60 Second Lectures October 25, 2011

The Greatest Challenge of our Time

To this question of the greatest challenge of our day, I give you not dire
warnings about the need to curb consumerism or the demise of civilized
political debate or the environmental wreckage we currently face, but
something that stands above them in the ways in which ends stand above
means. As I see it, the greatest challenge of our time (or any time, for that
matter is the need for the cultivation of faculties attuned toward the
discernment of beauty, the highest of values and the end toward which all
others serve.
To perceive beauty is to be capable of knowing and e!periencing the
intrinsic worth of created life. "eauty is intrinsic value# to e!perience it, is to
e!perience the worth of things and to know that value is woven within the
very fabric of reality.
Immediate ob$ections to these claims come in the form that beauty is
superficial, frivolous, associated with vanity and a life of selfishness. "ut
these are, at best, half truths%at worst, philistine cries of alarm.
To speak of beauty in the way that I do is not a call to the pursuit of finery
or the hurried and forever restless and cruel task of conforming to
conventional standards. &or is it a distraction from ethical duties. Indeed,
it is the thing that makes us aware of them. It is the thing that drives us to
love and that which pulls us into the full sweep of human and natural life.
"eauty gives rise to care and responsibility. It drives us out of ourselves
and into the world of otherness. "eauty comes to us only through
participation. "ut it comes more fully to those who know that in this
relationship they have no legitimate proprietary interest or titles to beauty.
It is a gift that gives, but what it gives does not belong to us. 'f course,
some will try to take ownership, but those with authentically attuned
faculties stand not with looks of avarice, but with those of gratitude. They
stand in the world open and welcoming, aware of the gratuitous nature of it
all. And here they become caretakers ( not in the way of embalmers or
resentful improvers ( but as those who care for things as they are, fragile
and finite.
&one of this guarantees easy lives of happiness%for many hearts have
been broken by the care for beauty. "ut with all of this (and so much
more, one can recover a sense of trust in the promise that beauty makes)
it is the promise that the beauty we know in our own lives is an indication of
the way things really are# it is the promise that the aim towards beauty is
worth*while, for as much as beauty speaks to the value of the present, it
propels us to concerns for a future greatly beyond the confines of our own
times.
+.Thomas ,owe, -h.