An article on interiors from the Wall Street Journal in 2011 talked about the trend of “undecorating.” It claimed that “periodically there is a design revolution that imagines itself in opposition to the formal, overly polished aesthetic of the previous generation.”
When I first left New York and moved to the country, I was surprised by how willing people seemed in non-urban spaces to allow nature to not only influence their home but become a part of it. I lived with an olive oil farmer whose entryway window was so covered in ivy that the plant had reached inside and started growing on the interior walls; he seemed to not even notice. Another homesteading family I rented a cottage from had chickens. Each morning when I opened my door a certain hen was waiting for scraps, and instead of staying patiently while I brought out an offering, she raced past me into the house and ran amok on all the carpets. Eventually we became friends, and after providing a treat I’d hold her in my arms and kiss her beak before releasing her onto the lawn.
A boy I dated during that time invited me to his house to see his books. He was the first libertarian I ever met, and as he stood in front of the bookcase and leafed through a title on plant life, a cat leapt onto his shoulder. I gazed at him, with his long black hair tumbling over the pages and the feline wrapping her tail around his neck, and something in my thinking shifted.
In an essay for the New Criterion, Roger Scruton wrote that he “made the passage from aesthetics to conservative politics with no sense of intellectual incongruity, believing that, in each case, I was in search of a lost experience of home. And I suppose that, underlying that sense of loss is the permanent belief that what has been lost can also be recaptured — not necessarily as it was when it first slipped from our grasp, but as it will be when consciously regained and remodeled, to reward us for all the toil of separation … That belief is the romantic core of conservatism.”
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat mentioned in a Dissent Magazine interview that he calls himself a conservative not only because of his religious worldview, but also because he has “a more personal conservatism that manifests itself in aesthetic affinities: I like the past.”
If conservatism is about liking old things, perhaps libertarianism is about liking wild things. I wonder how much of my own libertarianism has to do with a lost sense of nature, and myself as part of it. If aesthetic conservatism is about refinding something that has been lost, aesthetic libertarianism is about knowing what is deeply within and unleashing it.