We Should Once Again Build Monuments

It is not selfish to build monuments. It’s selfish not to.

Of all my opinions, the one that I’m surprised always proves controversial is that if I had the billions, I would go around the country building monuments.

I wouldn’t just build grand buildings and public art. By monuments, I mean any great work of ingenuity and culture meant to last centuries. I would fund symphonies. I would fund crazy unfashionable science. I would fund interesting writers and bold philosophers. I would finance great edifices that take centuries to complete and stand for millennia.

When I tell this to people, I’m often shocked at how much they seem to hate it. What I usually hear is that it’s frivolous and narcissistic. Millions around the world are suffering. They don’t need statues or works of art. They need food and water and housing and medicine, and they need it all right now. In the face of such pressing need, spending on grand projects is wasteful and offensive. It’s an egotistic attempt to bask in a pathetic reflected glory, like some Pharaoh stealing wealth to build an obnoxious Sphinx in the dunes bearing his prideful face. I think we must do both.

To be clear, I support philanthropy. I believe in uplifting people and alleviating poverty. I’m all for malaria prevention, access to drinking water, and rural schools. I know a ludicrously small amount can immeasurably improve a significant number of lives. While such work is necessary, however, many institutions are already doing it. Western governments devote immense time and resources to international development. There’s the United Nations, major foundations, global institutions, and an entire NGO industrial complex. There’s an industry devoted to international development staffed by professionals, along with a robust charitable sector at home spanning churches, foundations, and national institutions. Who is building monuments?

Philanthropy solves the material problems of today. Monuments speak across time to inspire us and locate humanity’s place, helping us as a species develop into a better future. Civilization requires both these things. Without works that endure, we leave no inheritance of beauty or wisdom, no testimony to who we thought we were, or what we thought worth doing. We give up on the belief that our civilization has something to say across centuries, and forfeit the responsibility to imagine a future beyond our own brief lives. Material comfort cannot be the sum of our ambition. A culture without monuments is one that no longer sees itself as part of the human story.

For most of human history, those with great wealth and power took on this civic responsibility. The Medici funded breathlessly incredible works of art. European kings built grand cathedrals of stone and stained glass. King Louis built a palace at Versailles. The Mesopotamians built ziggurats and hanging gardens, the Chinese Emperors built a Forbidden City and Great Wall, and Shah Jahan built a Taj Mahal. Great artists and thinkers like da Vinci had patrons. Who fills this role now that the merchant princes, aristocrats, and kings are gone? Who is funding our da Vincis? Who is building our pyramids and grand cathedrals?

It can’t, and won’t, be democratic governments, and I understand why. It’s hard to raise a family, and voters don’t want their dollars spent on non-pressing needs. We won’t be building many more grand buildings like the White House or Capitol, or post offices resembling Greco-Roman temples. Government buildings now are efficient, modern, and cheap. Even new monuments lack audacity. Democratic citizens would rather a new program or tax cut than another Rushmore.

The ultrarich build companies, not monuments. They spend on elaborate houses and boats hidden from public view. Instead of funding art and science, they carve their names into the walls of institutional buildings not meant to last fifty years. Instead of sponsoring new artists, they buy already famous works and hang them on their walls. Their philanthropy is present-oriented, material, and efficiency-based, like Bill Gates’ vaccines and mosquito nets. Most times, they find a good cause and simply write a check. They’re focused solely on feeding bodies, but rarely souls. The reason for this ultimately falls on us.

No one builds great works because we no longer value them or socially reward them. Imagine some rich guy financing some glorious public monument that would take a century to build. People would attack him as a narcissist. If he sought to sponsor artists and scholars, they would find him condescending like collecting pets. If he were to finance frontier science or unpopular research, they would call him a dangerous crackpot. They would tell him he’s squandering resources better spent on making money, driving growth, or meeting needs. Look at what we say about space exploration, like SpaceX’s plan to get to Mars. They say going to Mars is pointless, not inspiring. Now imagine it was a new Alhambra or a pyramid.

We consider grand buildings, speculative science, public gardens, and novel art to be frivolous. Who can then blame holders of great wealth from spending it on boats and houses and sports franchises and massive weddings when anything more ambitious will just get you attacked.

It’s a dangerous lack of vision and civic ambition that’s holding America back. We inherited pyramids, cathedrals, and epics we did not build. We owe a comparable inheritance in return. It’s not selfish to build monuments. It’s selfish not to. We should use our brief moment in the sun to contribute the most beautiful and meaningful note we can to the symphony of human history.

Greatness Is Valuable

What’s the true value of Shakespeare’s plays? If you calculate it solely based on what he earned from them during his lifetime, they weren’t that valuable. Shakespeare was financially successful, earning enough to retire a country gentleman. It’s a solid life roughly equivalent to a successful doctor or a lawyer. It’s hardly a financial windfall like founding Microsoft or Google.

If you consider instead the impact Shakespeare’s plays had in the four centuries since his death, they suddenly look a lot more worthwhile. How many times have Shakespeare’s plays been performed over the last four hundred years? How many people read them? How much other art have they inspired? How much wisdom did they communicate about the human condition, changing people’s minds in ways that matter? The value those plays have generated for humanity must be in the trillions, and more than the lifetime earnings of Ford Motor Company, Standard Oil, or Google.

What about Michelangelo’s David, carved in 1504? What about the Iliad and Odyssey, composed by Homer around 750 BCE based on an oral tradition from sometime before 1000 BCE? How about the Pyramids at Giza, dating back thousands of years more?

Great works don’t house us, clothe us, keep us warm, or feed us. They don’t even entertain us or make us happy. They express hopes, dreams, experiences, and values. They communicate ideas across cultures and centuries. Their purpose isn’t to sustain us as material beings, but to inspire us and push us closer toward what humanity could become. When you stand before the Parthenon or Taj Mahal, you realize you’re part of a human story that goes back millennia and will continue for millennia more. You touch a bit of greatness and, for a moment, know that as a human greatness also lies within you. You know you’re capable of, and meant for, more.

Creating great works that inspire generations is the purpose of civilization. America exists not only for us alive today, but for all humanity that will live ages after we’re gone. It’s our job to share it with them, just like it was the duty of the dynastic Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans, and the Han to share their worlds with us. In the symphony of human history, we play a single note. That note is sounded in the works we leave behind.

Restore the Will to Create

The Bishop of Paris began the Notre Dame cathedral in 1163, with support from the French crown. It took around a century to complete the building in 1260. Further additions took another hundred years, finally finishing in the middle of the 14^th century. Imagine a government or corporation announcing a project on this scale. What would voters or investors think? To us, building a cathedral that takes centuries seems foolish. No one can make money off it. None of us will enjoy it. We’ll all be dead by the time it’s done.

This isn’t to say Americans haven’t created some great and lasting things. We sponsored some revolutionary science. We stumbled into some great art in films and music during our pursuit of commerce and entertainment. We built the James Webb telescope, a marvel of humanity. One might identify modern playgrounds like Las Vegas and Disney World as wonders of the world. We built Central Park, the National Mall, the Transcontinental Railroad, and the Golden Gate Bridge. However, the greatness of these projects was purely accidental. They inspire awe and gratitude, but weren’t built as wonders. They’re byproducts of more practical concerns on a grand scale.

What we don’t do much is literature or art. Our buildings are utilitarian, calculated to end their useful life in less than a single century. We don’t build many public spaces, and those we have are slowly disappearing. After building a rocket to the moon in 1969, we haven’t been back since 1972. We don’t even still have the Space Shuttle popping in and out of orbit that we intended to replace it. We’ve barely explored the ocean. When some dream of exploring the depths or space, or building lunar colonies, most Americans seem to find it pointless and ridiculous.

If our civilization were suddenly to collapse, how much after a thousand years would we really leave behind? Within a century most of our buildings would be reduced to grassy fields like parts of once great Detroit. Our skyscrapers would collapse, leaving at most random girders sticking from landscapes. Some stories would remain, perhaps the myths of the Jedi or tales about Abe Lincoln and George Washington. There would be some old coins in collections, and a few old books preserved. In five thousand years it would pretty much be down to just Mount Rushmore and the Hoover Dam. Almost certainly, it’s less than remains of Rome or Egypt.

America is a unique and dynamic culture built around innovation, pioneering, and liberty. We’ve gained insights into what makes a nation good. We’ve developed ideas on liberty, justice, dynamism, opportunity, innovation, and realizing dreams. We’ve invented things and created a military machine that awes the world. Yet somehow we’re at risk of becoming our era’s Mongol Empire, which burst across the steppe to subjugate an empire from Kiev, to Baghdad, to Beijing but built few lasting monuments and left no great works of literature, art, or architecture to shape the civilizations that followed. Its legacy is one of great power that did not inspire or build.

This isn’t a role democratic governments can fill. The best we can hope is, when we build public infrastructure, we once again build Beaux-Arts masterpieces like the original Penn Station and fewer Brutalist monstrosities. We must therefore depend on private Americans looking to pay back successes and leave legacies. To do that, we must update our attitudes and values to socially reward it. We inherit great works from the past and are meant to add our own.

If I had billions, I’d sponsor talented thinkers and artists with no-strings-attached stipends to live comfortable middle-class lives experimenting with ideas and art. I’d try to build Plato’s Academy for our age and discover the next da Vinci, Picasso, Beethoven, and Kant. Then I’d go out to the middle of the country and amid a cornfield put up a giant stone hand shaped in a big thumbs up. In a thousand years, let archaeologists who no longer speak our language know something essential about who we were: confident, joyful, irreverent, optimistic builders and dreamers who believed in a shot at greatness. Let it communicate across generations the permission to go-ahead, risk, and strive.

Just as we reflect upon the pyramids, they’ll reflect on what we built and consider for a moment what else humanity can achieve. As they gaze upon it, it will bring a bit of the spirit of America into their world as they contribute their note. The question isn’t whether we should still build monuments. It’s how we can restore our confidence that we’re a civilization worth remembering, and one that ought to build them.

What do you think about building monuments? Join the conversation in the comments.