The countryside is dotted with adorable houses made out of natural materials and natives wearing colorful traditional garb. Poor countries have their old colonial buildings still standing, because no one had the money (or the reason) to tear them down and put up something bigger. So why the difference?ġ) Sample error: they visited the nicest parts of Cuba, and the nastiest part of northern Mexico.Ģ) The economists are wrong: per-capita GDP is missing important components of quality of life a more egalitarian distribution of a little income makes people, on average, better off than a much higher GDP unequally distributed.ģ) Deep poverty is much more picturesque than moderate poverty. It's pretty unambiguously clear to economists that quality of life is higher in Northern Mexico, which is the richest part of a country that has a per-capita GDP three times higher than that of Cuba. It's time to stop apologizing for communist dictatorships are you really so taken with the idea of confiscating property as to overlook decades of tyranny, impoverishment, and human misery? Yes I am familiar with the UN social indicators I say you need to visit each of these countries, preferably speaking Spanish, and then report back to me.Ī couple of commenters claim that they have visited Cuba, and it looks a lot better than Northern Mexico. While we're at it, let's not forget northern Mexico or even central Mexico. It is a fascinating place for visitors, but right now the quality of life in Cuba isn't close to that of the DR or for that matter Honduras, the second-biggest Latino mess in the hemisphere. And a non-communist Cuba could have done much better than the DR. Such criteria reflect the criteria of God and the world as He originally made it, a complex creation reflecting proportion and harmony.A simple checklist would start with the question of whether an apologist has visited both the Dominican Republic and Cuba. Historically, Christian thinkers have evaluated art according to four criteria: proportion, harmony, simplicity, and complexity. He makes all things beautiful in their time (Eccl. Works of art that somehow reflect His nature are more beautiful than works that do not. Of course, God is the ultimate standard of beauty, just as He is the ultimate standard of truth. Otherwise, they might pay as much for a chimpanzee's fingerpainting as they would for a portrait by Da Vinci. Yet although objective standards are harder for people to recognize in the realm of aesthetics, people still have some kind of standard in mind when they evaluate the arts.
No one who wants to live, for example, disregards the universal truth of gravity when standing near the edge of a cliff. Even those who profess relativism vociferously live according to certain objective standards. To recognize the role of the subject, however, is not to embrace aesthetic subjectivism. We must recognize that the subject is deeply involved in any response to music, painting, sculpture, or any other work of art. Musical preferences and artistic appreciation, for example, vary widely. Without a doubt, there is a highly subjective response to beauty that differs from person to person. Few would affirm that there is any objective way to define one work of art as more beautiful than another.
Christians who would otherwise affirm the existence of absolute truth seem just as likely as their non-Christian neighbors to believe that beauty is solely in the eye of the beholder. We see the embrace of subjectivism quite clearly in the realm of aesthetics as well. The only absolute truth that most people in our society will affirm is that there is no such thing as absolute truth. Every day, people deny the existence of universal, objective truth, preferring instead to affirm that "what is true for me may not be true for you, and what is true for you may not be true for me." This is particularly clear when ethics are under consideration. If there is anything we learn from observing the culture around us, it is that subjectivity is king.
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