"I Don't Think This Thing is Working ..."
How do we respond to the sense that things are broken?
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You may not be a student of architecture, I’m certainly not, but you may have noticed that modern buildings are not very … well, pretty. Ross Douthat’s daughter has noticed. The New York Times columnist was in Rome on a family trip when his daughter posed this very question.
Standing in the Roman Pantheon last spring, one of my daughters asked the kind of question that newspaper columnists are tempted to place in the mouths of our children when we’re hard up for a column hook: “Dad, why don’t people build things this beautiful anymore?”
Why We Don’t Build Beautifully - Ross Douthat - NYT - August 30, 2024
I have wondered the same thing. One answer is that, as labor got appropriately more expensive, buildings with ornamentation requiring craftsmanship got too expensive to build. But Douthat states that this largely isn’t the case. He refers to Samuel James’ essay The Beauty of Concrete, to note that many of the trends of the Industrial Revolution did not change the amount of ornamentation in buildings. In fact, as with most things, it made these things less expensive, not more.
Only thereafter, via the cultural disillusionment that followed the First World War, did ornamentation enter into an eclipse — one that after World War II became so complete and radical as to spawn a puckish contemporary conspiracy theory that holds that many pre-1945 buildings actually belong to a vanished empire, Tartaria, whose existence and collapse has been erased from our history books so that we don’t realize just how far we’ve fallen.
Why We Don’t Build Beautifully - Ross Douthat - NYT - August 30, 2024
Of course, there is no Tartaria. This tongue-in-cheek explanation points to how significant and sudden the break in architectural style was. How did Douthat answer his daughter?
So I told her that from my perspective, the decline of beauty, grace and ornament in public architecture reflects a collapse of humanist confidence and religious faith, an abandonment of the assumption that human artifice is tapping into some deeper cosmic order, a fatal surrender to bad ideas about aesthetics and human life itself.
Why We Don’t Build Beautifully - Ross Douthat - NYT - August 30, 2024
As you might suspect, I am not writing about architecture. I am writing about the collapse of both humanist confidence and religious faith, the abandonment of the notion of a deeper cosmic order and a fatal surrender to bad ideas about human life itself.
I have written about how dystopian art often speaks to some aspect of how we view ourselves and the current state of the world. Children of Men, both the novel by P.D. James and the movie, loosely based on the novel by Alfonso Cauron (and I recommend both), is one of the most unique expressions of dystopian art. It depicts a world where there are no more children. And so everyone sees the end coming, the inevitable end, and that changes everything about how today is lived - even though the book and the movie have different ways of expressing this, it is the same reality. In this sort of pre-apocalyptic story, the sense is that we aren’t at the end of the world as we know it quite yet, but we can see it from here. And optimism, hope, and trust fade as a result - in fact, people turn inward.
This loss of optimism and hope can be found in much of our current climate conversation, in the loss of trust in our institutions after Vietnam and Iraq and the market crash and the extralegal escapades of the CIA, in the polarization of our politics and culture … it is the sense that, in the words of a young adult I am close to expressing a bit of the tone of his generation - “I don’t think this thing is working”. Even the most optimistic among us probably can understand this sentiment. And, implicit in this sentiment is that there is nothing we can do about it - that all of these trends are beyond our ability to change, that we are subject to them, that, faced with this loss of optimism, hope, and trust, we lack agency. What can we do? How do we respond to a world that is broken?
I have a lot of responses to this question. You might say the existence of The Embassy is one of my answers. But before I get to those responses, I think a bit of perspective might be helpful. The world is broken, yes - but it has always been broken. One of the issues of our generation, I believe, is that we thought we should be living in an unbroken world. Certainly all previous generations (go back and look) had what they would have seen as existential threats to their existence. We think we are special in this regard as in most regards, but I am not sure we are. And as Ross Douthat observed, we live in a time where we have, as a larger culture, increasingly abandoned the Christian narrative that would put this brokenness in perspective - into a larger story of redemption and hope. Which, more than anything else, might explain this increase in hopelessness. All that said, we don’t lack agency, there are things we can do to address the brokenness of our world. For a start, we can love our neighbor.
Larissa Phillips describes part of her experience being surrounded by those on the other side of what we might think of as the political and cultural divide. It is not what she expected.
But personally I’ve been stunned by the depth of my neighbors’ generosity. “I saw you and your husband out here with that little mower,” one guy knocked on my door to tell me. “It’s ridiculous.” He said he was coming over with his massive sit-on mower. He made quick work of our lawn, then waved away my profuse—and unconflicted—thanks. Another neighbor practically screeched to a halt when he saw us clearing snow off our driveway with handheld shovels. He just happened to have a snowplow attachment on the ATV he was hauling on the platform trailer attached to his truck. Within minutes he’d unloaded it and was clearing our driveway.
And then, last winter, my son, then 24, was driving a few miles from the house when he found himself sliding off the icy road into a snowbank. Hopelessly stuck, he gunned the engine of his little sedan, to no avail. Then, two trucks pulled over and three burly guys got out. After ribbing him a bit for his pathetic predicament, they motioned him out of his car. One hopped in the driver’s seat while the other two pushed and heaved. When that didn’t work, all three got behind the car and essentially lifted and shoved it back up to the road. My son thanked them; the apparent leader of the trio said, “I lost my job today. I was looking for something good to do.”
Whatever Happens, Love Thy Neighbor - The Free Press - Larissa Phillips - November 2, 2024
We can love our neighbor. We can listen. We can practice humility. We can practice generosity. These are the real things in our world, the things we practice directly and experience directly. Everything else we find out about from the internet. That doesn’t make it false, but it also means that it doesn’t determine everything about our lives. We have agency to do all the things we are called to do. And, failing this, the macro trends won’t matter anyway. For those of us in the Christian faith, this is what is required of us - macro trends notwithstanding. (And remember the macro trends of the New Testament - a world dominated by the Roman Empire, with Nero at its head).
A teacher of the law asked Jesus what was required of him - what must he do. Jesus, as he often does, turns the question around and asks the teacher of the law what his answer is. And this teacher gets it right, love the Lord with all of you and love your neighbor as yourself. So far, so good.
But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Luke 10:29
Jesus’ answer to this question is the parable of the Good Samaritan. You remember the story. The one who loves his neighbor is the one, on the surface, who is the least likely to do so - the one with the least reason to do so. The Samaritan was hated, despised, shunned … but he also becomes the illustration of what it means to love our neighbor. One of the bad ideas about human life that we have embraced is that we have no agency. We have all the agency we need to live a live empowered by God’s Spirit to do all that God calls us to do - to do what is required of us.
What is required of us? How do we respond to a broken world? What do we do when it seems we have no agency? Live. Practice generosity, including generosity of spirit. And curiosity. And dependence on the providence of God. Embrace a larger narrative. Live within a community you actually can see and help personally. And love your neighbor.
Links
Why We Don’t Build Beautifully - Ross Douthat - NYT - August 30, 2024
The Beauty of Concrete - Samuel James - Works in Progress - May 17, 2024
Whatever Happens, Love Thy Neighbor - The Free Press - Larissa Phillips - November 2, 2024
