What happened to our appreciation of beauty?

Declining appreciation of beauty: Everyone on Facebook, other social media or in the slightest touched by what is being presented in the media must be aware of it. Society is on a downward slide with respect to many things:

• From peace into war;
• From the constant search for knowledge to the dumbing-down of society;
• From the raising of consciousness and awareness to numbing them with drugs;
• From honing and uplifting the senses to assaulting them;
• From enjoying human life and what it has to offer to the drive to vilify it as a curse and even to eradicate it on a massive, industrial scale;
• From beauty and harmony to ugliness and discord – in music, visual arts, performing arts, poetry, fashion, architecture, and so on;
• From the love of humans to being obsessed with animals;
• From the appreciation of the beauty of the human body to destroying it through body modifications; ….

The list is virtually endless and limited only by the imagination. It is as if a dark force is at work in the world, trying to obliterate – and succeeding to eradicate – much or even everything the Renaissance brought, to bring an end not only to the human spirit but to human evolution and even to humanity itself.

Some may not wish to agree with that assessment, but can anyone who disagrees explain, for instance, why musical pieces such as the one linked to here, Albinoni: Adagio in G minor, are not at the top of the pop charts?

Some others present evidence that, they feel, proves that the promotion of ugliness, chaos, blood, gore and death is deliberate. Looking, for instance, at what is being presented on television these days, it is difficult to disagree with them. It is hardly possible that the descent into primitivity in television is coming about by accident. Consider:

The people of North America and Western Europe now accept a level of ugliness in their daily lives which is almost without precedent in the history of Western civilization. Most of us have become so inured, that the death of millions from starvation and disease draws from us no more than a sigh, or a murmur of protest. Our own city streets, home to legions of the homeless, are ruled by Dope, Inc., the largest industry in the world, and on those streets Americans now murder each other at a rate not seen since the Dark Ages.

At the same time, a thousand smaller horrors are so commonplace as to go unnoticed. Our children spend as much time sitting in front of television sets as they do in school, watching with glee, scenes of torture and death which might have shocked an audience in the Roman Coliseum. Music is everywhere, almost unavoidable—but it does not uplift, nor even tranquilize—it claws at the ears, sometimes spitting out an obscenity. Our plastic arts are ugly, our architecture is ugly, our clothes are ugly. There have certainly been periods in history where mankind has lived through similar kinds of brutishness, but our time is crucially different. Our post-World War II era is the first in history in which these horrors are completely avoidable. Our time is the first to have the technology and resources to feed, house, educate, and humanely employ every person on earth, no matter what the growth of population. Yet, when shown the ideas and proven technologies that can solve the most horrendous problems, most people retreat into implacable passivity. We have become not only ugly, but impotent….

More: “The Frankfurt School and ‘Political Correctness’ “, by Michael Minnicino