Transcription
Everything around you is ugly, and the people who made it that way are proud of it. Balenciaga sells destroyed sneakers for $1,850. Shoes designed to look like they came out of a dumpster, and they sell their trash bag purse for $1,790. Yep, looks like a trash bag. Tracy Emin put her dirty unmade bed in a gallery. Stained sheets, used condoms, and bloody underwear on the floor, empty vodka bottles, and cigarette butts. And it sold for two and a half million dollars. Young women with their faces pierced up. Young men with face tattoos, chopped up haircuts. It's all just so ugly. I know it. You know it. Everyone knows it. So, what happened to beauty? The people who did this will tell you themselves. Architects, artists, designers, they brag about tearing down beauty on purpose. The only question is why?
Look, I'm not the guy who thinks everything peaked in 1950. I'm covered in tattoos and wear a t-shirt and jeans. Transport me back a hundred years, I look like a convict serving prison time. So, I get it. Every generation calls the new style ugly. Gothic architecture was considered barbaric. People hated the Eiffel Tower when it went up. The Impressionists were mocked as sloppy amateurs. But, every one of those eras was still trying to build something beautiful. What happened in the 20th century is different. These people decided beauty itself was the enemy.
Roger Scruton made a documentary about this called Why Beauty Matters. Beauty, he said, offers us consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy. He looked at the last 100 years of art and music and architecture and called what's going on right now a cult of ugliness. He showed city after city where beautiful old buildings have been torn down and replaced with concrete towers. And he stood in front of modern buildings designed by architects who said, "Beauty doesn't matter. Only functionality and price." And he pointed out what everybody already knows. The buildings people actually love, the ones they travel across the world to see, are all old. Nobody flies to Paris to look at the newest highly functional high-rise office building. So, we see the ugliness is intentional. And toward the end of the video, we're going to talk about how we as men are supposed to respond and bring back beauty into the world. At the Alpha Path, that's what we're really all about. Bringing about God's design for true masculinity to this world. And so, we're doing a mentorship cohort where we're directly going through all of that. If you're ready to become that type of man, click the link below.
Here's how we know our reaction to the ugly isn't just in our heads. In art, in architecture, and fashion, you can pretend. You can stand in front of Tracey Emin's dirty bed and nod like you see the genius. You can ignore the glass and concrete high-rise on your way to work. What you can't accept is bad music. John Cage composed 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. And here's what was said about it. "This piece challenges traditional notions of music by emphasizing the ambient sounds that occur during the performance." What a bunch of horse crap. Arnold Schoenberg threw out melody and tonality in music altogether. Art critics love Schoenberg and Cage, but no one listens to either by choice. Nobody's driving to work with Schoenberg on. No one puts on John Cage's 4:33 at a party. A song either moves you or it doesn't, and no critic on earth can talk you into listening to something you hate. Every culture on earth makes different music, but beauty is always the objective. Every civilization in history has had a beauty standard. The specifics change, but the existence of one never does. Listen, when a man rejects his biological sex and pretends he's a woman, how does he present himself? He shaves his legs, grows his hair out long, puts on makeup and a dress. Why? Because there's a standard for feminine beauty that he's trying to achieve. He didn't invent something new, he reaches for what everyone already recognizes. That beauty is transcendent beyond mere cultural taste. A standard this universal didn't come from nowhere. So, where does it come from?
The natural world is more beautiful than survival requires. Philosophers call it gratuitous beauty: galaxies no human eye saw until we built telescopes to reach them, colors inside a coral reef a thousand feet below the surface, where no human being was ever meant to see them, bird song more elaborate than any mate requires. A grown man watches a sunset, and something inside him breaks open for no reason that keeps him alive. It's the beauty that moves him. This was God's intent. In the beginning, God made the trees pleasant to the sight before he made them good for food. Genesis 2:9. Psalm 19 says that the heavens declare his glory. Ecclesiastes tells us that God has made everything beautiful in its time. And in Exodus 31, the first man in scripture filled with the spirit of God is Bezalel. And the spirit filled him for craftsmanship and art. Rachel was so beautiful, Jacob worked 14 years for her. Genesis calls Sarah beautiful. It calls Rebecca beautiful. Esther was chosen for her beauty. Scripture itself celebrates a woman's beauty. Man was meant to reflect God's creative vision by making beauty in art and story, music and architecture, craftsmanship, and yes, even fashion. What we're seeing today is a direct rebellion against God's design. Man taking what God made beautiful and degrading it into the grotesque.
There's a story I keep coming back to. In 1 Kings 18, Elijah stood against 450 prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. Each side built an altar and called on their God for fire. The prophets of Baal called all morning and got silence. Elijah mocked them. So, they escalated, cutting their arms and cutting their chests with swords, screaming at a god who was never there until their throats were raw. The false prophets serving false gods disfigured their own bodies as a sacrifice, exchanging the beautiful for the profane in rebellion against the living and true God. The world was created beautiful, but sin corrupted it and brought decay and chaos into creation. Christ stepped into that chaos and began the process of restoration. One of the earliest church fathers, Irenaeus, called this recapitulation, Christ restoring everything Adam lost. And Irenaeus wrote that the glory of God is man fully alive. A man fully alive pursuing beauty, reflecting the God who made him. That is glory. That is what we were made for. Every man carries the image of God within him. When he makes art, writes poems, tells stories, erects buildings, when he pursues the beautiful and transcendent, he reflects the God who made him that way.
How do we change the world? It starts with transforming hearts through the gospel. Everyone who creates ugliness in the world does so because there's ugliness in their own hearts, that rebellion against God. By sharing and demonstrating the love of Christ through our own lives, that's how transformation happens. The world transforms one family at a time. Happy children are children raised in the Lord. A happy wife is a wife led well by a husband who submits himself to Christ. And that radiates outward and brings beauty into the world. The answer isn't prettier paintings or better architecture. Those are just the outward expression. The real restoration happens when the gospel transforms hearts. When a man's heart is changed by Christ, it radiates outward in how he builds, what he creates, how he leads his family, how he treats people. The more Christianity transforms [music] hearts and minds through the world, the more that transformation spreads, and humanity begins to reflect the beauty he was made to create.