Selective deletions
“Beauty is truth, and truth beauty,” — said Keats, controversially, — “that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” The controversy is in the fact that he was probably examining a Greek urn that we, in our much-vaunted wisdom, would now condemn as rather ugly, and buy something else in the trinket-shop of history, where the Sung pots from China seem rather more attractive.
Mere tastes change, over the years, but with Keats I suggest that when one can appreciate beauty of some kind, one has also discerned truth of some kind; and vice versa; in a world that is complex.
Benito Mussolini, for instance, could appreciate not only the beauty of bombs exploding, but of the aeroplanes that deliver them, and by extension I would imagine the beauty of missiles bearing nuclear bombs. But he had a (quite literally) Fascist sensibility, and the truth in that easily slips away. Normally, it does not slide so easily, from an Italian savant.
Yet in one respect, Benito was onto something. At the complex intersection of beauty and truth, morality may be ignored. For goodness sake, itself, it should never be ignored entirely, because we were instructed to avoid evil, initially by God; but there is a pure sense where beauty and truth are amoral. This sense is discovered both in art and life.
Much of Shia, and Muslim, art is gorgeous; and I was a child in Lahore, exposed occasionally to the truth and beauty of Persian art and gardening. Given my own descent from designers and calligraphers, I am mesmerized by Persian, Arabic, and Turkish writing. Fortunately, the IDF and the USAF were not called upon to delete any of that, unless incidentally. Most of what they deleted was of far more technical than aesthetic significance.
Indeed, generally their deletions from the Iranian environment improved it aesthetically. This is often the effect of warfare, but it is transient. For after the bangs die out, the workmen go back to making ugly things. Whereas, that for which we long is truth and beauty.