Enable Beauty in the Voting Booth

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Beauty is not a luxury.  At first glance the sentence appears to be an oxymoron. We need only take a quick stroll down memory lane to link the beautiful with the luxurious. Pick a century, pick an empire, pick a robber baron, and you will find a palace or mansion stuffed full of the artifacts deemed the most beautiful of the age. But interestingly we may have the chicken and the egg backwards. It is easy to assume that wealth and power were the dominant motivations of the top 1% of any particular era. And I would not suggest that Genghis Khan, Napoleon, the Medici, Hitler, Qin Shi Huang, and that crowd were shrinking violets; they were all megalomaniacs, whose glories were rooted in blood. But I am fascinated by what they acquired once they had amassed their wealth and power. Without exception they either plundered their known world for the finest art or commissioned new works by the world’s finest artists. A psychiatrist might wonder if all the brutality and mayhem had, at least in part, masked a frustrated obsession with “all things bright and beautiful.” 

But the love of beauty has by no means been restricted to the lifestyles of the rich and famous, or infamous, nor to recent history. Humans have been painting on the walls of caves and carving wooden and stone figures for some 60 thousand years! We seem to have an innate love of - even a visceral need for - the beautiful.  In the context of this specific post, we need to pay particular attention to the work of one iconic President, FDR. 

In 1934, with the country mired in the depths of the Great Depression, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration realized that art and artists were vital to the fiscal and emotional recovery of the nation. And so the Public Works of Art Project was born, hiring some 4000 artists to create almost 16,000 works of art.  The scope and lasting legacy of the various works remains open to debate. What is not, is the legacy of an administration with the courage to assert that beauty was fundamental to the health of the nation. Interestingly, FDR’s distant cousin and fellow president, Teddy Roosevelt, had taken a similarly courageous stand earlier in the century, setting aside vast tracts of wilderness as national parks and forests, assuring us of a heritage of natural beauty to partner with FDR’s efforts in the arts. 

So what insight do these histories lend to our voting behavior in 2020?  A candidate’s position on environment is often fairly front and center.  Climate change, exploration by private companies into public lands, policies and leadership of the EPA, these are all fairly high profile issues that impact natural beauty, and separating the “pro-beauty” candidate from those who show little concern for, or outright animosity towards, these issues is not terribly difficult. Standard position papers posted on the candidate’s website usually make the candidate’s feelings on these issues clear.   

However, positions on the fine arts, like those championed by Roosevelt’s Public Arts Work Project are often less transparent. The National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities are flagship national “pro-beauty” endeavors, so we can be guided somewhat by candidates’ positions on those agencies and their budgets. However other issues, like a candidate’s position on national educational curricular initiatives the effect of which can trickle all the way down to providing art supplies in public elementary school classrooms are often harder to discern and may require contact with a candidate’s campaign that goes beyond their boilerplate social media blurbs. Take the time and effort to learn what these folks believe about beauty and the arts and why. 

Beauty and humanity have coexisted across the millennia.  It seems that every time the anthropologists and archeologists push our species’ history further back into the "mists before now" we find sculpture among the skeletons, paintings beside the ancient hearths. Enable Beauty is the second tenet of Distilled Harmony simply because it seems obvious that by enabling beauty we enable and ennoble humanity and the world in which we live.

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