Our Brown Culture

We have available to us today the entire rainbow of color with which we can add color and beauty to our lives. We can decorate our homes and our cities with the entire color palate capable of being seen with the human eye.

Yet what have we built with this incredible cornucopia of color at our fingertips? A brown culture devoid of beauty and color. Entire neighborhoods are built with a color scheme revolving around various shades of brown and grey. We plant lawns and gardens to give color to our lives but paint our own homes in ghastly shades of brown.

What does this say about us?

This first thing it says is that we no longer want beauty in our lives. We sacrifice the beauty of our own home to maintain the “resale value” to a home that we have no plans to sell in the near future. We are so afraid that our home might be devalued a couple thousand dollars (so the new owner can paint the home brown again) so we decide to live for years and decades in ugly brown homes.

The argument given in rebuttal to this truth is the canard about a neighbor possibly painting their home in polka dot purple. But do we see this actually happening in neighborhoods without an HOA? Nope.

Deep down everyone is conditioned to be afraid of standing out or showing off beautiful colors for their home. They don’t want what is beautiful. So they go for bland. Nothing is more ugly than bland. Even bad colors are better than bland. I neighborhood full of bad colors is still more appealing than being overrun with neighborhood after neighborhood of brown homes.

We also see this in our cars. We also have every single color of the rainbow available for painting our cars. But what do we have instead? I would estimate that at least 98% of all cars fall in the same color range that every other car on the road has. The entire fleet of our society is a bland mixture of about twelve basic colors. The very few cars that we see that fall outside these dozen colors immediately catch our eye because they are so rare.

The same blandness in our homes and cars, we also see on our roads and in our cities. All of our roads and highways are various shades of grey and black. We can’t even bother with adding any colors to the sidewalks, guardrails or overpasses. We live in a time of unprecedented access to color in our world, and we choose brown and grey.

This absolute embrace of ugly brutalism can also be seen in our buildings. In the past, buildings were built to be beautiful first. They were built in classical styles that were beautiful century upon century. Buildings were designed to be enjoyable to look at even a millennia after they were constructed because those who built them love beauty. They loved beauty because they loved God. They looked to create that which was good, beautiful and true because that is what reflects the love of God. They wanted things in our lives to be beautiful.

That all changed over the last century plus as our society and culture has rejected God. The more we have embraced atheism, the more we have embraced ugliness, banality and hideousness. Our buildings, our homes and everything around us only gets uglier the further we walk away from God.

This can really be shown in the invention and promotion of modern art. Ugliness abounds as the navel-gazers proclaim that anything can be art and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That statement is nonsense and stupid. Beauty is objective, and that is because beauty is a trait of God. Beauty also points us to God. So it is downright silly to claim that anything is art when that is objectively false. Beauty is objective and it is not in the eye of the beholder.

We can see that when they give tests to people to see if they can tell the difference between the artwork of preschoolers compared to the “art” of modern artists.

Most of the time, people fail because modern “art” is not art at all. It is ugly and boring. It does not point to what is true and beautiful. It does not point to God.

Reject the banality of our Brown Culture. Reject the ugliness of atheism. Reject the boring and bland. Bring back beauty into our lives. Bring back color into our lives. Bring back what is good, what is true and what is beautiful.