Roger Scruton:
We should not think that these changes in the world of art – which have been paralleled, too, in the worlds of music and literature – are without significance. What we look at, listen to and read affects us in the deepest part of our being. Once we start to celebrate ugliness, then we become ugly too. Just as art and architecture have uglified themselves, so have our manners, our relationships and our language become crude.
Without the guidance offered by beauty and good taste we find it difficult to relate to each other in a natural or graceful way. Society itself becomes fractured and atomized.
This official uglification of our world is the work of the ivory-towered elites of the liberal classes – people who have little sympathy for how the rest of us live and who, with their mania for modernizing, are happy to rip up beliefs that have stood the test of time for millennia.
What they forget is that ordinary people hunger for beauty as they have always hungered, for beauty is the voice of comfort, the voice of home.
When a lovely melody, a sublime landscape or a passage of exquisite poetry comes before your senses and your mind, you know that you are at home in the world. Beauty is the voice that settles us, the assurance that we belong among others, in a place of sharing and consolation. By contrast, the ugly art and architecture of today divides society rather than bringing it together.