Once again, interesting.
There is a connection in historical fact between modern art and architecture and social utopianism. It does seem to cut across the grain of my own ideas.
My model for aesthetics was:
Naive thought: yay for pretty things! Let's gild our paintings and paint our statues!
Sophisticated thought: it's vulgar/naive to just make things pretty. Often the best things are difficult to appreciate. (The first example I can think of this is the Renaissance tradition of making stone statues and leaving them unpainted.)
There have been various reactions against prettiness. Some Romantic ideas were against prettiness (the sublime vs. the beautiful.) As I understand, Communism was not particularly friendly either to prettiness or to sophisticated formalism. (e.g. composers in the USSR would be condemned for being too atonal, but painters would be condemned if they painted beautiful women in pretty dresses.)
So I don't know if there's a consistent relationship between prettiness and politics. I think there's art that's both pretty and political (Judy Collins) and art that's pretty, and very non-political (Matisse). I'm for prettiness, either way.
Finding a small, pleasant, out-of-the way corner for myself sounds very good, actually. Utopia for me and a few other folks would be more than enough. A hobbit-hole is the very definition of nice. I would put that in the "nice" category... and yet spending time thinking about the dangers of idealism is distinctly "anti-nice." It's not really a pleasant corner if you spend most of your time hunkered down against foes, is it?
SarahC:
There is a connection in historical fact between modern art and architecture and social utopianism. It does seem to cut across the grain of my own ideas.
Modernism in architecture is fundamentally an expression of utopianism. Constructing buildings, public spaces, and interiors that will be pleasant and attractive for people has been a well understood problem for thousands of years. A modernist, however, sees sticking to this body of well-established knowledge and experience as insufficiently idealistic and sophisticated, and strives for more exa...
EDIT: This post is pretty flawed, but please read the comments anyway: I'm hoping to rework it into something that catches the idea better.
You can view a lot of value differences along a pro-nice/anti-nice spectrum.
Pro-nice people (I'm one) gravitate to obviously pleasant, lovely, happy experiences. We like kittens and puppies and rainbows. We like transparently "happy" music and transparently "beautiful" works of art and literature. (If you like Romantic poetry and science fiction, but not contemporary novels, you might be pro-nice.) We prefer the positive social emotions, like sympathy, encouragement, and teamwork. We may choose intellectual interests based on the fact that they make our brains feel good. We tend to be drawn towards proposals for making the world wonderful.
Pro-nice people aren't quite the same thing as optimists. An optimist tends to anticipate that things will turn out well, or look on the bright side. But pro-nice people may well hold pessimistic ideas or have melancholy temperaments. Pro-nice is a preference for the positive. A typical pro-nice attitude is "Humanity may be destructive and cruel, but the one time when we're at our best is when we're doing science. Science is lovely. I think I'll be a scientist."
Anti-nice people have a preference for the difficult. They find pro-nice preferences saccharine. They like artistic expressions that have a challenging or negative "mood." They prefer the negative social emotions, like antagonism, sarcasm, and cynicism. They dislike things that have obvious appeal, or things that everyone finds pleasant. As far as social issues go, they take a keen interest in potential catastrophes and what must be done to avert them; they generally aren't drawn to proposals to "make the world a better place."
Again, anti-nice people aren't necessarily pessimists or unhappy people. Anti-nice people prefer to direct their attention to the challenging, the problematic, the worst-case scenario. To an anti-nice person, there's nothing interesting to work on when everything is going smoothly; just liking things or agreeing with people or being contented is rather dull.
I suspect that a lot of conflict can be summarized by the clash between pro-nice and anti-nice personality types.
Are you pro-nice or anti-nice? Have you experienced difficulty communicating with the other type?