We all know how to engage in political action: to campaign, to march, to protest, to resist. We know the courage action demands and the risk it entails. But we no longer know that we have other means of action that too require courage: the courage of the heart to stand for its perceptions. And unless we stand and speak in behalf of our aesthetic sense, the pall of numbing conformity deadens our language, our food, our workplaces and city streets.
Small acts of protest and praise break through the numbed condition. We can each be heroes of the heart, for this kind of personal response, simple as it seems, goes yet deeper than the usual protests about genderism, racism, environmentalism. There is no “ism” here, no ideology. You are in service to the soul’s unquenchable desire for beauty. Remember? Psyche in Apuleius’s tale was imagined to be the most beautiful figure in all classical myth.
I do believe that were the public to awaken to its hunger for beauty there would be rebellion in the streets. Was it not aesthetics that took down the Berlin Wall and opened China? Not market consumerism and Western gadgets, as we are told, but music, color, fashion, shoes, fabrics, films, dance, lyrics, and the shapes of cars. The aesthetic response leads to political action, becomes political action, is political action.
— Aesthetic Response as Political Action, City & Soul UE 2