Schizoid Modernism
Thoughts on the spread of ugliness
Three years before his death in 1959, the modernist architect and suburbiaphile philosopher, Frank Lloyd Wright built his “little St. Sophia,” the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin.[1]
I’m no critic of architecture, but I’m struck by the drab sterility of this edifice when compared to the Hagia Sophia, of which it purports to be an heir.
Wright believed wholeheartedly that architecture should serve and fit the character of the land and the people which it shapes. He therefore built abstracted, geometric structures and advocated an urban planning of sprawl to fit the utilitarian, democratic, atomized, “usonian” spirit of his midcentury American homeland.
The late architect Christopher Alexander once remarked that “everything that we see in our surroundings—everything—either slightly raises our spirits or slightly lowers them.” He therefore worried that “one of the very largest problems that is facing the earth… is the spread of ugliness.” I quote Alexander to suggest that—in addition to what our aesthetic sense reveals about our souls—our aesthetic sense also, particularly in the realm of architecture, has a direct effect upon our souls through its role of shaping the texture of our lives.
Granting all the above, some may still find the concerns of Alexander somewhat overblown. “One of the very largest problems?” they’d ask, insulted by the claim. “Surely we have bigger fish to fry.”
They might respond that all these fuddy-duddy worries about beauty and ugliness sound quite trivial in the face of our actual problems: the looming potential[2] of global war or the suffering wretches living unsheltered on our sidewalks—to name two which cross my mind as I write.
However, it’s worth considering that such a response may be peculiar to a specific perspective rarely found outside the modern secular West and its colonies. Much has been sacrificed for beauty throughout history. And rest assured that some of our enemies take it very, very seriously.
In the February 2008 issue of The New Criterion, Roger Scruton opens his thoughtful diatribe against modernism in architecture by discussing how one of the 9/11 hijackers wrote his dissertation at the University of Hamburg architecture school on a similar theme. The man was horrified by what the spirit of skyscrapers and boxed glass had done to the old city of Aleppo, so he flew a plane into its quintessential manifestation and murdered thousands of people in the process.
Given the stakes, we need to understand what’s revealed by our art. And we need to understand the effects of what’s revealed. We incarnate our inner lives into and onto the world by what we build. The world thus altered then shapes our inner lives. If we build ugliness around us, we both reveal the ugliness within us and simultaneously make ourselves more ugly.
The modernist mind, as a rule, favors abstraction—sometimes up to the ideal form and sometimes down to the meaningless matter that instantiates the form.[3] Liberated from the constraints of tradition, the modernist can approach all things with an eye toward deconstruction or frivolity. He’s hyper aware of clichés and highlights them by rejecting recognizable subjects for representation altogether or by leaning so heavily into clichés that it’s kitschy. He takes an ironic posture and distrusts associations between form and matter.
The modernist tends to take apart and reassemble the world. He pursues pure form with no matter or pure instantiation with no form, both of which paths somewhat humorously often to lead to the exact same place.[4]
This total rupture in the intimate connection between the form of things and their material existence is a sort of insanity. Louis Sass’s Madness and Modernism convincingly demonstrates the undeniable parallels between the modernist aesthetic and the phenomenology of schizophrenia. In the following progression of cat paintings by Louis Wain over the course of his developing schizophrenic illness[5] one can see an increasing abstraction, an increasing sinister detachment, which Sass establishes as so characteristic of both madness and modernism.
The cat gradually disappears until all that’s left is a menacing abstraction—what Sass describes as the “morbid geometricism” of schizophrenia and of modernism in thought and in art. Do we see a similar progression from the Hagia Sophia to Wright’s cathedral?
G. K. Chesterton wrote that the “madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory.”[6] In other words, the madman retains his logical, abstract “map” of things, and what’s gone wrong is that he’s lost his connection to the “territory” of which his map should be a helpful guide.
We live in a world in which our map is taken to be more foundational than the territory.
So we filter our experience through theories. We privilege the way things should be according to our models over the way we find them in the experienced world. And we discourage the artist from responding with immediacy to the world. We ask him to create our art to satisfy our theories. As Tom Wolfe hilariously illustrates in The Painted Word: an art critic comes up with the idea of “flatness” (of limiting the painting to the plane of the canvas) and the artist winds up laying on the ground with one eye closed, staring across the plane of his canvas to make sure that no paint-globs protrude more than the couple millimeters he would tolerate to achieve “flatness.”
But to reiterate, this dynamic rules our lives beyond art narrowly defined. It actually shapes the first-person worlds we inhabit every second of every day. In his unbelievably profound The Master and his Emissary, Scottish polymath Iain McGilchrist shows how modern society uncritically accepts many aspects of the schizoid take of our left cerebral hemisphere (when unmoored from the grounding comprehensiveness of the right). Once you’ve seen his vision, it cannot be unseen.[7]
A few examples of the schizoid take of an overactive left hemisphere: We see parts before we see wholes. We see objects in isolation, disconnected from each other. We see a world constituted by lifeless matter. We attempt to see the world from outside it rather than from within it (e.g., in the scientistic vision for example). We privilege the way we expect things to be according to our theories over the way things are according to experience. We believe all things operate like machines and can therefore be taken apart, reassembled, and manipulated. We are uncomfortable with paradox and attempt to rationalize all things (always blind to the contradictions at the bottom of our systems). We slip off into solipsistic idealism (form with no matter) or deterministic empiricism (matter with no form). We have total faith in our predictive models. We operate with the ever-present suspicion that someone “at the top” is “pulling the strings.” We bureaucratize our social lives. We prefer centralized homogenization over localized heterogeny. Those at the top attempt to pull the strings. We are alienated from our bodies, our communities, our histories, our faiths. We prioritize utilitarian goals over the pursuit of truth, beauty, goodness, or God. And our art, literature, architecture, etc. incarnate the schizoid take as both its cause and its effect. The list could go on much longer.
Another way of putting all this is that the modernist mind treats the world with what the early modern mathematician Blaise Pascal called the “spirit of geometry” (useful for building maps) rather than the “spirit of finesse” (good for navigating territory). If we were occupying a lifeless environment of nothing besides matter and energy in the void of time and space pursuing comfort while we wait for the nonexistence of death, the spirit of geometry would maybe be appropriate. However, if we inhabit a living world on fire with the glory of its Creator, such a spirit might lead us wrongly if we allow it to guide rather than to serve.
Quebecois Christian artist Jonathan Pageau argues we need to rediscover an art that lands. By this he means that since the modernist split between form and matter—what he calls a moment of “deincarnation” or “desacramentalization”—our art has remained abstracted and removed from the daily business of life. He means we need to heal this gash. We no longer make art in which we can live. He means all this can be undone.
Pageau points to a few developments in the history of art from archaic man to today. Not only has our fine art grown disembodied (as we’ve alluded thus far), but our relationship to it has become passive and abstracted. We contemplate paintings behind velvet ropes, hung on the sterile white walls of museums behind plexiglass and motion-sensors.
And rather than tell each other tales around the fire, we read novels in isolation. Rather than build monuments to shared myth and history, we ask sculptors to fill our public spaces with off-putting curiosities, which tend toward the prismic or the absurd. Rather than to join into a folk dance, high art asks us to passively observe ballet.[8] Rather than writing poetry in stone (the Hagia Sophia) we build brutalist monstrosities and drab fora for the architect to self-express (Wright’s “little St. Sophia”).
As Pageau observes, it all seems so inhospitable. We cannot live within it.
From this perspective, the art of our often more participative pop culture seems like a reasonable, if sometimes vulgar and misguided, effort to undo the passivity with which we engage deincarnated high culture. The EDM festival, the rap concert, or the rock show bring the audience in dancing and singing along. And the comic book worlds have long invited their audiences to live the stories at their various conventions.
These flails against the deincarnation of art can often reach quite high. Literary worlds like those of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings[9] invite their readers in to inhabit and expand upon their creations. But more frequently they stay low, dragging us down to a common denominator that’s a far cry from the heavenward spires of Byzantium’s cathedral.
And sometimes, these unmoored reactions against desacramentalization slip into an oddly occult, even satanic aesthetic. I don’t mean to assert that all these artists are consciously engaged in some sort of devilish cabal, but when Marina Abramovic simulates a clinically erotic cannibalistic ritual of witchcraft, she still physically enacts the ritual regardless of intent. And when pop music performers incorporate this aesthetic into their shows, the audience engages. If it’s all completely meaningless, why do it? Surely the subversion of societal taboos through shock and awe is played out. Why do fashion magazines gesture toward Baphomet? Even public sculptures—those which have evolved beyond passé modernist abstraction—start to reintroduce pagan and overtly demonic imagery back into the landscape. At the conscious level, many of our artists may think it’s all a joke, but it might make sense to wonder: a joke on whom?
People are reaching, yearning for an aesthetic to reinvigorate the world while the momentum of society drains it of all life. Museums function as cultural morgues. The artifacts within it are dead. Were they alive, we wouldn’t lock them in the white mausoleum. Were they alive, we’d live within them and among them.[10]
I imagine most of us could agree that the demonic aesthetic is a poor route from the morgues in which we’ve locked our highest creative aspirations. But Main Street rots, and the landscape homogenizes into an ever-sprawling concrete wasteland of strip malls, billboards, and branded signage. So we crave alternatives but find ourselves impotent or worse.
Roger Scruton argues that—echoing Christopher Alexander—we actively seek ugliness. This too is an insanity and frequently walks hand in hand with the drive toward morbid geometricism (an apt descriptor of the strip mall). And ugliness spreads, as one can see in the way interstates rot the countryside around them for miles on either side of the official right-of-way.
For at least a century, beauty has consistently lost ground. Beyond carelessness, this fact stems from many sources: iconoclasm, utilitarianism, rationalism, even laudable efforts to atone for cultural sin—for example, the recent spate of statue-takedowns—all drives baked deep into the usonian spirit Wright identified as ours. There is much to recommend the above. But when beauty’s on the bottom rung of our values, the fabric of everything breaks down.
For example, in July 2021, the project to remove an equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee from a park in downtown Charlottesville Virginia (following extremist terrorism and murder in defense of the statue) succeeded. They called the project Swords into Plowshares, which Lee—as a reconciliationist, an opposer of Confederate monuments in general, a gradual emancipationist[11], and a lover of scripture—might have liked. They melted down the bronze and plan to replace it with something else.[12] But when the statue was removed, an encampment of homeless junkies replaced it. This seems to me a nice parable of our current politics. We privilege laudable abstractions while we deracinate ourselves, the fabric of social life frays, ugliness spreads, and people suffer.
It may seem thus far as if I’m arguing that something specific happened at a specific point in time when it all went wrong. Maybe all was well and dandy before the modernist turn in the late nineteenth century while industrialism spread across the “developed” (a word whose modern usage I detest) world. Maybe the reason that T. S. Eliot found himself following Dante into hell[13] is simple: Emily Dickinson, in her madness, broke poetry.
Though I do feel the temptation to believe this sort of story, I think the modernist move was at most an acceleration. Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction tracks—in the history of language—something like this general trend toward increasing abstraction since Homer (c. 800 BC). He notices a pattern in which the definition of words—and therefore, he argues, the delineation between concepts of thought and experience—increase in specificity over time. The Hebrew Ruach, the Greek Pneuma, the Latin Spiritus once covered our differentiated concepts of breath, wind, spirit, and more.[14] He calls such expansive definitions “original unified meanings,” which through time gradually split into more precise categories. This increase in precision affords an increase in our manipulative power over the world.[15] But it may also destroy something living, as a thing dissected is killed.
I suspect that we’ve been in this cart and on this track since Eden.
Barfield believed a core function of the poet is to discover “true metaphors,” in which original unified meanings are put back together and the world is briefly healed. The effective poet kindles a realization in his audience that the world is alive—that breath truly is spirit.
Andrew Klavan’s beautiful literary memoir, The Truth and Beauty, follows Barfield’s tack. Klavan argues that the English romantics intuited the savaging that Enlightenment rationalism had wrought upon the world. They noticed a growing inability to perceive the world truly as they aged. Wordsworth writes:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day.
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
As Barfield would think that they should, the romantic poets tried to heal these wounds by putting the world back together through their art. Their poetry invites us to rediscover the vision of early childhood in which we experience the world more truly.
Klavan argues that Jesus of Nazareth beckons us to follow in a similar—though deeper, truer, more comprehensive—direction back into something like Edenic experience of the world. “Consider the lilies how they grow,” he says. “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
The rationalists, too, sometimes acknowledge this pattern from unified experience toward differentiation, but they tend to see it—unsurprisingly given the argument thus far—as positive progress toward development. Freud believed our progress away from the infant’s “oceanic feeling” of “being one with the external world as a whole,” which he saw as a root cause of religious delusion, could be facilitated by psychoanalysis. On the Jungian side of things, Erich Neumann charts a similar progression (both in civilizational history and in the life of the individual) from the unconscious state of the tail-eating serpent, the ouroboros—though he interestingly sees the self-eating snake as a symbol of both dawn and destination. Maybe Neumann, too, agrees on this point with the Nazarene. “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
So how can beauty be restored? How can the world be healed?
Nothing is perfect, but there is much reason to hope. I’m involved in a project south of Atlanta called Serenbe, in which beautiful small towns on traditional plans—somewhat integrated with the countryside and its history—are being built. The Atlanta Beltline has made enormous progress in healing my city by repurposing abandoned railway beds into parks, trails, and eventually light-rail. Both have flaws, but they’re something. And I suspect there’s much to be done all around us: In the building of our houses, in the designing of our interior spaces, in the cultivations of our gardens, in our lives.
Simple exhortations occur to me. Lewis Mumford says to “forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.” Philologist Richard Rohlin says we should “pick up our heads and go to Church.” Roger Scruton says just stop the desecration.
If all that’s too much for us, maybe we can just open our eyes and take a look around.
[1] Wright was a lifelong Unitarian.
[2] Or said conflict’s recent initiation—though I pray that it’s not so—depending on how things unfurl.
[3] For convenience, throughout this essay, I lump together the modernist, postmodernist, post-postmodernist, metamodernist, etc. sensibilities under the common header of “modernist,” which requires that much nuance is lost. For example, some readers may object here that the modernist proper is not frivolous but serious and that it’s the postmodernist who is frivolous. This may be true as far as it goes, but neither is serious in the way that a medieval or an ancient is serious.
[4] This observation of convergence and the following two examples are borrowed from Quebecois artist Jonathan Pageau’s lecture “The Search for Participation in Contemporary Art.”
[5] Example of Wain’s cats taken from Louis Sass’s Madness and Modernism (Figure 5.1).
[6] From G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy.
[7] There’s no way to avoid oversimplifying the intensely subtle thought of this Scottish neuroscientist, literary scholar, polymath and, I would argue, soon to be recognized world-historical philosopher.
[8] It’s no surprise to learn that ballet was a participative event in which the audience learned the steps from its inception in the 15th century until it moved to the stage in the late 17th century.
[9] LOTR is a special case, which may contain the key to undoing the split without degrading ourselves.
[10] That’s why it seems to me that interior design is more important as an art form than abstract painting.
[11] And a hypocrite like we all are I’m aware.
[12] One wonders which of the previously discussed aesthetics of public art they’ll go with; let’s hope it’s not demonic.
[13] Do not fear; Eliot—with a little help from Heraclitus and Jesus—found his way out.
[14] It’s worth pointing out that traces remain of this original unified meaning in contemporary English: suspiration, respiration, inspiration, spirit; and we say “bless you” after a sneeze (whose root is pneuma).
[15] I suspect—dwelling on the patterns of Eden, Flood, and Babel—that the steady accumulation of manipulative power hits a limit at which it reverses in a flood. When the entire world’s been transformed into the fungible soup of what Heidegger called “standing reserve” there may be a point at which the chaos overwhelms us and our powers prove cheap.
Excellent analysis. The importance of architecture in the formation of the soul is one of my abiding interests, and Scruton and Alexander are among my guiding lights.