The Beauty We Miss

We live in a world saturated with beauty. Sadly, we all too often let it pass us by

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

We live in a world that is saturated with beauty. Whether or not we notice it, we walk past a plethora of beautiful things every day, regardless of whether we live in the countryside or the city. Our environs are filled with beautiful things both large and small, from tiny delicate flowers eking out an existence on the side of a pavement to colourful birds flitting around in a magnificent oak tree. Beauty truly surrounds us all. A person habitually orientated towards wonder, and thus focused on seeing and finding beauty (even amidst the mundane), will find plenty to delight and satisfy both their eyes and minds.

Tragically, this disposition is found among very few in our society. For the greater part, we have lost the art of seeing, seeking, and even appreciating beauty. Surely we should admit that few of our modern lives are characterised by the virtue of wonder: “a settled disposition to stand in rapt attention and amazement in the presence of something awe-inspiring, mysterious, or novel”¹ and even if we have occasional moments of true wonder, few of us habitually seek after it or have days where wonder is a frequent companion.

The loss of wonder and the failure to seek true beauty is one of the most tragic features of our modern times. For reasons that I shall explain, it is imperative that we rediscover this disposition towards wonder and beauty if we are to live the “good life” and operate convivially with the world around us. But before we embark on “rediscovering”, it is important to explore and diagnose some of the reasons why we fail to see and admire so much of the beauty in this awe-inspiring world. Time and space do not permit an exhaustive study, but the reasons discussed below are some of the most pertinent.

Our limits of perception

There are plenty of beautiful things and moments that we miss by virtue of our natural limitations and this is unavoidable and not necessarily a problem. As Tim Chester notes, “we live in a world of excess beauty, a redundancy of beauty”. Part of what this “excess” means is that many instances of beauty and dramas of creation occur in depths and recesses beyond the human eye's reach. In the abysses of the ocean and the farthest corners of the rainforests, creatures whose exquisiteness would stop us in our tracks, play, sing, dance, and move in the most sublime of performances. This is beauty that humankind may never know and never see, performed perhaps for the joy of the Creator alone.

But even those who purposefully look for beauty in the accessible areas that surround them will still miss much, for our consciousness is finite and our attention limited. It is simply impossible to notice, let alone appreciate, everything beautiful around us. Our eyes can only be transfixed on one object at a time and our ears can only be attuned to only one melody. While our attention is thus fixed on one object of beauty, many other beautiful creatures, moments, and lives pass us by. Ann Dillard was aware of this when she said “Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we [notice] them. The least we can do is try to be there.”² Our physical limitations thus result in us missing much beauty — but this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try “to be there” more often.

Our wayward desires and appetites

It is, sadly, though, for want of “being there” that most of the beauty around us goes unnoticed. One reason for this is that beauty demands something precious from us — our time. To stand in rapt attention takes time; to seek out beauty in our often monochrome, brutalist urban spaces takes time; and to trek up a mountain to witness a sunrise takes a lot of time. If we are to live habitually focused on awe and beauty we will have to sacrifice a considerable amount of the time we could spend on other pursuits. Time is precious and time is money (as the old adage goes), thus beauty has to compete with many of the supreme ‘ counterfeit gods’ of the age (efficiency, consumerism, vain entertainment, ease…). Not only that, but beauty is up against a global industrial complex that invests billions of pounds in schemes, policies, and products to ensure we pay homage to and serve (even love) these gods. Up against these extreme powers, beauty is often conquered in the grand battle for our time and attention.

It is becoming increasingly normal, therefore, for the modern man to live a life that is deficient, if not starved, of true beauty³. Some have even become desensitised to the beauty around them, unable to appreciate what should take their breath away. Many of us have witnessed the pitiful sight of someone glued to their smartphone while walking through a cathedral or standing at the foot of a mountain. This is the dual vice of what Bouma-Prediger calls "indifference and misplaced wonder"⁴ — and it is ugly to witness.

These two vices are ubiquitous in modern society, and with the ever-increasing encroachment of visual technology into our lives, the pull of misplaced wonder grows ever stronger. The digital worlds most of us inhabit are with saturated with triviality and fake beauty — the objects of attention for misplaced wonder. The lives of celebrities, cat memes, or the latest sports results are more enthralling to many of us than the mountains in view. Partly this is down to clever and relentless marketing, but we are not helpless victims. More often than not, we actively chose to walk down these paths of triviality and have come to prefer them. Even when we do choose to look up from our smartphones, many of us have become so desensitised to true beauty that our default response to the truly awe-inspiring isn’t to stand in awe with rapt attention, but to position ourselves in front of the scenery with our smartphones still in hand ready to take our selfie. We thus trivialise even true beauty, and further feed our social media addictions in the process, all the while neglecting to take in, deeply enjoy, and be satisfied with what should transfix our attention⁵.

The repeated voluntary orientation toward triviality, coupled with a constant bombardment with media, sets in motion a reinforcing cycle of decline. We established earlier that our physical limitations limit our capacity for taking in beauty. Our attention spans and time are limited and are precious commodities, too precious to waste on the trivial, but lo! That is what we do. For many of us, our minds are saturated with trivialities mediated to us through ever-present technology. A mind that is saturated cannot take in nor focus on anything else. Such a mind is thus, by default, starved of beauty and is left with a damaged attention span⁶ which diminishes our capacity to take in and focus on future moments of beauty.

The relentless march of triviality doesn’t stop there. Taking advantage of our degraded attention spans is easy for triviality because it is addictive. It has been designed (often algorithmically so) to give a burst of pleasure that quickly fades leaving one wanting more (and more). Social media, (an environment swamped with triviality) exacerbates this addiction by making it easy to scroll from one trivial post or picture to the next. Whenever we uncritically log on to social media we are met with a torrent of mind-numbing superficiality, eager to sweep our attention away to a mindless abyss. And whenever we encounter true beauty on these platforms (say a stunning landscape photograph), the temptation is to quickly glance, like, and scroll on — thus demoting true beauty to the same level as triviality.

The tragedy is our addiction to triviality leaves us discontent, while admiring beauty leaves us satisfied. Take for example the sensation of witnessing a beautiful view. We do not immediately seek another vista, we stay for a while, taking in the beauty and sublimity in front of us. When the time to move on comes, we replay the scene over and over again in our minds, creating a cherished memory, and as we walk back down, we feel content. The same cannot be said for triviality, for when the time comes to pull oneself away from social media and the phone is finally put down, the urge to pick it straight back up has to be immediately resisted — such is the power of addiction to triviality, which can never leave one content.

Modern man has thus replaced beauty with triviality — and we are much the poor for it.

The importance of beauty

Why though is it a vice to be insensible to beauty?⁷ If triviality makes us "happy" (even if fleetingly so) does that make it a suitable replacement for beauty which can take up so much of our precious time to seek?

No.

We have been designed to seek and appreciate beauty, and indeed beauty (or sublimity) demands our attention for it has been created and given to us by the Ultimate Beauty. God is the Creator of all beauty, and He has created that which is beautiful to reflect His glory and to testify to His reality⁸. To ignore the beauty He has made, is, therefore, to be grossly ungrateful and to miss what is meant to drive us to the chief of our pursuits — worship.

Observing beauty not only reminds us of the 'chief end of Man' but also provides us with a guidepost to navigate us through the noise of modern life to what is truly valuable and worth our time⁹. We have been exhorted to think and dwell on "whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, excellent and worthy of praise" (Philippians 4:8 ESV paraphrased). Primarily, this calls us to dwell on God and His perfect being, but we must not stop there. The word here translated 'lovely' includes aesthetic beauty — that which delights the eyes in purity and gives pleasure and/or a sense of awe.¹⁰ God's creation and man-made things that can be termed lovely are His good gifts for us to enjoy, use, study, propagate, protect and dwell on. A life which dwells on and surrounds itself with such things is a good life indeed.

Thus, the call to limit ourselves as much as we can to the good, the lovely and the beautiful rings loud and clear. We must let our natural limitations remind us that we have an allotted time within a day and no more. Our waking hours are all we have, and they can be filled with the good, the lovely, and the beautiful, or the trivial, the superficial and the profane. The quality of our lives will depend on what we choose to dwell on and pursue. This isn't to say we should seek to always avoid what is painful and difficult — that would be a mistake and a dereliction of our duties in this fallen world — but even in these less desirable moments of life we can still seek out beauty, or seek to restore it.

The danger of neglecting beauty

When we neglect beauty, then, we submit to the vices of insensibility, ingratitude, and triviality. Not only, though, are our lives being characterised by vice, but in neglecting beauty we also threaten its existence, for what we do not notice we do not know, and what we do not know we cannot love. This is critical as that which we do not love we will not seek to protect or nurture, for love and affection are the greatest motivators for protecting and nurturing the beautiful things, places, and cultures around us.

Ronald Sandler frames this dynamic from a slightly different angle (though with the same end) when he says, “wonder is a gateway to love, gratitude, appreciation, and care for that which is found wonderful.”¹¹ We naturally cherish and protect what is valuable to us and this presupposes our knowing of them. We only protest against the loss of beautiful things that we know and appreciate. The undiscovered or less prominent beautiful things that are threatened with destruction can easily cease to exist without an advocate in this modern age, and by nature of their obscurity (and our collective lack of a disposition toward wonder), they all too often have no such defender or preserver — and are lost.

We are, though, aware of this need of ‘being known’ in our societies, and it is reflected in the institutions and schemes we set up. In Britain, we ‘list’ old buildings and protect places we designate as Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Globally, we preserve traditions and heritage through Protected Origin Designations and UNESCO. But the issue remains that these designations tend to only protect what is grand and well-known. There are plenty of other beautiful habitats, buildings, traditions, and creatures that by nature of their smallness or obscurity are not seen, known, and cherished, and are thus exposed to the forces of the global market, urbanisation, and environmental degradation that obliterates much beauty. And in an age of addiction to the trivial, even the larger more prominent sources of beauty have fewer advocates when they come under threat from developers, dilapidation, or environmental change than they did in the past. Their preservation can no longer be taken for granted.

A final reason why it is dangerous to neglect beauty is that affection and focus are essential for the proper care and preservation of beauty that we do see and know. Our affection for and dwelling on beautiful things leads to Intimate knowledge of their loci, idiosyncrasies, and requirements. As I have argued in a previous essay, knowledge of this sort is essential to proper conservation. When we are aware of the idiosyncrasies of what we are protecting, our care and preservation can be tailored to their particularities and specific needs. Habitats are lost not only to intentional destruction but also to inappropriate or generalised management and works of art can be lost through well-intentioned but inappropriate methods of preservation. Tragedies such as these would be averted if we had access to intimate knowledge which we obtain by seeing, appreciating, and studying.

If we are to keep this world full of beautiful things, we must then commit to seeing, knowing, and loving beauty, for then and then only will we be its protector.

A call back to beauty

A world starved of beauty would be an ugly and desolate place. Thankfully despite our centuries of destruction, we still live in a beauty-filled world (even if we have to look a little bit harder to find it). We have been made for beauty and are meant to delight in it. The onus is on us, therefore, to recover and cultivate our disposition towards it. This will take practice and diligence,¹² for like any virtue worth cultivating, our disposition will not mature overnight and resisting the trivial urges in our frantic-paced lives will be hard even for those of us who are actively trying to nurture their disposition toward beauty.¹³ However, take heart. The journey towards beauty although uphill and difficult is also a pleasurable road, filled with wonderful sights, smells, and sounds that can bring us deep joy.

Beauty is delightful — let us not miss it.

1. Steven Bouma-Prediger, Earthkeeping and Character, Baker.

2. Ann Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

3. Eric Carlson, Why Beauty is Important, Medium https://medium.com/@ericcarlson/why-beauty-is-important-f0253d0e409f

4. Bouma-Prediger, Earthkeeping and Character.

5. Not to mention the fact that this action is antithetical to humility, which Bouma-Prediger and others argue is a necessary predisposition to the virtue of wonder

6. Our attention spans are becoming increasingly shorter and more restless, flitting from this to that, unable to concentrate. This is partly down to our addictions to trivial things, especially social media.

7. The recognition that insensibility to what should command our attention is a vice goes back to Aristotle.

8. T.M. Moore, Consider the Lilies. Presbyterian and Reformed; Owen Strachan and Doug Sweeney, Jonathan Edwards on Beauty, Moody Press.

9. Hannah Anderson, All That’s Good. Moody Press.

10. G. Walter Hansen, The Letter to the Philippians, Pillar New Testament Commentary, Eerdmans.

11. Ronald Sandler, Character and the Environment: A Virtue-Oriented Approach to Environmental Ethics, Colombia University Press.

12. Steven Bouma-Prediger, Earthkeeping and Character, Baker.

13. “I’d consciously chosen to leave my iPhone at home, determined to look around me as I went. It’s an ongoing ethical project, a way of life I aspire to and too rarely achieve.” - Ian Marcus Cobin, The Abyss of Beauty, Plough, vol 28.