Authentic morality, art, and philosophy all seek a a connection to something higher and greater and more perfect than yourself.

False religion and false art are quite similar. They concern themselves more with themselves, and seeking the approval and regard of others, than any actual search for higher truth or beauty. A vain appreciator of art buys only those thing which it is trendy and status enhancing to buy. A vain philosopher seeks to believe and restate those things that will gain them praise and acclaim and make them seem clever and refined and current. Virtue signaling, whether the old fashioned religious kind or the modern political kind, is the all the same brand of colorful, feathery display. It is aimed toward the feeling of self righteousness and the appearance of righteousness relative to the masses. All such pursuits are at heart pursuits of your own value or the value of how you appear to others.

That is why the face of religious pretension and false piety and that of artistic pretension seem to similar to us. They are substantially the same thing.

Still, false religion and false art and bad philosophy still carry the weight of truth and justice and beauty seeking, and have a real relation to it. They aren’t an absence of truth or justice, merely a subversion of it. The content may even be good content, the right content. And others finding the results hollow or self serving may even be deceived about the content, thinking that it too was vain, and not merely it’s supplicant. Many works of great beauty and truth have been maligned by how poorly their adherents wore them. As humans, we find stories, the living out of an idea, much more convincing and relatable than mere data or arguments. Unfortunately that tendency to find story so convincing leads very easily into distortion, when the primary way we corrupt truth, beauty, and goodness is to make them about ourselves. So when we fall, when the illusion we project falls, or when our selfish pursuit eventually yields bad ends, our truth falls, our art, our ethic. Because we made it too much about us.

Wise art seeks the good that we do not possess. It reverences something beyond itself that it discovers. It is more like a new country we have found than a society we have built. So when we inevitably fail in life or, even standing, die, it does not die with us. We lived in it, not it in us.

That is why it is so important that righteousness is not a heritable condition, but a choice. Beauty, goodness, and truth are not birthrights. They are allegiances. They are a recognition of something greater. They are a fidelity, a covenant.

Our instinctual fidelity is to ourselves and our own godhood, definitive of goodness, truth, and beauty. We define them by ourselves, by our desires and needs, as children. And we will always see and experience them through the lens of our own individuality, our tastes and our sensitivities, our capabilities, our limitations. The skill is in learning to find the transcendent through the particular. It doesn’t matter what bit of the particular you’re attuned to. If there is truly anything greater than yourself out there to be found, you should be able to come nearer to it from any point. All paths should eventually draw closer as they near the whole that is greater than all perspective. But the nearer we seek to draw, the more willing and able to see beyond our own perspective and limitations we will have to be have to be. And for some that journey will be too arduous.

Of course, if there is no greater conception than that which you privately hold and are born with, then there’s no journey to take, and little value in seeking it. Cooperation and clustering with nearer paths to advance our own agenda and avoidance or elimination of more distant paths to protect our agenda will be the limit of our collaboration. It would be naive to hope for much more from bare nature.

If supernature existed and had broad claims upon us, regardless of our differences, there could be a case for broader cooperation. But if it does not, then our alliances and peace exist only as long as we can either maintain the illusion in our imaginations that there is some higher authority we and other must submit to, or as long as it takes for people to realize its no longer in their benefit to cooperate. And, barring forceful restrictions of law that impose as if there was an incumbent supernature, most people would find that limit much sooner than you would expect. One has only to look at how many average people are willing to cheat on their taxes or their partners or in their driving to realize how quick we are to seize the opportunity to violate higher values we have supposedly submitted to the moment it seems we might benefit from disposing of them.

In a civilization, this is why you see decadence invading across all levels of art, law, and thought. The three aren’t divisible, though one may hangon longer or lead the pack downward or upward. Great art can inspire and guide and be the fire behind a growing civilization, bad art can be the bellwether of its demise. In the great, visionary minds that either guide or warn civilizations, often they will create something in the dimension closest to their own heart and talents and strengthen them, and it has effects across all dimensions. As artistic people are made good they communicate that goodness and the longing for unity and enlightenment in their art. Good guards of justice will see the vision of beauty and try to realize it in their laws. Great thinkers will see the goodness of just conduct and laws and the power and majesty of art and beauty and seek to understand and explain it.

No one person, or single society, can hope to find and achieve perfection in their own time. But the same great truths get expressed in new ways and lift civilizations up into a more perfect form. And great lies recur and degrade order and beauty as well.