiritual, intellectual, or moral development? Nothing, save anxiety. We should take a lesson from this kind of desecration: in attempting to show us that our human ideals are worthless, it shows itself to be worthless. And when something shows itself to be worthless, it is time to throw it away.

It is therefore plain that the culture of transgression achieves nothing save the loss that it revels in: the loss of beauty as a value and a goal. But why is beauty a value? It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction. That is the message of such early modernists as Eliot, Barber, and Stevens, and it is a message that we need to listen to.

To mount a full riposte to the habit of desecration, we need to rediscover the affirmation and the truth to life without which artistic beauty cannot be realized. This is no easy task. If we look at the true apostles of beauty in our time…we are immediately struck by the immense hard work, the studious isolation, and the attention to detail that characterizes their craft. In art, beauty has to be won, but the work becomes harder as the sheer noise of desecration—amplified now by the Internet—drowns out the quiet voices murmuring in the heart of things.

One response is to look for beauty in its other and more everyday forms—the beauty of settled streets and cheerful faces, of natural objects and genial landscapes. It is possible to throw dirt on these things, too, and it is the mark of a second-rate artist to take such a path to our attention—the via negativa of desecration. But it is also possible to return to ordinary things in the spirit…to show that we are at home with them and that they magnify and vindicate our life. Such is the overgrown path that the early modernists once cleared for us—the via positiva of beauty. There is no reason yet to think that we must abandon it.

City Journal Spring 2009.
A quarterly magazine of urban affairs, published by the Manhattan Institute, edited by Brian C. Anderson.

maverick muse on July 8, 2009 at 6:07 AM