«Politicians fixate on growth,
but humans need beauty too |A relentless focus on economics has stopped us
discussing the intangible things we need (...)
Then, beauty mattered enough to shape policy for the public good. Indeed, after the horror of two world wars, the 1945 government implemented a package of measures designed to meet not only people’s basic human needs, but also their spiritual, physical and cultural wellbeing. The designation of National Parks, the protection of our cultural heritage and access to the countryside sat alongside the universal right to education, the National Health Service and the welfare state, as well as jobs and housing.
We understood then, as we seem to have forgotten now, that the human spirit is not satisfied by material progress alone. Yet today we seem to have become seduced by what the US economist Albert Jay Nock called “economism”: that which “can build a society that is rich, prosperous, powerful—even one that has a reasonably wide diffusion of material wellbeing. But it cannot build one that is lovely, one that has savour and depth, and which exercises the irresistible power of attraction that loveliness wields.”(...)». Leia na integra.
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