On beauty
Beauty lies at the heart of cultural, architectural and environmental progress, argues Ben Rogers, so why are policymakers still so wary of it?
The RSA has a new strapline: '21st century enlightenment'. This invites us to look back to the first Enlightenment, a movement characterised by its optimistic belief that reason, properly used and applied, could lead to the betterment of the human condition. Progress, learning, reform, fellowship, liberty and happiness were its watchwords. Where was beauty in this mix, and would modern enlightenment care?
You don't have to look far to see that beauty was central to Enlightenment thinking. Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Smith and Kant all took it for granted that one important measure of progress was that made in the arts, or what was sometimes called 'taste'. More practically, the influence of Enlightenment thinking can be seen in attempts to improve taste - to 'spread beauty around' - through educational reform and the promotion of literature, music, art and, perhaps above all, (neo-classical) architecture. The RSA's own House, designed by leading Scottish Enlightenment architect Robert Adam, embodies this confident - or was it conceited? - commitment to beauty.
The social and political reformists of the 19th and early 20th century tended to have a strong cultural agenda. For John Ruskin and his followers, social reform was inseparable from architectural transformation. John Maynard Keynes, a founder of the Arts Council, was perhaps the last really important British thinker to place cultural progress and, in particular, the promotion of beauty at the heart of his understanding of human improvement. 
What about today? As Simon Jenkins, chairman of the National Trust, and Conservative minister Oliver Letwin have noted, we are wary of using the 'B word' in public, particularly when it comes to public policy. It is true that the government recognises and provides special protection for 'Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty', but this is an exception. Planning guidance does not refer to beauty, preferring terms such as 'high-quality development' and 'good design'. Politicians virtually never invoke it. Public justification for investment in architecture and design, in conserving the natural environment, in heritage or in the arts is invariably in terms of its contribution to more hard-headed and measurable goods: sustainability, inclusion, wellbeing and economic growth.
The sources of our embarrassment about beauty are complex. Powerful strands of utilitarianism in our culture may not help. Beauty, after all, is meant to be in the 'eye of the beholder', too subjective to serve as the basis for public policy. Perhaps most seriously, it is claimed that 'ordinary' people do not value beauty. Any politician who talks about beauty opens himself or herself up to a charge of snobbery. And not completely without reason: cultured elites can use their 'superior' understanding and access to culture and beauty as a way of maintaining privilege.
Perhaps elites are responsible in other ways. Artists, architects and philosophers stopped talking about beauty in part for the reasons above and in part because, to those with an avant-garde temperament, it felt old-fashioned and bourgeois. 'Beautification' has negative connotations because it denotes the superficial concern with appearance over function, integrity and other 'deeper' values. It seems we have something of a comedy of misunderstanding here, with policymakers thinking that beauty does not matter to the artists and designers, and artists and designers thinking it does not matter to policymakers. Both, meanwhile, remain sure that it does not matter to 'ordinary people'.
Glimpses of the ideal
Yet beauty is a respectable concept and is again receiving more attention. The Canadian philosopher Glenn Parsons characterises beauty as “that which pleases in virtue of its perfection”; we experience beauty when we are confronted with something that we would not know how to improve. He adds that the perfection associated with beauty is of a surprising kind, where, given the circumstances, a thing should not really be so good.
Meanwhile, philosopher Matthew Kieran argues that the value of beauty is not reducible to its contribution to happiness: “It is because we care about and respond to beauty for its own sake that any further beneficial side effects arise.” Nevertheless, beauty, by putting us in touch with an extraordinary, unworldly perfection, helps reconcile us to the world's imperfections, struggles and sorrows. “We seem,” Parsons writes, “to have a psychological need for this glimpse of the ideal, perhaps as a reminder that, despite the imperfections of the world around us, it does after all exist.” Put like this, we can begin to understand the value of beauty and its contribution to human wellbeing. We have reason to (re)classify the experience of beauty as among the great goods of human life.
Over the past eight months, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Ipsos MORI have been exploring the public's attitudes to beauty and their implication for public policy. When people are asked about beauty, their responses indicate that they do value it. The first things that come to mind involve fashion and models or investing in our appearance and homes. But the place of beauty in people's lives goes well beyond this. We can identify a deeper and more important beauty in art and music, in the built environment (old and new) and, perhaps most importantly, in nature. People make old-age associations between beauty and moral virtue or personal integrity. I was surprised that hardly anyone associated beauty with terms such as 'snobbish', 'frivolous' or 'expensive'.
A question of taste
Judgements about beauty do differ, but not perhaps as profoundly as we might assume. As Kiernan pointed out at one CABE-AHRC discussion, almost everyone agrees that an iPhone is more beautiful than the average mobile phone. Almost everyone agrees that Chartres is more beautiful than Westminster Abbey, or the Gherkin more beautiful (or less ugly) than the NatWest Tower.
But shared standards only get us so far. There remain real differences in judgement, especially where modern art and architecture are concerned. This does not, however, scupper the argument that 21st century enlightenment should take beauty - and its distribution - more seriously. After all, we differ on other things. The mark of an enlightened society is its ability to resolve differences in a reasonable way. This means that decisions about how to allocate resources among different goods are made on the basis of the best available evidence and after due democratic deliberation. It means that decisions about the built environment should be made through a planning process that is open and deliberative.
We already know that, for some years, there is going to be less public money to invest in our natural and built environment, and in culture. That is a cause for concern, but not despair: new technologies enable a more constructive and participative planning process. 'Big Society' initiatives such as more support for community groups, volunteers and charities could further enhance the contribution that these already make to the environment and culture.
The public is more sensitive than ever before to the limits of narrowly economistic approaches to growth. Arguably, we are less tolerant of poor-quality developments and degraded environments. The trick will be to find ways of ensuring that cutting the deficit does not become an excuse for lowering standards of publicly funded development and letting anything through the planning system. It does not always cost more, even in the short run, to make something beautiful rather than ugly.
Ben Rogers is an associate Fellow of the Institute for Public Policy Research and Demos. CABE and the AHRC are launching an initiative called 'People and Places' this autumn, which will include essays by Matthew Kieran and Glenn Parsons.
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