The Society for the Reclamation of Western Beauty is a new organization, but whose ideas on beauty have developed over the years. It aims to study and document the contributions that beauty has made toward our Western civilization, from the earliest records of God’s love of beauty, to a young child who sees beauty almost as soon as he is born. Our civilization thrived, prospered and matured because of beauty. Our great artists, architects, writers, philosophers and scientists have always referred to beauty with awe and wonder. It is in the modern era that beauty began to be undermined and eventually neglected by artists and other intellectual leaders.
The Society for the Reclamation of Western Beauty will investigate the idea that the abandonment of beauty leads to the death of culture, and eventually society, and that modern man’s neglect of beauty has initiated the cult of ugliness, leaving us with bleakness and nihilism.
But, people want beauty. And they will surround themselves with some kind of aesthetic quality. Still, beauty is the business of the knowledgeable. The man on the street may be able to recognize beauty, but he would not be able to explain why it is beautiful. That is the task of the experts.
With The Society for the Reclamation of Western Beauty, we aim to present our ideas, observations and analyses on beauty, and to provide a guide for recommendations on how to remove oneself from the nefarious influences of our beauty-rejecting world. This way, we can build a parallel world which will eventually form a growing movement of beauty-reclaiming individuals, who can start to shape the world where beauty is not minimized and rejected.
Beauty was not only undermined, but eventually abandoned, as a paradigm of civilized life by modern man. Rather than attributing beauty to a Godly goodness, philosophers, writers and artists began to view beauty as their enemy, and as their nemesis. They saw God as a judge who would not let them do as they wished. In order to pursue the image of beauty they desired, they began to look elsewhere. They began to abandon God, and by abandoning God, they began to change their world, filling it with horror and ugliness.
This was not their objective, which was merely to look for a different perspective on beauty and aesthetics. This realization may have come too late, and too weakly, from the cultural leaders, but ordinary people, who cannot make useful inferences, and hence necessary changes, are the most affected by these changes in worldview. They are already incurring changes instinctively, in order to live in a more beautiful world. But they still need an elite to help them materialize their desires and observations.
A new elite that is pro-beauty needs to take the cultural reins, to guide and return our world back to its awe and wonder of beauty. To this end, The Society for Reclamation of Western Beauty will add an element which no other study on beauty has attempted: guidelines on how to renounce this world of anti-beauty, and how to progressively bring beauty back into our culture.
A book with a similar title will be available, which will act as a manifesto for concrete references to these basic ideas. Along with the book, a website has been developed that will be an interactive continuation of the book. On the website, members can post their original articles, shorter commentaries, articles and excerpts from other authors, and encourage feedback and comments from other members. Meetings and conferences will be planned in physical locations a few times a year, building regional beauty societies, whose purposes would be to develop ideas and strategies for bringing beauty back into our culture and our world.