America the Beautiful

Debating aesthetics with American Founding Father John Adams.

A belated happy 4th of July — and 250th birthday to America!

I often wonder about the relationship between aesthetics and liberalism. (That is to say, the Enlightenment tradition that generated the American Experiment, or “classical liberalism” as distinct from “the left.”) Can artists contribute to liberalism’s vitality?

This is trickier for artists than for polemicists or policymakers, because when artists have passionate ideological commitments, we risk becoming too didactic to create good art, like the hollow social realist paintings from the Soviets. And yet, classical liberalism can’t thrive without a vibrant culture to accompany its ideas and values. I want liberalism to have its version of the breathtaking cathedrals, paintings, and sculptures that ennobled Catholicism, to have its Michelangelo and Raphael.

Artists can become powerful mythmakers, like how film auteur John Ford largely crafted the myth of the American West. In his elegy to that myth, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, he also uplifted classical liberalism through the character of Ranse Stoddard. Ford pulled it off without becoming preachy.

Back in October, I argued against this famous quote on art by American Founding Father John Adams:

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

And I laid out some thoughts about the value of beauty to America — thoughts that I’ve been revisiting over this holiday, and intend to write about again soon. Until then, here I am debating aesthetics with John Adams:

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Also of interest…

John Ford’s American Justice