Why Beauty is Good for Us

We are drawn to natural beauty by spiritual (or psychological) instinct. We can be culturally trained to ignore or even despise natural beauty, and such training always serves dubious purposes -- usually to encourage or condition people to settle for or endure an ugly existence. I deal not in superficialities here. I'm not talking about beauty as defined in magazines and movies. I also do not confine myself to visual beauty, nor even a single standard of beauty. Beauty can be intellectual as well as physical, sensory as well as imaginative. Art, if it is honest, can be another aspect of what I speak, for if we are in touch with Nature (including that within ourselves), we express Nature. Thought art is technically "artificial", if it is inspired it is not artificial in the sense of being false. There are many people who have been desensitized to beauty, and programmed to fixate on culturally negotiated concepts of beauty that do not uplift the spirit. There are people who can be shown a meadow or a forest or a river passing through a beautiful dale, and they will feel nothing. In cases where the person is not in some way mentally damaged or congenitally wanting, the root cause of this lack of responsiveness may lie in the fact that their culture has trained them to commidify all elements of existence. Material value is all with such people. The training may have begun in childhood through something as simple as physical deprivation from Nature, but surely it has been actively ingrained beginning with adolescence. The concept of Nature as having an intrinsic, independent, even magical value is something emotionally real to children; not only did I experience it as a child, but I have seen it repeatedly occur in children during my adulthood. The divorce of our nature from Nature happens as a consequence of what is presented to us as a "mature" and "realistic" attitude toward the natural world. De-spiritualized societies institutionalize this training. That it is not healthy can be construed not merely from the heedless damage we do to our very living environment in our current age. Conversely, there is also the positive evidence that love and respect for Nature exists on a society-wide level among tribal groups where the psychological health of the entire group remains a priority of survival as much as the acquisition of material necessities for group success. The divorce from Nature seems to coincide in the evolution of civilization at the same time that ideologues encourage a divorce from the natural affinities between human beings that otherwise naturally arise out of sharing a common social purpose. Just as human societies begin to parasitize Nature, one can detect parasitization of certain social groups upon others within that society. Where one finds a respect for Nature and a responsible use of its gifts. one finds a similar respect for and just compensation toward the fellow members of the society so collectively engaged. In such circumstances one also inevitably discovers a deep appreciation of Nature for its quality of beauty, and personal artistic evocations of that appreciation accompany this -- though never of one single standard from one such culture or person to another, for Nature itself is infinitely complex in its beauty. We must first teach our children to not be ashamed of their love of Nature's beauty (which lies in its movements, sounds and scents, as well as appearance), and other more broadly beneficial behaviors will inevitably follow. From the seed of a child's simple love of Nature's beauty will follow the positive and informed associations necessary for a mature sponsoring of our biosphere's survival.