​No Justice without Beauty

beauty is the urge to live and feel fully alive
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Introducing the "And Beauty for All" Movement with related reflections
​ by Sandra Lubarsky, Terry Goddard, and Patricia Adams Farmer

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Introducing the "And Beauty for All" Movement
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@ beauty for all website

And Beauty for All Website

"We believe all Americans appreciate beauty, regardless of their political views, origin, economic status or creed, and that working to restore beautiful landscapes and create beautiful places is a non-partisan cause that can bring us together and build community in polarizing times."

Excerpts and photos from the "And Beauty for All" Website

We seek to build on a new upsurge of local interest in whole foods, sustainable agriculture, land stewardship, small businesses and cooperatives, physical and mental health, meaningful work and leisure and desires for community and empathy. We understand that all over America new solutions are being tested and found effective. Our hope is to create awareness of these “best practices” and help bring them to scale.

We seek to counter the increasing congestion in our cities, the decay in our countryside, the monopolization of enterprises and power, and the treatment of our land as a commodity instead of our common legacy.

We seek to revitalize education so that all Americans appreciate the value of natural beauty, conservation and stewardship, and we seek to honor the histories and struggles of those who passed on to us what remains of our magnificent heritage.

With Aldo Leopold, we discern that “bread and beauty grow best together.” Thus, we seek both to restore landscapes and local economies and to create meaningful jobs for many who are currently unemployed or underemployed.

Specific Examples of Local Action

more from the "And Beauty for All" website
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"Join with us in the AND BEAUTY FOR ALL campaign—as we advocate restoring the mountaintops of Appalachia (with a program to put unemployed coal miners to work refilling and replanting instead of removing) and the wetlands of Louisiana, reawakening the deserted small towns of rural America and transforming the bleak streets and weed-filled open spaces in our cities.  Join us to turn the vacant spaces to farms and parks and let beauty flourish throughout the land. Join us to restore small farms and sustainable agriculture and they beauty they provide."
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• Growing Power in Milwaukee, a huge urban farm started by former NBA player Will Allen that employs hundreds of inner city teens and grows millions of dollars’ worth of food.
• Eden Place in Chicago, another remarkable urban farm and a nature center.
• Woodlake Pride, a 14-acre botanical garden in a small California farming town that drew teens from local gangs and got them excited in growing things.
• The African-American Nature and Parks Experience organization and others that are introducing greater diversity to our parks and public spaces.
• The Los Angeles River, once a concrete-lined cesspool, but now being restored thanks to kayakers who proved the river was navigable and should be protected.
• The Tacoma, Washington, waterfront, where a focus on beauty reinvigorated one of America’s least livable cities and turned it into an All-American City.”
• Nevada City, California, where the fight to save the beautiful Yuba River has led to a decades-long push toward sustainability.
• Fairview Gardens, in the heart of suburban Santa Barbara, saved from development by engaged citizens.
• Duluth, Minnesota, where parks and a trail alongside Lake Superior created the most visited tourist destination in the state and revitalized the city.
• The Refresh Appalachia Project, which has unemployed coal miners restoring mountaintops—only three of 530 so far, but a start in the right direction!

​In These Anxious Times
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from the And Beauty for All Website

In these anxious times, when the very authoritarian forces that have precipitated such darkness in the world now appeal to 'law and order' as the solution to social diseases of their own making, it can seem quaint to hear people appeal to "beauty" as the solution.  The conventional rhetoric among self-styled progressives is "And Justice for all." 

The rhetoric carries with it a cumbersome appeal to moral obligation alone, but not to joy.  And yet, as is abundantly clear, humans cannot live by moral obligation alone.  The great injustices of our time require a recovery or discovery of awe and wonder, amazement and play,  They require a recovery of beauty. 

​So, yes, we must say not only "And Justice for all" but also, with equal enthusiasm, "And Beauty for all." And we must learn from mentors in the arts of beauty such as Loren Eiseley and Alfred North Whitehead.  Enjoy the short note below by Terry Goddard exploring the connections and then, as a conclusion, an essay by Patricia Adams Farmer on the beauty of justice.

- Jay McDaniel, August 2020

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Now is the Time to Practice Beauty

Beauty is intimately and evolutionarily connected to the urge to live. 
It is the value associated most keenly with experiences that affirm
our vitality in relation to the vitality of other beings.

Sandra Lubarsky 
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Shinichi Suzuki, the founder of the Suzuki method of music, is famous for having said, “Practice only on the days you eat.” It is an admonition repeated often in Suzuki households. (I know because we said it often to our younger son.) Suzuki wanted to make music as much a part of a child’s daily life as the desire and need to eat. More than this, he wanted to help rebuild Japanese society after WWII in a way that would insure that it would be defined by beauty and morality. “I want to make good citizens,” wrote Suzuki. “If a child hears fine music from the day of his birth and learns to play it himself, he develops sensitivity, discipline and endurance. He gets a beautiful heart.” 

In this time of pandemic, when our days are frayed by apprehension and so much has been brought to a standstill—and when the sting of loss is sharp--the practice of beauty is a powerful antidote. Under beauty’s spell, we surrender our self-concern and remember that underneath and alongside the present disorder of life are patterns of relations that sustain life. 

But in our American culture, beauty is hardly ever declared a principle for shaping lives. Instead, it is mistrusted as a form of sexual and commercial manipulation, demeaned as superficial, reduced to personal opinion, and removed from the public sphere. And yet we pursue beauty in our gardens and on our vacations, in our subscriptions to House Beautiful and Dwell, and in our postings on Pinterest. 

There is no doubt that beauty is one of life’s great pleasures. And because it is, we desire it, seek it out, and sometimes fixate on it. I know a man who almost missed his train stop in Frankfurt, so taken was he with the beauty of the young woman seated across from him. That man was my husband and the only reason he told me this story was to confess the utter thralldom he’d experienced. But beauty is more than pleasure and its importance in these times deserves attention. Beauty is intimately and evolutionarily connected to the urge to live. It is the value associated most keenly with experiences that affirm our vitality in relation to the vitality of other beings. In the presence of beauty, we feel more intensely alive. 

The practice of beauty, like any other practice, requires intention and repetition. In the ball field behind my house, now off-limits to summer leagues, I heard a father and son at practice. “Watch the ball, watch the ball!” urged the father as he sent a grounder out. “Stay low; use your short hop.” Over and over, they rehearsed the kinesthetic motions until bat, ball, body were no longer unaligned objects and “playingball” was one action. The practice of beauty is strikingly similar, a fine-tuning of feeling the world. The world comes to us like a fast pitch—directly and all-at-once. To catch it, we have to be as agile as an outfielder, able to coordinate ourselves with life in its abounding forms. 

For years, the architect Christopher Alexander devoted several hours each day to an exercise in receptivity, looking at pairs of objects—ceramic bowls, woven rugs, tiles, metal utensils, etc.—and asking: “Which has more life?” His aim was to feel the energy in the structure of things. He did not ask, “Which do I like better?” a question that sinks us into the quicksand of personal pleasure and human ego--and destroys the connected life of observer and observed. To be attuned to beauty involves a shift away from my feelings about the world and toward the feeling in the world and the world as felt in me. 

The ability to feel is synonymous with being alive. “The truth of a thing,” said filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, "is in the feel of it, not the think of it." In the modern world, we have given a lot of time to disciplining our thinking and hardly any to amplifying our capacity to feel. But beauty’s kinship with life is disclosed through feeling and so the practice of beauty involves training ourselves to feel the rush of relations that support life. 

It also involves familiarity with the relational patterns that intensify the energy embodied in forms. Through his daily practice, Alexander found fifteen such patterns, including boundaries, rhythm, contrast, and strong centers that appear in both the human-made world and the natural world. Each pattern enlivens the relations between things. A strong border strengthens both what is enclosed by it and the relation between the one and the many. Think of a garden bed, set off by timber beams; the inside plant life is accentuated while the plant bed as a whole contributes more forcefully to the overall landscape. Attention to these intensifying patterns unites the receptivity of feeling with precision. The vividness of life becomes even more apparent. 

The poet Mary Oliver offered these now-famous “instructions for living a life.”  “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” I think of them as a short hand for practicing beauty. Pay attention to the patterns of relations that sustain, generate, and enhance life. Lose yourself in them. And talk about them, even though the words are hard to come by.

It takes practice to break old habits and develop new ones. But practice is not just necessary; it is in itself gratifying. In this time of the great disruptions brought on by the coronavirus, the practice of beauty keeps us centered on the ultimate importance and worth of the world in which we live.

​First Published on Thursday, May 21, 2020 by Common Dreams

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Loren Eiseley and A.N. Whitehead

​Terry Goddard

​The teleology of the Universe is directed toward the production of Beauty.

A. N. Whitehead, Adventures in Ideas

It is obvious that nature, or some part of it in the shape of these seeds, has made plans to travel with me.  Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at all, would be today unrecognizable.

Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey
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From the above two quotations Alfred North Whitehead and Loren Eiseley appear to agree that the universe has a goal or purpose.  They certainly agree that the universe is full of beauty.

Whitehead suggests that it is God that brings about beauty through the creative lure of love.  Eiseley is silent on God and rather seems to see nature’s stretching, extending, reaching out, and adding beauty along the way as a means to survival.  I tend to side with Eiseley and evolution in this case.  For example, Eiseley writes, “… (a seed in) some of the berries, can be covered with a juicy, attractive fruit to lure birds…” and thus extend its life. 

For both Whitehead and Eiseley, beauty plays a significant role in the expansion of life in our world.  Whitehead suggests that beauty is the goal, the purpose of life.  Eiseley, on the other hand, does not claim that beauty is the goal of life (being an evolutionist), he sees beauty as an important aspect of the struggle for survival and for the expansion of life.  A wonderful example of this comes from Eiseley’s essay, “How Flowers Changed the World”.  He points out that “by featherdown attachments, as in dandelion or milkweed seed, (the seed) can be wafted upward on gusts and ride the wind for miles; …”  Who of us, as a child or maybe even today, hasn’t picked a dandelion and blown on the featherdowns to watch the seedlings float off on their journey to spread beauty?  This passage from Eiseley evokes in me not just the memories of childhood but the feelings as well.  If I close my eyes, I can see the little featherdowns drifting on the wind currents lifting higher and higher. 

Whitehead describes beauty as harmony but a harmony of diversity.  Patricia Adams Farmer talks of this harmony of diversity in the music of Mozart.  Farmer notes that one of Mozart’s greatest works, Symphony No. 41, is a “Harmony of Harmonies” mixing beauty and pathos.  The symphony is a blend of five melodies.   Yet the beauty and diversity of the music was the result of Mozart’s personal suffering and personal tragedy; he was suffering from the death of a child and he was mired in poverty.  Symphony No. 41 then is a monument to beauty and tragedy.  Whitehead also suffered the loss of a child, and yet he was able to affirm a God that lovingly lures the Universe to adding greater beauty and value to life.  Jay McDaniel puts it this way:

“But God's power is not absolute.  What happens in the dance (of co-creativity) as a whole is an outcome of divine creativity and the universe's creativity, not divine creativity alone.  Process thinkers call this the co-creativity of God and the Universe.  Co-creativity can result in tragedy as well as joy, horror as well as beauty.  In process theology God, understood as the lead dancer, is always trying to guide the world into joy and beauty, not tragedy and horror.  God is good.”

Others, like Eiseley, find this harmony, this creativity, in the vast diversity of the natural world.  However, both Eiseley and Whitehead agree that beauty, harmony, and diversity contain intense feelings.  In fact, for Whitehead, intense feelings are the source of new creation.  Moreover, with diversity comes the bad as well as the good.  The possibility of evil is part of the diversity of our world.  Evil then adds the element of tragedy to beauty, as both writers note beauty is not all sweet and lovely.  Tragic beauty is clearly expressed in Eiseley’s moving essay – “The Judgement of Birds”.  As the songbirds sing their song of life in the face of death there is no greater beauty.  Yet, like the songbirds, I experience this beauty as a mix of life and death, horror and beauty. 

Eiseley writes of the beauty of nature and the harmony of trees and birds, bees and flowers. Whitehead extends this understanding of beauty to include the aesthetics of art and music as well - the work of human beings. Both Eiseley and Whitehead understand beauty to be beautiful and tragic

If I understand Whitehead’s claim (and I am not certain I do) that “the teleology of the Universe is directed toward the production of Beauty” and that beauty according to Whitehead includes evil and tragedy, then I suppose I am in agreement with at least this part of process thought.  Eiseley’s argument as to intention in the world is more convincing to me, however.  This may be because I find Eiseley simpler to understand than I find Whitehead.  Little seeds clinging to Eiseley’s socks or to a bear’s back, hitching a ride in hopes of extending their life or dandelion featherdowns floating on the winds in hopes of finding an accommodating landing spot to grow and in the process  spreading beauty is a wonderful thought.  Eiseley, however, does not omit tragedy or violence as is evident in many of his works - most beautifully expressed in “Judgement of the Birds”.  Nor does Eiseley dismiss the possibility of intentionality in nature.  “It is obvious,” he writes, “that nature, or some part of it in the shape of these seeds (clinging to his socks and jacket as he walks through a field), has intentions beyond this field and has made plans to travel with me.”  And what a ride it is!

​The Beauty of Justice

Patricia Adams Farmer

When Things Get Torn
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The delicate beauty of diversity tears easily. And when the tearing and ripping begins, it's hard to stop. People who need something to tear apart jump in and "help" until what was once a precious gift lies in piles of shredded remnants, soon to be swept away and buried. At least they hope so.

This is what it feels like to me as I witness ugly images of police brutality against people of color. The fragile paper on which a human's life story is being written tears with the force of a single, brutal gesture. Laws, Amendments, and the Constitution itself are all shredded in that moment. The Bible, too.

Jim Wallis, founder editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine, remembers a time in seminary when he and some friends performed an experiment. They took a Bible and tore out all the passages having to do with God’s special care for the poor, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the stranger – those who were on the outside looking in. The result of this experiment? There was hardly anything left. They discovered that justice is the thread holding the whole narrative together.

Boundaries and Better Angels

Justice holds the whole world together, too, even if only a dream or a vision. I read mysteries—perhaps consume is a better word for it. Why do I devour them, one after the other? Because of my craving for justice. When we give ourselves over to a spirituality that rests on "love your neighbor as yourself," we expand the boundaries of our souls to include everyone as our neighbor. We know the
depravities of human nature -- that much is clear these days -- but we also know our "better angels," too, and so passionately call for fairness and justice to rise up and win the day.

The war between our baser instincts of exclusion and our "better angels" goes on within each of us. Spirituality helps nurture those better angels and relax the boundaries of our compassion and care.

The Beauty of Justice

A beautiful world is a just world -- by definition. The word "fairness" is another name for justice. Fairness in the sense of "fair play" comes from the aesthetic notion of the beautiful. The Greeks expressed justice with their own concepts of proportion and symmetry. Aristotle likened justice to a perfect cube. Beauty, then, by its very nature, beckons us toward justice, or as John Rawls stated: "a symmetry of everyone's relations to each other."

May this symmetry of relational beauty -- the thing we call justice -- find a central place in our spiritual and social lives. May the healing power of justice mend the torn places before our spiritual values are shredded and buried. It is up to us -- we who still have the power to act, to dream, to vote.