“The True, the Good and the Beautiful”

In contemporary America, beauty sometimes arrives in the dock accused of carrying an old accomplice: power.

The argument has a history. Standards called beautiful — in faces, bodies, buildings, painting and language — were often established when Western institutions were overwhelmingly European. What one generation
called proportion, harmony or refinement, another may therefore suspect of being merely preference hardened into authority.

But this leaves a larger question unanswered. Abuse of a standard does not prove that standards are impossible. Nor does the history of exclusion establish that beauty itself excludes.

A cathedral, a garden, a melody or a well-made room can move people who share neither ancestry nor politics.

Perhaps beauty is troublesome precisely because it makes a larger claim: that amid our differences, some things may still be worth admiring together.