The John Keats statement “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” feels absurd to me, but fifty years ago Ray Stevens sung a maudlin song “Everything is beautiful in its own way!” about the world I constantly see. Like a little child, I love the world, and there it gets complicated because there are so many things that cause problems. However, fifty years later Ray Stevens is still singing “Everything is beautiful in its own way!”

Perhaps the most confounding problem for me of linking truth and beauty, was stated by Benjamin Ferencz, the Chief Prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials of Nazi perpetrators of mass murder, after WWII. He said that those mass murders were honorable and law-abiding people in every way. Ferencz said, that if their job hadn’t been to administer the murder of vast numbers of people, they would still be considered fine citizens of our world. 

Was all of these men’s truth, beauty? Was everything beautiful in its own way? Was Ferencz more honorable than the Nazis for seeing to their being executed? Or was he just like them doing his honorable job? Was I a bad person back in 1960 when I was about to become responsible for hauling around H-bombs in a B-47 as a US Air Force pilot and refusing to accept that honorable job of killing a million innocent people when told to do so? 

Isn’t this a beautiful airplane! And yet its sole purpose was to kill people a million at a time.