Post 145.
Remind me to bring earplugs next time I write at Starbucks. Perhaps being a musician, or my tendencies toward the spectrum, is why I notice the obnoxiousness of today’s corporate spaces. Not only Starbucks. When I get gas at a Sheetz, I pay for the gas—my labor traded for ancient sunlight—and I also am forced to endure songs and advertisements blasted at an unpleasantly considerable volume-level. It feels like a breaking of the social contract. I pay for the gas; I don’t pay to be advertised at.
Problem solved, today anyway. I asked the cashier to turn the volume down a little. I feel awkward and assertive making the request, but nobody else has walked in for the 15 minutes I have been here. Online, customers indicate that corporations use loud music to keep customers from lingering. What an odd purpose for a business model, especially for the coffee house, which was borne in the Enlightenment and nicknamed the ‘Penny University,’ and where scholars, artists, merchants, and poets gathered to read, write, talk, and share ideas. But, as is well documented on the political right and left here in the U.S.—capitalism ruins everything.
Every business model has, at its core, a beautiful sowing—universities were founded to fulfill the medieval need to conserve the ancient intellectual tradition and to understand God in His created universe (university) and the activities of humankind. Public and parochial schools were established to increase public literacy, so that everyday people, and not only clergy and scholars, could read, especially scripture. Hospitals were instituted to care for and protect the lives of the ill and injured. Public housing projects to shelter the working homeless; police forces to protect the community; carpentry guilds/unions to erect beautiful buildings that everyday folk could not, such as cathedrals; and robotic technologies to lessen dangerous labor freeing people to attend plays, musical festivals, and to make their own arts and crafts. The list goes on, and all these institutions—when they grow long in the tooth—in capitalism risk losing sight of their beautiful purpose and reduce their existence to imprudent quarterly profits.
Most academics would understand capitalist institutions’ loss of their beautiful purpose within the historical writings of Marx—and they wouldn’t be wrong to do so. However, I am going to suggest writers who are otherwise at each other’s throats have identified this same problem. Russell Kirk’s 4th Principle of Conservatism is prudence—which is indeed long-standing virtue in our Christian and Greco-Roman history. “Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity.” https://kirkcenter.org/conservatism/ten-conservative-principles/ Most conservatives today might argue that many of these big businesses are private, when in fact the process of incorporation—a government policy—publicizes most especially large institutions, with their tendencies toward monopolization of markets. Rather than piecemeal argue against the squalor of modern public universities, schools, housing projects, and the like while ignoring the squalor of private gas stations and coffeehouses, I would rather apply this principle of prudence more consistently and generally.
If a virtue is to truly be a virtue in the Christian sense, it is applied generally. Christians are not relativists. Prudence, the virtue of being as clever as serpents and as harmless as doves (Matthew 10:16), is the finem, or “end” of all moral virtues, according to Thomas Aquinas, directing human thoughts on all other virtues (https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q47.A6). Rash, inconsiderate and fickle people often lack prudence while cunning and anxious people have a distorted sense of prudence. I would argue prudence also guides the human understanding of Beautying.
Prudent beauty is not a new idea. Medieval schools aimed to nurture harmonious people, the vir perfectus, through study of music as one of seven liberal arts. The ideal music was neither too harsh nor too timid; neither too loud nor too soft; neither too ignorable nor too striking. So too the harmonious people medieval schools taught (https://archive.org/details/didascaliconmedi00hugh). Today we may know more musical genres and have instant access, online, to more cultures’ folksongs, symphonies, improvisations, mantras, stories, raps, ragas and tunes, but a general application of prudence—fit within each culture’s ideal musical expression—can guide many assessments of the human formations of Beautying. I find, as I write this, I want to avoid falling into the trap of 20th Century aesthetic theory, which placed Western musics above non-Western musics, and classical musics above popular musics. I have no intention of flipping the pyramid on its head either, but rather appreciating all musics within context, and understanding that they are, in some way, an expression of that trinitarian reality impressed upon the whole universe (https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/bonaventure/). Beautying is prudent to the extent that all relationships best reflect prudence.
ds
Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:12_La_Prudence_-_H._Pussey_Grand_Etteilla_Tarot_Deck.jpg
Remind me to bring earplugs next time I write at Starbucks. Perhaps being a musician, or my tendencies toward the spectrum, is why I notice the obnoxiousness of today’s corporate spaces. Not only Starbucks. When I get gas at a Sheetz, I pay for the gas—my labor traded for ancient sunlight—and I also am forced to endure songs and advertisements blasted at an unpleasantly considerable volume-level. It feels like a breaking of the social contract. I pay for the gas; I don’t pay to be advertised at.
Problem solved, today anyway. I asked the cashier to turn the volume down a little. I feel awkward and assertive making the request, but nobody else has walked in for the 15 minutes I have been here. Online, customers indicate that corporations use loud music to keep customers from lingering. What an odd purpose for a business model, especially for the coffee house, which was borne in the Enlightenment and nicknamed the ‘Penny University,’ and where scholars, artists, merchants, and poets gathered to read, write, talk, and share ideas. But, as is well documented on the political right and left here in the U.S.—capitalism ruins everything.
Every business model has, at its core, a beautiful sowing—universities were founded to fulfill the medieval need to conserve the ancient intellectual tradition and to understand God in His created universe (university) and the activities of humankind. Public and parochial schools were established to increase public literacy, so that everyday people, and not only clergy and scholars, could read, especially scripture. Hospitals were instituted to care for and protect the lives of the ill and injured. Public housing projects to shelter the working homeless; police forces to protect the community; carpentry guilds/unions to erect beautiful buildings that everyday folk could not, such as cathedrals; and robotic technologies to lessen dangerous labor freeing people to attend plays, musical festivals, and to make their own arts and crafts. The list goes on, and all these institutions—when they grow long in the tooth—in capitalism risk losing sight of their beautiful purpose and reduce their existence to imprudent quarterly profits.
Most academics would understand capitalist institutions’ loss of their beautiful purpose within the historical writings of Marx—and they wouldn’t be wrong to do so. However, I am going to suggest writers who are otherwise at each other’s throats have identified this same problem. Russell Kirk’s 4th Principle of Conservatism is prudence—which is indeed long-standing virtue in our Christian and Greco-Roman history. “Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity.” https://kirkcenter.org/conservatism/ten-conservative-principles/ Most conservatives today might argue that many of these big businesses are private, when in fact the process of incorporation—a government policy—publicizes most especially large institutions, with their tendencies toward monopolization of markets. Rather than piecemeal argue against the squalor of modern public universities, schools, housing projects, and the like while ignoring the squalor of private gas stations and coffeehouses, I would rather apply this principle of prudence more consistently and generally.
If a virtue is to truly be a virtue in the Christian sense, it is applied generally. Christians are not relativists. Prudence, the virtue of being as clever as serpents and as harmless as doves (Matthew 10:16), is the finem, or “end” of all moral virtues, according to Thomas Aquinas, directing human thoughts on all other virtues (https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q47.A6). Rash, inconsiderate and fickle people often lack prudence while cunning and anxious people have a distorted sense of prudence. I would argue prudence also guides the human understanding of Beautying.
Prudent beauty is not a new idea. Medieval schools aimed to nurture harmonious people, the vir perfectus, through study of music as one of seven liberal arts. The ideal music was neither too harsh nor too timid; neither too loud nor too soft; neither too ignorable nor too striking. So too the harmonious people medieval schools taught (https://archive.org/details/didascaliconmedi00hugh). Today we may know more musical genres and have instant access, online, to more cultures’ folksongs, symphonies, improvisations, mantras, stories, raps, ragas and tunes, but a general application of prudence—fit within each culture’s ideal musical expression—can guide many assessments of the human formations of Beautying. I find, as I write this, I want to avoid falling into the trap of 20th Century aesthetic theory, which placed Western musics above non-Western musics, and classical musics above popular musics. I have no intention of flipping the pyramid on its head either, but rather appreciating all musics within context, and understanding that they are, in some way, an expression of that trinitarian reality impressed upon the whole universe (https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/bonaventure/). Beautying is prudent to the extent that all relationships best reflect prudence.
ds
Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:12_La_Prudence_-_H._Pussey_Grand_Etteilla_Tarot_Deck.jpg
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