The Monist, 2018, 101, 9–16

doi: 10.1093/monist/onx031
Article

Why Beauty Matters

Roger Scruton*
ABSTRACT
Judgments of beauty are neither subjective nor arbitrary, and are a necessary part of
practical reasoning in any attempt to harmonise our activities and ways of life with
those of our neighbours. The creation of a neighbourhood, a place, a home, or any
other settlement in which people of different occupations and views reside side by side
involves coordination of a kind that only aesthetic judgment can reliably achieve. And
that is why judgment of that kind exists, and why a rational being who has no grasp of
it is incapacitated.

I
In the United Kingdom the state, in the form either of local or of central govern-
ment, has wide-ranging powers through planning and building laws and statutory
instruments to tell you whether you can or cannot build on land that you own.
And if it permits you to build, it will stipulate not only the purposes for which you
may use the building, but also how it should look, and what materials should be
used to construct it. U.S. citizens are used to building regulations that enforce utili-
tarian standards: insulation, smoke alarms, electrical safety, the size and situation of
bathrooms, and so on. But they are not used to being told what aesthetic principles
to follow, or what the neighbourhood requires by way of materials and architec-
tural details. I suspect that many Americans would regard such stipulations as a
radical violation of property rights, and evidence of the state’s illegitimate
expansion.
This American attitude has something healthy about it: but it tends to go with
two quite erroneous assumptions about beauty and the aesthetic. The first assump-
tion is that beauty is an entirely subjective matter, about which there can be no rea-
soned argument and concerning which it is futile to search for a consensus. The
second assumption, congenial to those who adopt the first, is that beauty doesn’t
matter, that it is a value without economic reality, and which cannot be allowed to
place any independent constraint on the workings of the market.
The first assumption, that beauty is subjective, owes much of its appeal to the fact
that it is functional in a democratic culture. By making this assumption you avoid

*University of Buckingham

C The Author, 2018. Published by Oxford University Press.

V
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giving offence to the one whose taste differs from yours. He likes garden gnomes, il-
luminated Christmas displays, Bing Crosby singing ‘White Christmas’ and a thou-
sand other things that are liable to send shudders down the educated spine. But
that’s his taste, and he is entitled to it. Leave him to enjoy it and he will leave you to
get on with listening to Beethoven quartets, collecting antiques, and designing your
house in the style of Palladio. But sometimes the assumption becomes dysfunctional.
Each year his illuminated Christmas display increases in size, gets more bright and
obtrusive, and lasts longer. Eventually his house is an all-year round Christmas tree,
with Santa protruding from the chimney and brightly shining reindeer on the lawn.
To be honest, the sight is insufferable, and entirely spoils the view from your win-
dow. You retaliate by playing Wagner late at night, only to receive blasts of Bing
Crosby in the early hours. Here is the democratic culture at work—on its way to mu-
tual destruction.
This kind of thing has been felt strongly in Europe, and it is one of the reasons
for the reaction against McDonalds. While everyone has a right to advertise his
wares, the advertisement must not spoil the place on which it shines. And American
adverts seem invariably designed to do just that. Maybe they don’t have that effect in
America: after all, it is hard to see how the average American main street can be
spoiled by an illuminated sign or by anything else. But the main streets of European
cities are the result of meticulous aesthetic decisions over centuries. Do we really
want the double yellow arches competing with the arches of St Mark’s?
That question might prompt us to revise the assumption that beauty is subjective.
Aesthetic judgements may look subjective when you are wandering in the aesthetic
desert of Waco or Las Vegas. In the old cities of Europe, however, you discover what
happens when people are guided by a shared tradition which not only makes aes-
thetic judgement central, but also lays down standards that govern what everybody
does. And in Venice or Prague, in Bath, Oxford, or Lisbon, you come to see that
there is all the difference in the world between aesthetic judgement treated as an ex-
pression of individual taste, and aesthetic judgement treated in the opposite way, as
the expression of a community. Maybe we see beauty as subjective only because we
have given the wrong place to aesthetic judgement in our lives—seeing it as a way of
affirming ourselves, instead of a way of denying ourselves.

II
There is a parallel here with manners. Even if Americans feel entitled to build as they
wish, they don’t feel entitled to behave as they wish towards their neighbours. On
the contrary, America’s is a culture in which manners are of supreme importance,
and recognised as the ultimate guarantee of peaceful coexistence. Americans greet
their neighbours, speak politely, and are generally smiling. If someone bumps into
you in the street you apologise; you cannot take leave of anyone, not even a stranger,
without wishing him a wonderful day. And courtesy is the ruling principle of all busi-
ness dealings. In short, American manners exist so that people will fit in, not stand
out. They are ways in which individuality is suppressed, and a lingua franca of con-
formist gestures adopted in its stead. And this has a function, namely to protect the

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private from the public, to ensure that each person is secure within his space, and
that the public realm is minimally threatening.
When it comes to beauty, our view of its status is radically affected by whether we
see it as a form of self-expression, or as a form of self-denial. If we see it in this sec-
ond way, then the assumption that it is merely subjective begins to fall away. Instead
beauty begins to take on another character, as one of the instruments in our
consensus-building strategies, one of the values through which we construct and be-
long to a shared and mutually consoling world. In short, it is part of building a home.
We can see this clearly if we look at the rituals and customs of family life.
Consider what happens when you lay the table for a meal. This is not just a utilitar-
ian event. If you treat it as such, the ritual will disintegrate, and the family members
will end up grabbing individual portions to eat on their own. The table is laid accord-
ing to precise rules of symmetry, choosing the right cutlery, the right plates, the right
jugs and glasses. Everything is meticulously controlled by aesthetic norms, and those
norms convey some of the meaning of family life.
The pattern on a willow-pattern plate, for example, has been fixed over centuries,
and speaks of tranquillity, of gentleness, and of things that remain forever the same.
Very many ordinary objects on the table have been, as it were, polished by domestic
affection. Their edges have been rubbed off, and they speak in subdued, unpreten-
tious tones of belonging. Serving the food is ritualised too, and you witness in the
family meal the continuity of manners and aesthetic values. You witness another con-
tinuity too, between aesthetic values and the emotion that the Romans knew as pi-
ety—the recognition that the world is in other than human hands. Hence the gods
are present at mealtimes, and Christians precede their eating with a grace, inviting
God to sit down among them before they sit down themselves, Jews begin the meal
with a blessing, and Muslims invoke the name of Allah, the compassionate, the
merciful.
That example tells us a lot about aesthetic judgement and the pursuit of beauty.
In particular it shows the centrality of beauty to home-building, and therefore to
establishing a shared environment. When the motive of sharing arises, we look for
norms and conventions that we can all accept. We leave behind our private appetites
and subjective preferences in order to achieve a consensus that will provide a public
background to what we are and what we do. In such circumstances aesthetic dis-
agreements are not comfortable disagreements like disagreements over taste in food
(which are not so much disagreements as differences). When it comes to the built
environment we should not be surprised that aesthetic disagreements are the sub-
jects of fierce litigation and legislative enforcement—even in America, where each
person is sovereign in his land.
We can reject the assumption that beauty is merely subjective without embracing
the view that it is objective. The distinction between subjective and objective is nei-
ther clear nor exhaustive. I prefer to say that judgements of beauty express rational
preferences about matters in which the agreement of others is both sought and valued.
They are not so very different, in those respects, from moral judgements, and often
concern similar themes—as when we criticise works of art for their obscenity, cru-
elty, or sentimentality. Just how far we can go down the path of rational discussion
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depends upon what we think of the second assumption, namely, that beauty doesn’t
matter.

II I
This returns me to the case of my neighbour’s house, with its kitsch decorations and
ghastly illuminated tableaus. These things matter to him; and they matter to me. My
desire to get rid of them is as great as his desire to retain them—maybe even greater,
given that my taste, unlike his, is deeply rooted in a desire to fit in with my surround-
ings. So here is one proof that beauty matters—and also that the attempt to coordi-
nate our tastes is vital to sharing our home, our town, and our community.
In that case, however, there has to be a place for aesthetic judgement in the plan-
ning and building of cities. Jane Jacobs’s celebrated work, The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, published in 1961, announces its purpose in its opening paragraph:
“[This book] is an attack on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, ortho-
dox, city planning and rebuilding.”1 She goes on to argue that cities should develop
spontaneously and organically, so as to enshrine in their contours the unintended
results of the consensual transactions between their residents. Only then will they fa-
cilitate the peaceful evolution of urban life. A true city is built by its residents, in that
every aspect of it reflects something that results from what uncountably many resi-
dents have wanted, rather than something that a few self-appointed experts have
planned. And that is the aspect of old Rome, Siena, or Istanbul that most appeals to
the modern traveller. Some urbanists interpret Jacobs’s argument as showing that
aesthetic values can be left to look after themselves; others, on the contrary, have
insisted that her examples really derive their force from the aesthetic values that she
smuggles in as side-constraints.
We should certainly recognize that the old cities whose organic complexity Jacobs
admired show the mark of planning: not comprehensive planning, certainly, but the
insertion, into the fabric of the city, of localised forms of symmetry and order, like
the Piazza Navona in Rome, or the Suleimaniye mosque and its precincts in Istanbul.
And those are projects entirely motivated and controlled by aesthetic values. The
principal concern of the architects was to fit in to an existing urban fabric, to achieve
local symmetry within the context of an historically given settlement. No greater aes-
thetic catastrophe has struck our cities—European just as much as American—than
the modernist idea that a building should stand out from its surroundings, to become
a declaration of its own originality.
As much as the home, cities depend upon good manners; and good manners re-
quire the modest accommodation to neighbours rather than the arrogant assertion
of apartness. The architects who win the big commissions today—Frank Gehry,
Richard Rogers, Daniel Liebeskind, Norman Foster—are people who design build-
ings like the Centre Beaubourg in Paris or the Guggenheim Museum in Barcelona,
which stand apart from their surroundings, islands of Ego in a sea of Us. Foster has
lighted in his travels upon the lovely eighteenth-century city of Lisbon and taken of-
fence at its level architecture, which never rises above the height of an aristocratic
palace, and concentrates all attention on the place where human life occurs, which is
the street. He is therefore campaigning to build a large glass tower above the city, so
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as to provide a centre of attention in a place whose beauty arises precisely from the
fact that attention is not centred but dispersed.2
Jane Jacobs’s target was not stylistic rudeness, however, but functionalism, accord-
ing to which buildings are dictated by their purposes, so as to remain wedded to
those purposes forever. Since there is, in human life, no such thing as ‘forever’, the
result is buildings that stand derelict after twenty years, and indeed whole cities
which are abandoned as wasteland when the local industry dies. This effect is exacer-
bated in America by the zoning laws, which banish industry to one part of town, offi-
ces to another part, and shopping to another, leaving the residential areas deserted in
the daytime, and without the principal hubs of social communication. A city gov-
erned by zoning laws dies at the first economic shock—and we have seen this effect
from Buffalo to Tampa, as areas of the city first lose their function, then become van-
dalised, and finally provide the sordid background to scenes of violence and decay.
By clearing the city centre of residents, American zoning laws leave it unguarded,
prey to every kind of nomadism and occupied by buildings that can never adapt to
social and economic change. The law of ethology, which tells us that maladaptation
is the prelude to extinction, applies also to the American city, of which there are few
remaining examples.
Furthermore, functionalist building styles, which appropriate whole blocks, or
thrust jagged corners in the way of pedestrians, prevent the emergence of the princi-
pal public space, which is the street. Streets, with doors than open on to them from
houses that smile at them, are the arteries and veins, the lungs and digestive tracts of
the city—the channels through which all communication flows. A street in which
people live, work, and worship renews itself as life renews itself; it has eyes to watch
over it, and shared forms of life to fill it. Nothing is more important than the defence
of the street against expressways and throughways, against block development, and
against zoning provisions that forbid genuine settlement.
Jacobs’s ideas have shared the fate of every prophecy in recorded history, which is
to be ignored until it is too late to act on them. Her message has been taken up
and refined in recent years by James Howard Kunstler who, in The Geography of
Nowhere, describes the aesthetic and moral disaster of American urbanisation, as the
zoning laws drive people constantly further from their places of work and recreation,
leaving the abandoned wreckage of fleeting businesses in their wake. Part of the
problem, as he analyses it, is the failure of urban planning to observe the values of
place-making. He writes:

[T]he collective memory of what used to make a landscape or a townscape or

even a suburb humanly rewarding has nearly been erased. The culture of good
place-making, like the culture of farming, or agriculture, is a body of knowledge
and acquired skills. It is not bred in the bone, and if it is not transmitted from
one generation to the next it is lost.

Does the modern profession called urban planning have anything to do with
making good places anymore? Planners no longer employ the vocabulary of
civic art, nor do they find the opportunity to practice it—the term civic art
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itself has nearly vanished in common usage. . . . All the true design questions
. . . were long ago “solved” by civil engineers and their brethren and written
into the municipal zoning codes. These mechanistic “solutions” work only by
oversimplifying problems and isolating them from the effect they have on the
landscape and on people’s behaviour.3

Kunstler has also gone on to argue (in The Long Emergency) that suburbaniza-
tion—which is the only consensual solution to the disaster—is unsustainable, and
that America is preparing an extended emergency for itself when the oil runs out.4

IV
Whether or not you go along with Kunstler’s doom scenario, the question that
Jacobs has bequeathed to us remains. How do we get out of the mess? If the problem
is planning, how can we plan to avoid it? And is there no distinction between a good
plan and a bad plan? Wasn’t Venice planned, after all, and Ephesus, and Bath, and a
thousand other triumphs of urbanisation? Perhaps the wisest response to Jacobs’s ar-
gument therefore is to point to the distinction between goals and side-constraints.
Although a free economy is needed if we are to solve the problem of economic coor-
dination, freedom must be contained, and it is contained by law. Legal side-
constraints ensure that cheats will not prosper. Likewise with the city: there must be
planning; but it should be envisaged negatively, as a system of side-constraints, rather
than positively, as a way of ‘taking charge’ of what happens and where.
And here, it seems to me, is where beauty matters and how. Over time people es-
tablish styles, patterns, and vocabularies which perform, in the building of cities, the
same function as good manners between neighbours. A ‘neighbour’, according to the
Anglo-Saxon etymology, is one who ‘builds nearby’. The buildings that go up in our
neighbourhood matter to us in just the way that our neighbours matter. They de-
mand our attention, and shape our lives. They can overwhelm us or soothe us; they
can be an alien presence or a home. And the function of aesthetic values in the prac-
tice of architecture is to ensure that the primary requirement of every building is
served—namely, that it should be a fitting member of a community of neighbours.
Buildings need to fit in, to stand appropriately side by side; they are subject to the
rule of good manners just as much as people are. This is the real reason for the im-
portance of tradition in architecture—that it conveys the kind of practical knowledge
that is required by neighbourliness.
Architecture is not like poetry, music, or painting—an art that belongs in the
world of leisure and luxury. It survives regardless of its aesthetic merit, and is only
rarely the expression of creative genius. There are great works of architecture and of-
ten, like the churches of Mansart or Borromini, they are the work of a single person.
But most works of architecture are not great and should not aspire to be so, any
more than ordinary people should lay claim to the privileges of genius when convers-
ing with their neighbours. What matters in architecture is the emergence of a learn-
able vernacular style—a common language that enables buildings to stand side by
side without offending each other.

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The American towns were built using standard parts derived from the 3000 year
old tradition which we know as ‘classicism’. The old pattern-books (such as those
published by Asher Benjamin in Boston in 1797 and 1806, and which are responsible
for the once agreeable nature of the New England towns, Boston included) offered
precedents to builders, forms which had pleased and harmonised, and which could
be relied upon not to spoil or degrade the streets in which they were placed. That is
what we see in the streets of old Europe: not the imposition of some overall propor-
tion or outline, but the organic growth of a street from the repetition of matching
details. The failure of modernism, in my view, lies not in the fact that it has produced
no great or beautiful buildings—the Chapel at Ronchamp, and the houses of Frank
Lloyd-Wright abundantly prove the opposite. It lies in the absence of any reliable
patterns or types, which can be used in awkward or novel situations so as spontane-
ously to harmonize with the existing urban decor, and so as to retain the essence of
the street as a common home. The degradation of our cities is the result of a ‘mod-
ernist vernacular’, whose principal device is the stack of horizontal layers, with jutting
and obtrusive corners, built without consideration for the street, without a coherent
facade, and without intelligible relation to its neighbours. In other words, the degra-
dation that we witness, and which is the real cause of the flight to the suburbs, results
from the absence of aesthetic side-constraints.
When there are no such side-constraints the costs should not be reckoned merely
in terms of the uncomfortable and homeless feelings of the people who must work
in the resulting wasteland. The costs are both environmental and economic. The
glass and steel-frame blocks, built without facades and indifferent to alignment with
their neighbours are an ecological disaster. Traditional architecture concentrates on
the generality of form, on details that embody the tacit knowledge of how to live with
a building and adapt to it. Hence traditional architecture in turn adapts to us. It fits
to our uses, and shelters whatever we do. Hence it survives—in the way that
Georgetown in DC, and the nearby Old Town Alexandria in Virginia have survived,
though hampered alas by zoning laws. Modernist architecture cannot change its use,
and architects assume that their buildings will have a life-span of 20 years. Building
with that thought in mind you are not building a settlement, still less a neighbour-
hood. You are constructing an extremely expensive and ecologically destructive tent.
The environmental impact of its demolition is enormous, and the energy that goes
into building it must be spent again on demolishing it and yet again on replacing it.

V
In this respect it is worth also recalling that great human discovery, the window. The
windows of traditional pattern-book houses form agreeable, humanizing details; they
are the eyes of the house. In hot weather they can be opened to let in the breezes,
and ensure a circulation of air. In cold weather they can be closed. They are adorned
with simple mouldings and crowned with architrave and keystone that emphasize
their proportions. They are integrated into the implicit order of the façade, so that it
is easy to find the matching door or attic window that will look right beside them. In
all this we see an accumulation of practical knowledge, which issues from the

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aesthetic side-constraints in something like the way that deals and market transac-
tions issue from good manners.
The windows of modern downtown buildings are not eyes; they do not humanize
the façade; they suggest no form or pattern that could be repeated, and lay no con-
straints on what can and cannot be place beside, above and beneath them. They can-
not be opened in hot weather, and they forbid the circulation of air from outside the
building. The building is therefore dependent on a year-round consumption of en-
ergy, in the winter to heat it, in the summer to cool it, and the stale air that circulates
inside captures and perpetuates the diseases of the inmates—producing that well
known ‘sick building syndrome’ which is responsible for more lost days of work than
any other single cause in modern cities. The result is not just an aesthetic disaster: it
is an ecological disaster too. And it exemplifies an important feature of the modern
world, which is the hard work that is being constantly expended on losing knowl-
edge. The modernist vernacular, which conceives buildings as curtains of tinted glass
raised on invisible scaffolds of concrete and steel, represents both an unusual advance
for ignorance and a giant ecological threat. And architects and their theorists devoted
an immense amount of intellectual labour to achieving this result.
I have concentrated on architecture since it provides such a clear illustration of
the social, environmental, and economic costs of ignoring beauty. But there is an-
other cost too, and it is one that we witness in individual lives as well as in the com-
munity. This is the aesthetic cost. People need beauty. They need the sense of being
at home in their world, and being in communication with other souls. In so many
areas of modern life—in popular music, in television and cinema, in language and lit-
erature—beauty is being displaced by raucous and attention-grabbing clichés. We are
being torn out of ourselves by the loud and insolent gestures of people who want to
seize our attention but to give nothing in return for it. Although this is not the place
to argue the point it should perhaps be said that this loss of beauty, and contempt
for the pursuit of it, is one step on the way to a new form of human life, in which tak-
ing replaces giving, and vague lusts replace real loves.

N O T ES
1. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).
2. See Foster and Partners, “Boavista Lisbon: A Destination and a New Quarter for Design and Culture,”
available at www.fosterandpartners.com.
3. James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-made
Landscape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 113.
4. James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century
(New York: Atlantic, 2005).

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Copyright © 2018 Hegeler Institute.