When beauty breaks the system

It's hard to gaze up at the stars and not think bigger

There’s a true story from the 1970s about a public university program that got shut down for doing something radical: changing people’s lives. Not by making them more employable or “market ready,” but actually nourishing their souls and opening their minds.

The Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas didn’t preach or proselytize. No catechisms, no altar calls. It just asked students to do small, old-fashioned things: memorize poetry, read Homer and Plato and Dante slowly, learn folk songs, look up at the stars together with no telescope and no commentary, just quiet awe. Incredibly, it worked.

The students, many fresh from the anti-institutional haze of the ’60s, started converting to Catholicism. Others didn’t convert but found themselves wrestling with the kinds of questions that usually precede conversion: What makes a good life? What’s worth loving? What’s real, and why does it move me?

Administrators got nervous. Journalists started poking around. Investigations followed. Nothing was found, no evidence of classroom evangelism, but the program was quietly killed anyway.

The usual version of this story frames it as a culture-war clash: religion versus secularism, tradition versus modernity. But that’s not really the heart of it. The real scandal wasn’t religion. It was beauty.

Beauty, it turns out, isn’t neutral.

People pretend it is, especially in academia. Beauty’s treated like a decorative side dish: nice if you like that sort of thing, but ultimately subjective, maybe even suspicious or “patriarchal.” You can enjoy a poem, sure, just don’t let it tell you anything true. You can feel awe, but don’t trust it. You can sense transcendence, but keep it far away from “reality.” Meaning, we’re told, is something you must create, not something you stumble into or simply observe to be true. Everything must be constantly analyzed and deconstructed until nothing is left, and all joy is gone.

The IHP accidentally broke that rule. Its premise was simple, even naïve: that spending time with what is true, good, and beautiful actually changes you. That argument matters less than attention. That wonder comes before belief. The professors didn’t talk students into faith, they just handed them the kind of things people have loved for centuries and trusted that genuine love is never arbitrary.

That’s precisely what made the program dangerous.

Institutions that pride themselves on being “neutral” can’t handle anything that forms the heart as well as the mind. If students start loving the “permanent things,” as Russell Kirk called them, they get harder to manipulate. They stop worshiping novelty. They become less marketable and harder to sell to.

And here’s the unsettling part: those conversions weren’t a glitch. They were the system bumping into reality itself.

Stargazing isn’t purely physics. Poetry isn’t just words. Great books aren’t only relics. They’re tools for shaping attention, and attention is upstream of belief. When you train people to look steadily at what’s beautiful, you’re telling them that some things are worth revering. And once reverence enters, relativism doesn’t stand a chance.

That’s why the program didn’t die in flames. It died on paper. Restructured, defunded, absorbed. No scandal, no show trial, just death by procedure. The modern way of declaring something wrong without ever admitting it or giving it attention.

The lesson here isn’t that universities are scared of religion. It’s that they’re deeply uncomfortable with anything that hints meaning might not be negotiable. Beauty implies order. Order implies hierarchy. Hierarchy implies obligation. And obligation implies that freedom isn’t just doing whatever you want or subscribing to strange postmodern versions of reality, it’s aligning yourself with something transcendental and timeless. This is all similar to my previous essay on how the modern atheist movement is wrong, by the way.

All this is a chain reaction the modern university isn’t built to contain.

We live in a culture that wants the upside of beauty without the price tag. We want aesthetic pleasure without commitment, awe without authority, transcendence without transformation, functional institutions without morality. The IHP proved, unintentionally, that you can’t have one without the others. You can’t let people swim in beauty and expect them not to ask where it leads.

So the program had to go.

Not because it taught religion, but because it whispered that life isn’t just something to manage. That a soul set free can’t be demoralized. That once wonder and independence wakes up, it doesn’t stay politely within the syllabus.

This is why the story still lingers, it’s part legend and part warning. It touches something people instinctively know: that persuasion changes opinions, but love changes people. And once love is educated, once it knows what to love and what is exploitive, there’s no stopping it. And that “what” isn’t a political party or ideology modern academics tend to subscribe to.

Beauty converts people to a different set of beliefs way ahead of any doctrine. And any system that claims neutrality while quietly shaping desire will always fear the day desire wakes up and demands to know where it’s headed, or simply realizes the value system being promoted to them is at odds with our nature.