Not beholden to beauty

In a first discussion of Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si' in the "Religion and Ecology" class, I struck out by drawing the classes' attention to the repeated references to beauty (¶¶11, 12, 34, 45, 53, 79, 97, 103, 112, 150, 215, 235, 238, 241, 243) throughout a work whose main concerns are the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor (¶49). Here's the place where its significance is made most clear.

How could one object to calls to ensure all people have opportunities to experience beauty in their lives, an escape from waste, pollution and uniformity? But it turns out "beauty" is a loaded term for at least those students who spoke up. One thought that the natural response to beauty is to try to own it, like a private beach - which of course the rest of us would thus never get to see, not to mention the poor. Others thought it would be swiftly turned into a brand, that a person who thought something beautiful would try to sell others on it. Another complained about the banal clichés of beautiful this and beautiful that, sunsets and the like. Others felt that judgments of beauty are all subjective anyway, varying from person to person. It started to seem like none thought they might happen on a beauty that wasn't a trap someone had set for them.

I'm not sure what to make of this, except that it makes me very sad somehow. The consumer economy and new media have ruined something very precious. One need not buy into the Kantian understanding of the beautiful to feel that robbing a generation of trust in their experiences of beauty excludes them (or perhaps results from their exclusion from) from communities of shared judgment, appreciation, admiration. Laudato Si' worries that that "ecological conversion" our world needs ust be based on experiences of interdependence, community, local culture, creative work and mutual care which the "practical relativism" (¶122) of the technoscientific utilitarian order devalues and undermines. Too true, even for people yearning for more.