To add a postscript to my recent essay about the relationship between beauty and goodness, I wanted to elaborate on the ways in which tradition can help orient us towards these ideals. As an aid, I refer to the insight offered in Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, where he demonstrates the pitfalls at risk when over-rationalizing one’s value judgments. Specifically in the story, we see how pursuing self-interested or false-utopian goals can precipitate flawed reasoning: when ends are used to justify the means. Through the struggles of the dual protagonists, Tolstoy shows how such logic inevitably leads away from absolute values like beauty and goodness, making us vulnerable to unintended consequences in the process.
As a counter to this way of thinking, Tolstoy argues that reason should be a tool for actualizing our highest virtues, not a means for validating them. In other words, beauty and goodness should be considered a priori principles towards which rational thought ought to aim. To that effect, Tolstoy argues that tradition has a critical role to play in safeguarding these ideals and guiding our decision-making towards them.
Tradition in the field of architecture, however, is now largely seen as archaic. Instead, architects typically search for a more rational basis to guide their work. But when looking at modern cities, it seems evident that beauty is often sacrificed as a result. This is largely because modern culture no longer holds beauty to be a universal value. In its place architects commonly prioritize other goals like function, economy, or sustainability. But the risk in focusing on one practical aim is that it often overshadows the needs of others. Beauty, on the other hand, can serve as a generous guiding principle, allowing the architect to balance multiple concerns simultaneously. In that process tradition is an invaluable aid.
LEVIN’S REVELATION
To understand Tolstoy’s point of view, we must look at the epiphany experienced by Anna Karenina’s co-protagonist Konstantin Levin. He, like the title character, also struggles with questions of duty and desire, and he, too, is haunted by thoughts of suicide when the purpose of life evades him.
Throughout the novel, Levin (who serves as a proxy for Tolstoy) is in a constant search for meaning through his work and relationships, suffering disappointments and setbacks along the way. As an aristocratic landowner in post-emancipation Russia, he pursues various labour schemes in an attempt to achieve greater harmony and productivity with the local peasantry. But despite his noble intentions and highly reasoned plans, Levin finds himself constantly at odds with the cultural practices embodied in the people around him. Furthermore, he experiences setbacks in his personal life, with the death of his brother and difficulties in establishing a happy home.
Things change, however, when Levin finally sets aside his search for a guiding, practical philosophy. Instead, he finds peace by focusing on the responsibilities immediately in front of him, which spring from his family and farm. After a chance remark from one of his workers, Levin experiences a revelation:
Was it through reason that I arrived at the necessity of loving my neighbour and not throttling him? I was told it as a child, and I joyfully believed it, because they told me what was in my soul. And who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence and the law which demands that everyone who hinders the satisfaction of my desires should be throttled. That is the conclusion of reason. Reason could not discover love for the other, because it’s unreasonable.
In this moment, Levin finds a clarified moral view. He rejects the rationalized, utilitarian approach to ethics which had overtaken his moral life—with judgments reduced to cold cost/benefit analyses. The resultant lack of meaning and isolation had thrown him into depression, and he is rescued only by the realization that his greatest joys have come from unselfish love.
OMITTED VARIABLE BIAS
The lack of altruism isn’t the only failure of utilitarian philosophy. Tolstoy draws attention to a more practical one: omitted variable bias. This is the tendency to overlook small, but nevertheless contributing factors when analyzing a given problem. While scientists work on ways to limit this issue in the lab, it proves impossible to account for all potential cause and effect reactions in real life relationships, where unconsidered variables might thwart an otherwise rational act. Furthermore, if ends become the only values worth taking into account, then the possible means deemed necessary could include ethically dubious ones which might multiply exponentially in the process.
For Levin, centring his moral life in this way becomes overwhelming and unsustainable. Better, he decides, to ground his judgments in an ethos that allows for more intuitive decision-making, one with built-in backstops against falsely justified bad deeds. Levin finds this anchor by returning to his religious heritage, the Eastern Orthodox Church. It’s from accepting what in many ways is the ultimate a priori moral value, the golden rule, that Levin then feels liberated to reason intuitively when addressing his day-to-day concerns.
Though Tolstoy’s subject matter deals with the most significant of moral considerations, there are parallels in the world of everyday aesthetics, as well. For example, in his work The Nature of Order, Christopher Alexander discusses the difficulties of rationalizing even ordinary architectural features, like a column base. As he notes, a column base must be designed to accommodate many variables simultaneously: the sequence of construction, the vertical load, lateral forces, and all while helping shape the space around it. Trying to express and balance each factor might prove overwhelming, but this is exactly what any building tradition has achieved over time, from which an architect can use their creativity to fashion beautiful, site-specific solutions.
THE IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL CONNECTIVITY
In Anna Karenina, Konstantin Levin also sees that over-rationalizing his value judgments has ultimately led him to unhappy isolation:
‘In infinite time, in the infinity of matter, in infinite space, a bubble-organism separates itself, and that bubble holds out for a while and then bursts, and that bubble is—me.’
This was a tormenting untruth, but it was the sole, the latest result of age-long labours of human thought in that direction. This was the latest belief on which all researches of the human mind in almost all fields were built.
The lighthearted, but poignant satire of Warren Zevon in “Splendid Isolation” (1989)
For Levin, reconciling with his native church provides a means of breaking from the trap of modern solipsism, allowing him to reconnect with his people and culture. Importantly, though, he makes no claim to his particular religion as an absolute, universal theology or moral standard bearer. Instead, Levin asserts that one can only be expected to properly judge the customs and beliefs of their own culture.
We can take from Tolstoy, then, that the value of any given tradition can be understood as the sum of its historically gathered wisdom, subject to improvement along the way. As a result, it can act as an invisible hand guiding individuals towards better value judgments and connections to the community at large.
Stepping back into the world of everyday aesthetics, we can see this dynamic at work in the field of architecture. For example, it’s been widely documented that people come to quick consensus on the best architectural forms for their community when they are asked to do so.1 The problem today is that they almost never are. Instead, architecture is usually imposed from the outside by bureaucrats, developers, and the design establishment, whose interests in any particular place is significantly removed from the people who actually live there.
In the city where I live, Toronto, Canada, policy has for decades worked against traditional settlement patterns, favouring tower blocks over the gentler density of townhouses and 4–6 storey apartment buildings. This is done despite people’s preferences to the contrary. As is typical, the means have been justified to suit the end (in this case, addressing the self-perpetuated housing crisis2).
Meanwhile feelings of isolation grow, as evidenced by a plummeting birth rate, even among immigrants who come from countries where large families are typical. In the process Toronto becomes more like no place in particular as each new tower is erected, despite their sometimes desperate and idiosyncratic designs.3
Unfortunately our cities have largely become a reflection of the over-rationalized way of thinking that Tolstoy warned us about in Anna Karenina, and the lack of beauty in our environment demonstrates the price we pay. Nevertheless, I believe hope lies in reviving what the architect Christopher Alexander calls “a timeless way of building.”4 One that places beauty as an ultimate value outside the realm of rationalization, making use of traditional wisdom to help address practical concerns. When designing in this way, I believe one acts with a kind of beauty intuition, harnessing the aesthetic skills necessary to address whatever challenges any situation might bring.
Research catalogued and explained in Heart in the Right Street: Beauty, Happiness and Health in Designing the Modern City by Nicholas Boys Smith
See this link to my article in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper on policy issues around the housing affordability crisis
As detailed in Christopher Alexander’s book A Timeless Way of Building