Why the Lack of Beauty is Destroying Society

Beauty’s disappearance is portrayed as a direct driver of cultural decline and personal immorality, because beauty is treated as an essential human good that awakens moral passions rather than a luxury for taste. The argument traces a line from Roger Scruton’s 2009 warning about a “cult of ugliness” to today’s built environment, arts, and entertainment—claiming that when beauty fades, people increasingly chase either shocking disorder or sterile novelty, and that shift corrodes character.

The core claim rests on a philosophical framework: beauty, alongside truth and goodness, is an “ultimate value” pursued for its own sake. But beauty is also said to be necessary for living well. Without it, people become mentally, emotionally, and spiritually impoverished. Beauty matters because it activates the passions—felt responses that can’t be reduced to knowing facts or choosing what’s good. Drawing on John Mark Miral and Friedrich Nietzsche, the transcript argues that aesthetic experience produces a sense of strength, fullness, and longing to become more virtuous. In this view, beauty doesn’t merely please; it morally disciplines. Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic torso of Apollo” is used to illustrate how beauty can feel like it “sees” the observer, exposing flaws and issuing a demand to change one’s life.

That moral demand is also presented as the reason many people flee beauty. Scruton’s description of aesthetic judgment as an “affliction” frames a psychological pattern: rather than meet ideals, people try to chew away judgment by turning aesthetic experience against itself. The transcript links this to a preference for content that surprises through shock rather than wonder. Wonder is defined as surprise mixed with admiration—something unexpected yet fitting. When surprise is pursued in isolation from order, it “instantly turns into perversion,” leading to desensitization and a need for ever more extreme stimuli. Examples include sexual fetishism, dysfunctional reality TV, and horror movies, alongside a theatrical trend described by Robert Bolt: moving from beauty toward an appetite for scandal that ends in performers screaming obscenities.

A second escape route is described as seeking order without surprise—especially in architecture. Roger Scruton’s “cult of utility” is invoked to argue that modern buildings prioritize function and cost over aesthetic richness, producing monotony that deadens passions. Le Corbusier is quoted calling for ancient cities’ spires and cathedrals to be shattered and replaced by skyscrapers, and the transcript contrasts what future generations might visit with what people flock to see today, like Notre Dame Cathedral.

The decline is then connected to religion, but with a twist: the transcript suggests the deeper problem may not be the loss of religious authority or doctrine, but the disappearance of beauty that once accompanied living faith. The story of Prince Vladimir the Great’s envoys is offered as evidence—reports from Constantinople emphasize not strict theory or punishment, but overwhelming beauty that made them feel as if “God dwells among men.” The conclusion is that beauty can motivate salvation and moral formation even beyond religious belief, so what society needs most is not a revival of religion alone, but a revival of beauty—one that has the courage to accept the moral demands beauty places on people.