#25 – Walker Larson

#25 – Walker Larson

December 29th, 2025

Show notes: Additional reading for this episode = Case Studies in Cultural Renewal

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Angus (00:06.69)
This is Everything is Somewhere. I’m Angus Stocking. Today’s guest is writer and cultural critic Walker Larson, whose recent article, “A Case for Beauty in Our Cities,” argues that our built environments should nourish the human soul, not just efficiency. A former literature and history teacher and now a freelance journalist, novelist, and author of the Substack The Hazelnut, Walker’s work spans urban beauty, Italian streetscapes, family life, and the permanent things that give culture depth and meaning.

Walker Larson, welcome to Everything is Somewhere.

Walker (00:43)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me on.

Angus (00:46)
And we have some similarities. In addition to your first name being my middle name, we both had other careers and then got into writing, and we’re both interested in urban aesthetics and so forth. How did that come to be for you? How did you transition from teaching to writing and journalism? And we’re both trying to make a living writing, it sounds like, which is not always easy. Tell us a bit about yourself.

Walker (01:10)
Well, I always wanted to be a writer, from the time I was a little kid. The first thing that I wrote that stands out in my memory was basically a knockoff of The Lord of the Rings. I just kind of rewrote The Lord of the Rings in my eight‑year‑old vocabulary and with terrible eight‑year‑old spelling. But from early on, I really wanted to do that, and that’s what I went to school for. My bachelors is in writing.

Walker (01:47.94)
Then I wasn’t sure exactly what direction I wanted to go. My dad was an English professor for many years, and so I had seen that lifestyle and that definitely had appeal. So I continued on and got a master’s in English literature, with the thought that perhaps I would teach. That can pair well with writing too: you write in the summers and teach in the school year or something like that, which is what my dad had done some of.

I got the master’s because I wasn’t sure what direction to go, whether I would be able to make a living writing or not. That worked out well. I was able to get a teaching position pretty soon after I graduated at a small classical academy. I taught middle school and high school literature and history, and it was a good experience. You really learn something when you have to teach it, and that was true for me with both of those subjects.

It was a good experience, but I just couldn’t shake the urge to write. Like I said, that’s my first passion and that remained with me. I’m kind of a homebody. I love to be home with my family. I’m married, I have two daughters; the second one was just born a month and a half ago, so we’re enjoying that. But I love being home with my family, and the teaching life—though it allows a lot of time off and time at home with breaks and summer—during the school year you’re putting in pretty long hours, and I had a long commute as well. You’re just gone from home a lot. That didn’t sit super well with me.

I thought, if there’s any way to make this writing thing work, I want to make it work. So I started dabbling as a freelancer. A friend introduced me to a publication that was looking for somebody, and one thing led to another. Eventually I saw the job posting over at The Epoch Times, which is one of the main places I write for. They were looking for somebody who specialized in literature, classical literature, which is what I taught. So I applied, somehow got that, and I was doing that on the side for about a year, year and a half.

Walker (04:12.75)
I slowly built up my freelance work on the side while I was still teaching, until I got to where I could do part‑time teaching and part‑time writing. I did that for a year, and then it got to the point where I was able to go full‑time with the writing. That’s what I’ve been doing for about a year and a half—trying to make a go, as you said, making a living as a writer, which is not always easy, but it’s a very rewarding life, I find.

Angus (04:42)
Yeah, congratulations.

Walker (04:44)
Yeah, thank you. So that’s the story of how I moved in that direction. It’s always been a dream of mine. I’m really grateful to be able to do this. It’s something I wanted to do and I didn’t know that it would be possible. And who knows, maybe it’ll change and I’ll have to switch to something else, but as long as it lasts, I’m grateful.

Angus (05:09)
I can guarantee it’ll change. Yeah, similar for me. I had a career as a licensed land surveyor for almost 20 years or so. This was in Wisconsin and California. It was a good career; I liked land surveying quite a bit. But I also had a writing bug.

My transition was writing marketing content for infrastructure firms. So I wrote about sewers quite a bit, and land surveying equipment and stuff I’d used or worked on. Then, like you, I had a nice sideline in columns and more what I’d call creative work that’s in line with my interests in advanced use of geospatial tools. That’s kind of what the podcast came out of.

Angus (06:02.83)
On the article in particular that led to this conversation: it was forwarded to me by my editor at American Surveyor magazine, Marc Cheves, because he knows my interest—and he has his own interest—in urban aesthetics, we could say. The title of that article, “A Case for Beauty in Our Cities: Modern Architecture Often Prioritizes Efficiency Over Aesthetics, but It Leaves the Human Heart Wanting More.” And then there’s a nice picture of a park.

In a way, Walker, this article has some dark aspects, starting with the political movements that led to what we might call ugliness in cities. Was that your intent? Maybe tell us about your writing of this particular article. What did you see as a problem in today’s infrastructure or architecture and what caused it? Why are we at this place? I think a lot of people would agree that today’s urban environment, and really the built environment, doesn’t feed the human spirit, but why do you think that happened?

Walker (08:01.00)
Yeah. Well, that’s a big question, because I don’t think you can disentangle it from the story of the arts in general, the movement of cultures, the movement of philosophy. My perspective on architecture or any of these issues is really firmly rooted in the idea that the human being is a composite, a body‑soul composite.

Therefore, what happens in philosophy or what happens in our minds is going to manifest physically. It’s going to manifest in our bodies, but also in the environments that we create for ourselves. Everything kind of works together or is interdependent. I would argue when it comes to culture, whether you’re talking about literature or architecture or any of the arts, religion, philosophy—these things can’t or shouldn’t be separated. When you do separate them out or attempt to, when you attempt to divide the human person in that way, you run into problems.

So the interest for this article ties in with my general interest in culture and how we can meaningfully recover traditional principles of culture. I know that’s a broad term.

Angus (09:30)
Don’t you worry about that. Talk as long as you want; it’s a topic I’m interested in. I’m interested in particular about the concept of the spirit‑and‑matter hybrid that humans are. It’s so important and it very rarely comes up in trade journals. I try to introduce it.

Walker (09:43.66)
Yeah, right.

Angus (09:45)
And I think even at The Epoch Times, as you know, in politics it’s very easy to pretend that there isn’t a spiritual component to human existence. But just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s right, and the bad effects are pretty huge.

Walker (09:58)
Yeah. To give maybe a short answer to the question you posed—how have we gotten here where buildings and cityscapes tend to be ugly?—I would say it is due really to what you just said: to this denial of our spiritual side, our spiritual nature. There’s more to it than that, but if you want to boil it down, I think it’s because we’re treating human beings in too pragmatic of a way and too materialistic of a way, or mechanistic if you prefer.

I tried to get at that in the article, where I was talking about how these environments are built for efficiency. They’re built very pragmatically, and the architectural movements I mentioned in there, like the Bauhaus or the Brutalist movement, were very consciously trying to strip things down to what’s utilitarian—what’s efficient—and to get rid of the beauty and the aesthetics. They focused on what can be mass‑produced, what can be cheap, and what can facilitate efficiency. I would argue that that idea of architecture flows from a flawed idea of the human person.

Walker (11:31.51)
It’s a flawed philosophy of the human person that strips away our spiritual nature and reduces us to economic cogs, if you want to look at it from a Marxist or some capitalist perspective where it’s all about the economic value of the person; or scientific materialist views where we’re just animals, blobs of chemicals that need shelter to survive, and so any old box will do.

Angus (11:58)
And we’re kind of closing in on the classic idealism versus materialism argument—mind before matter or matter before mind. And that is a hard argument to have in the public arena. In particular, civil engineers are not, by nature or by profession, geared to identify spiritual needs. They’re very good at solving problems of drainage, population density, transportation. But it’s not part of the engineering praxis to identify spiritual needs. As a result, we don’t get cities that speak to the soul, although we used to—and that’s part of the tragedy here.

If you go back a couple hundred years, we really prize urban interiors now, like in London or Amsterdam or parts of Spain or Europe generally, and even older portions of cities are historically important now because they’re beautiful, because they work. And that’s changed.

If I could, maybe I’ll just read a quotation from your article.

Angus (13:14.91)
You were talking about the Bauhaus art movement, identified it as Marxist in nature, communist, and then you wrote that it essentially made a direct assault on the traditional bourgeois notions of beauty and design behind the world’s buildings and cities, in favor of a more egalitarian form of architecture and furniture for the working class that could be industrially produced using scarce resources.

When the Bauhaus movement was stifled by the Nazis, many of its figures fled to other countries, spreading their ideas about art and architecture internationally. That image of “squash the movement and it just sends the cockroaches fleeing to other parts of the world,” as with Nazism…

Walker (14:32)
Sure.

Angus (14:33)
…is pretty striking.

Walker (14:46.54)
Right, yeah. Certainly with the Marxist influence there, which is a philosophy that tends to view humanity in a mechanistic way and in a non‑spiritual way, I think that feeds directly into the ugliness of design and the very utilitarian mindset that affects that school of thought and design.

Yeah, it is a tragedy. As you said, we have these cities in the past that didn’t make such a firm divide between body and soul, where it was recognized that human beings have a spiritual dimension that is open to the transcendent, that is open to beauty, that can see and appreciate beauty—which almost by definition is not utilitarian. Beauty is that which is for its own sake, by one way of looking at it.

Angus (15:40)
To me, it wasn’t so much that anyone was arguing for a transcendent nature, it was more that nobody was really thinking in terms of there not being a transcendent nature. It wasn’t a public debate about whether or not humans had spiritual needs. That seems a fairly modern philosophy: to propose that they don’t. It’s associated with rationality and science, I think falsely—but there you have it.

Walker (16:25.48)
Yeah, I agree. I think that is somewhat of a new idea: to reduce us to our physical and biological needs solely, and to discount the spiritual side. Take, for example, some of these medieval cities in Europe. They’re so obviously oriented towards or acknowledging the spiritual dimension. Oftentimes they were literally built around a church—a little village church or a bigger city church in the center. That was just taken for granted, as you said. It wasn’t a debate, at least in that part of the world at that time, as to whether or not humanity had spiritual needs. That was a given. And it was also more or less taken for granted that those spiritual needs would influence and shape the physical environment as well.

Angus (17:15)
Tell us about Brutalism in particular. To me, it’s like a horror story. The spread of Brutalism is like 1984 personified. How did it get started? What were the aims of the movement? And why is so much civic architecture influenced by it to this day? There are huge buildings that are consciously ugly, that are identified with Brutalism. What was it, why did it catch on, and why are we having trouble leaving it behind?

Walker (18:09.58)
Well, again, I think it largely spreads in the post‑war years. Part of the reason there, as with the Bauhaus, is that it was supposed to be a cheap way to construct buildings. You had to rebuild Europe after World War II. So much architecture had been destroyed. Brutalism was proposed as one way of cheaply and efficiently rebuilding things: these concrete boxes and slabs. It’s very much “just kind of get it done.”

But I think it was more than just cheap and practical. It seemed philosophically oriented toward consciously excluding beauty—not just that beauty was an afterthought, but that it was consciously excluded. I’m theorizing here a little bit, but it reminds me of the Dada movement in the arts. Because of the war, there was a disillusionment with so many presuppositions that had been accepted before the war. You had this brutal bloodbath and destruction. People were deeply affected by that, and for some it had the effect of saying: this whole pre‑war European civilization was all kind of a facade, a fraud, and these ideas of beauty didn’t save us from war.

With the Dada movement, they go in absurdist directions trying to say: look, traditional notions of beauty are social constructs that we can tear down and that are really irrelevant in this post‑war reality, where we’ve stripped away bourgeois ideas. The old ideas of beauty are not permanent, they’re not real, and they didn’t save us. That may be one aspect of it.

Angus (20:34.97)
It’s nihilism. The way I’ve put it sometimes is: it’s as if, starting post‑war and in the rebuilding, and really to this day, the question becomes, “Why should we make it nice? It’s just for us.”

It’s so frustrating because there wasn’t the idea “let’s make it as nice as it was,” maybe because they didn’t know how to ask that question. Maybe they weren’t identifying that it was nice, and if it was, why? Inevitably, if you ask yourself, “Why is Notre Dame or Chartres more wonderful than this Brutalist city hall we’re building?” unless you really dig in, it’s hard to ask that question, and it’s impossible to answer if you’re not working from a religious or spiritual—and perhaps specifically religious—aspect. The great cathedrals were Catholic, and their builders were working for God.

Walker, when I was reading your article and thinking about this topic, I was reminded quite a bit of the architect Christopher Alexander, who spent his whole life asking that question: why do old things tend to be nicer, and how do we capture that? Is he a person that has influenced your thinking at all, or did he come up as you wrote this article?

Walker (22:28.78)
No, actually. I was interested when you mentioned him, but he’s not someone I was familiar with prior to when you brought him up in our correspondence. I’m certainly intrigued to learn more, because as you said, these aren’t questions being asked very often by civil engineers, and not even commonly by architects. It’s not a common debate.

Jumping to my other experience as a classical teacher for a moment, I think it might have something to do with the fact that a liberal education—a classical liberal education—is no longer expected or required of people going into the hard sciences or even architecture. It’s just not considered necessary. I would argue that part of why we see ugly buildings today, and why maybe we haven’t been able to move past that, has to do with the lack of liberal education, a humanist education, for the people who design these structures.

There are some exceptions. I know the University of Notre Dame has an architecture school that’s specifically dedicated to classical architecture and maintaining that. You had asked about the origins of this article. One of the things that inspired me was hearing about a city, or a small kind of development, that was built to look old, using classical principles. I’m pretty sure I have the name correct here—I have it in my notes—but I found out about this city, Cayalá.

It was built by architects from the University of Notre Dame’s classical architecture school. If you look at photographs of it, it looks like one of these old European cities. You would not have any idea, if you just glanced at the photo, that it was built in the 2010s. So it’s not that we can’t build beautiful cities and buildings; it’s that, as you said, it’s just not a question that’s really being asked. It’s not something that people are choosing to do. But it is possible, as we see with Cayalá, and there are a few others popping up, largely as part of this new urbanism school of thought, which is consciously trying to recover some of those principles of beauty, mixed‑use areas, community, and basically designing structures, landscapes, and cityscapes that foster full human flourishing: social, economic, and also the spiritual aspect and our rational nature that can see and appreciate beauty.

Walker (24:53.19)
So, I’m sorry—I kind of lost track of your question there.

Angus (24:56)
I don’t know that it was a clear question. This has come up before on Everything is Somewhere. We’re working through a series of interviews with some of the students of Christopher Alexander, and I’ve written several columns. I would recommend him to you. He’s asking the same questions that you’re asking in this interview and in your article.

He’s most famous for writing the book A Pattern Language, which had a big influence in the ’70s and ’80s and is the most widely distributed architecture book of all time. He ended up being a little dissatisfied with that book because he felt he hadn’t adequately conveyed the spiritual nature of good building, so he wrote a tremendous magnum opus of four volumes, The Nature of Order.

He was at odds with the architectural profession. He was hounded when he taught at Berkeley and excoriated in the architectural press, even as he was building beautiful buildings that really worked for people. He was a general contractor too, which was out of fashion for architects.

Angus (27:05.59)
He went pretty far, even for those who most admired him and what he was doing. In his fourth book, The Luminous Ground, he essentially proposed a new cosmology that dealt with our sense of self, the “I,” as being as real as what we see outside. He was attempting to heal the subjective–objective divide, as many great philosophers have, and more successfully than most, in my opinion.

He didn’t prove God, but he offered an almost mystic transmission of how to establish meaning and beauty in infrastructure and the built world. They’re difficult books to read, but well worth it. They amount to a specifically spiritual take, or an insistence on the importance of soul and spirit and a spiritual substrate—the luminous ground, he called it—that, if we work at it, can be built into the environment. He’s talking about civilizational renewal, a revival of spirit, which is a lot to ask, but also entirely necessary, I would say.

Where have you ended up on this question? Have you detected a way forward, or what’s your prescription for the problem of ugliness?

Walker (28:57.45)
Again, it’s a huge problem, because it ties into these fundamental questions of what we believe about human nature. The predominant philosophy today would deny that there are objective measures of beauty to begin with. Until you address that problem, it’s going to be hard to move forward, on the one hand.

On the other hand, people do recognize beauty when they see it. I would argue this is one of the proofs for the objectivity of beauty: it’s pretty well universally recognized.

Angus (30:24)
Let me break in, because I think you’ll find this interesting. Christopher Alexander would agree. Starting in the ’70s, he would put slides up in his presentations: on the left, a picture of a street corner from today’s cities; and on the right, another street corner from a couple hundred years ago that was more traditional.

He would ask his audience, “Which of these is more like a picture of yourself?” People would hem and haw because they didn’t like the question, but there was almost universal acceptance that one of the two was more like a picture of self than the other. The one that people chose tended to be the older, more richly built place, and it would be more beautiful.

It became a way for him to evaluate beauty, not by some metric, but by human response, using the human as an instrument for measuring beauty. It was infallible; it always came up with an answer with a high degree of reliability. I think that’s what you’re getting at: how do we even define or talk about beauty? His work is about that process—how do we identify it, talk about it, and recreate it or build it in new buildings?

The reason I broke in is because he had a way to prove to people that responsiveness to beauty is cross‑cultural, and it became very profound—a very simple question: which of these is a better picture of you? Sorry to interrupt.

Walker (31:58)
Yeah, no, that’s great. That ties in with what I’m saying about this recognition that I think all of us have on some level. You’re going to find exceptions, I suppose, but as a rule, we can see it and recognize it. That’s because there is something there that is constant with our human nature.

I talk about nature in the article, and I would say both human nature and nature in the sense of the natural world. These are unchanging realities that we can either better or worse reflect in our built environments. Another example of what you’re talking about—where people recognize it when they see it—would be that development or small city I mentioned, Cayalá, which has become a very popular tourist place to go. What makes it attractive is that it is so much more beautiful than the surrounding cityscape. There’s no other reason for people to go there. So it’s a proof, I would say, that there are universally valid forms of beauty.

Walker (32:45.29)
In Western philosophy, for many centuries, people were confident enough to say that. They believed and articulated principles of beauty like symmetry, order, and proportion. They felt these were things we could know and recognize, that beauty was not purely a question of sentiment—although emotion plays into it for sure—but that it’s not just a matter of “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I think there is something objective that people, when they see it, respond to, and it shapes you.

Because we have this bodily element, these senses, our environment does affect our mood; it affects our thoughts; it affects, I would argue, our soul to some extent. That’s part of the case I’m trying to make in the article—a case for beauty in our cities. I’m trying to say: this will elevate people internally if they can be surrounded by beauty externally.

If you want to take a scientific approach, which tends to be more convincing to modern audiences than appeals to Aristotle, you can see this in studies of the natural world and its effect on health. When people go out into forests or other natural environments, it boosts the mood, helps you stay healthy, protects you from disease, boosts the immune system, things like that. That reinforces the idea that we should pay attention to our environments. What are we surrounding ourselves with? If you surround yourself with a sterile, ugly, utilitarian built environment, that will shape your mindset about yourself and about the nature of the world.

Walker (35:10.31)
That is a pessimistic way to view the human person: as something sterile and utilitarian. So, yeah, I think it’s really important, and we can’t ignore the effect of our environment.

Angus (35:27)
Tell us a bit more about this city you’ve mentioned twice now. What’s the name?

Walker (35:32)
Yeah, Cayalá. Let me double‑check here. It’s in Guatemala, but I want to get the correct place. I wrote a full article about it on my Substack. If people go to my Substack, The Hazelnut, and search for “Case Studies in Cultural Renewal,” I have a couple of posts in this series. The first one is about this city.

Angus (36:02)
And where is it?

Walker (36:18.17)
Guatemala City, actually. It’s within the city limits, a city within a city. It was built, as I said, in the 2010s by these architects—Estudio Urbano is the name of the architectural firm—headed by Pedro Godoy and María Sánchez, who were both trained at the University of Notre Dame classical architecture school, which is sort of a one‑of‑a‑kind architectural school.

They said specifically that they were invoking the cities of the past. The concept was to bring what they called the Christian city that comes from the Persian, Greek, and Roman city—so the medieval cities that we mentioned earlier, having drawn from the classical tradition with the Greek and Roman cities. Those were built along a different philosophical framework where beauty was considered integral to a true city and to a flourishing population, where they were trying to build environments that would lead to human flourishing.

In this modern development in Guatemala, they took those principles and applied them. They created spaces that were supposed to elevate and ennoble the human occupants and to bring them together as well. There’s a strong element of community here.

Walker (38:01)
All of this is influenced by new urbanism, that movement I mentioned before, and particularly by the work of traditional urban designer Léon Krier, who is a strong advocate for restorative urban planning that relies on traditional design features like harmonious arrangements of buildings, a human scale instead of the scale of the machine—whereas I would suggest most modern cities are built to the scale of the car.

Modern infrastructure is really designed for cars to move through. Pedestrian traffic is a second thought. In this development in Guatemala, instead they focus first on the human scale. It’s not built for cars. There are roads and cars can kind of weave through, but it’s really built for foot traffic. It’s built at a human scale. The buildings are not that tall.

You go into downtown Chicago or wherever and see these immense buildings, huge skyscrapers that are overwhelming, beyond the human scale. The human person is a fixed scale—we only get so tall—and beyond that you start to get beyond what we can easily take in with our senses, where we feel comfortable, in spaces we can easily traverse with our own power and not by the power of a machine. In Cayalá, I think the tallest buildings are probably just a few stories high. It’s the same principles you see in old European cities.

Walker (40:05)
This past summer I had the absolute delight of visiting Italy for the first time. Specifically, I spent a lot of time in Lucca, in Tuscany. It’s not a very big city, but it’s beautiful, and very old—it goes back to the Romans, and it was thriving for centuries in the Middle Ages as well. A lot of that original architecture is still there, or at least its traces and influences.

In the walled section of Lucca, it’s extremely walkable. Cars are more of a nuisance than a help. None of the buildings are that high—just a few stories. You can walk across the whole thing in about 20 minutes. It’s mixed‑use: shops, restaurants, lodging, places of business. I would say that’s a better reflection of the way we actually live, or ought to live, than the single‑use developments we see in modern cities now.

Walker (41:05.08)
The mixed use makes sense because it integrates our work life and our leisure and our economic production and our spiritual life—if there’s a church right there. Certainly that was the case in Lucca; it’s called the city of a hundred churches, which is almost literally true. All these things flow into each other in a way that is really important for restoring the unity of human life and the union of body and soul that we’ve been talking about.

Your environment in these types of cities better supports that unity of body and soul and the integration of our different activities. It’s not completely separating work life from everything else and so on.

Angus (42:07)
Okay, let me ask kind of a complicated question, and I’ll set it up with a personal question. We’re talking about religion, spirituality, soul, and the reflection in the built environment of spirit. So the setup would be: what are your own beliefs—spirituality or religion—and how do they affect your life and where you live?

Then, on the question of the urban environment: how does it have to work? Does the environment have to become more receptive to human flourishing by being built with spiritual principles, or does the environment become more beautiful because humans experience some sort of spiritual renewal?

And then to make it more complicated, I’m getting the barest idea that maybe you share some of my political paranoia that there are anti‑human forces at work in today’s culture. So that’s not a very good question, but I think you see what I’m getting at: how is it going to work? How are things going to get better? What do we have to do? How does the world have to change in order to be a nicer place for humans to live?

Walker (44:02)
Yeah, well, good question. I’ll try to take the two parts separately: first, my personal beliefs, and then how we maybe improve things in society’s understanding of these matters.

Personally, I’m a Catholic, so definitely religious, and that certainly shapes my worldview in many ways. Philosophically, I adhere to the moderate realism of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. For them, they see the human person as a composite of body and soul, and spiritual forms exist in the real world that we see around us. That’s part of the real world, that forms are to be found in things. That’s my personal belief.

As far as how it shapes my own life, I love to be out in the country. I live out in the country because I love to see God’s creation and the natural world, and because of some of these points I’m raising about cities and how I struggle to enjoy the way they’re designed. Obviously there are good cities out there and I appreciate what they have to offer, but I live out in the country and I suppose you could say that’s somewhat of a philosophical decision.

Walker (44:53.05)
As far as how these things change, the short answer is: I don’t know. I think it’s a both‑and. I don’t think it’s just going to be one side. A spiritual renewal among people certainly would, I think, lead to a flourishing in architecture and urban planning, for sure. I also think that improvements in urban planning and architecture could help fuel a spiritual renewal in people.

It’s a give‑and‑take. Our spiritual side and our beliefs shape our environment, but our environment also shapes our spiritual outlook. Practically speaking, what I would love to see is more of these types of projects like Cayalá in Guatemala, where you have architects and designers who do have spiritual belief and an understanding of the importance of the true nature of the human being, who then go out and design these environments and developments and buildings for people.

I would see that as something that will affect the people who live there. It will raise their minds to higher things. Beauty always has the potential to do that. It’s going to help them live a more humane life in the way I was describing: integrating their activities. That could help bring about greater spiritual renewal throughout the world. So that’s maybe one direction.

As far as how you bring about the spiritual renewal first from the other angle—that’s a huge question that I’m probably not qualified to answer.

Angus (46:57.47)
Well, it’s not an entirely fair question, and thank you for indulging me. You are inspiring confessional mode in me.

You are a Catholic, and I am a catechumen. I’m an adult convert to Catholicism, and I hope that this April I’ll be received into the Catholic Church. I personally see, in terms of Western culture, that it’s no accident that our great examples of architecture are the cathedrals and other buildings directly influenced by a Catholic mindset.

I’m sure I’m losing some listeners as we speak, but certainly there’s an aspect to it. Christopher Alexander is dead now, but we spoke several times while he was alive and I was a close reader. He wrestles with the question of religion in particular. He really hung out for a sort of secular understanding of spirit and couldn’t quite pull it off.

He was a mathematician with his initial degree at Cambridge and definitely saw himself as a rational materialist. But against his will, he was drawn to the truth that it was absolutely necessary to acknowledge spiritual, perpetual, eternal verities in the built world. Spirit and matter became so intertwined for him that he almost went a little crazy over it.

Angus (48:42.41)
He wrote about Christianity in particular. He felt the need to kind of disavow it, but at the same time, one of the best, most luminous chapters in his closing argument for his worldview was on Chartres—how every corner of every building, every gargoyle, every stained‑glass window, every pane of glass seemed to have been made as a gift for God.

So definitely it all comes together. You mentioned Aquinas too, and he will be my patron saint upon confirmation. I’m glad I brought it up and I’m glad you went with me on that question.

We’re getting to the end here—not in any rush—but what should people know about you and your writing, and where can they go for more? The Substack you mentioned—we’ll get links. Is that a paid Substack? Could we work out a link for listeners to read without a big obligation? And same with The Epoch Times: what’s going on in your writing life, and what are you doing in your world to bring about more beauty in the environment, in addition to living in the country? I do too—that’s another thing we have in common. I live in a rural part of Colorado.

Walker (50:27.12)
Nice. Yeah, so the Substack is all free, and a lot of it is reposting from where I publish elsewhere online. There are a few publications I write for regularly, and some other one‑offs. The Epoch Times is one, and Intellectual Takeout is another that I write for regularly. Those should be free as well. I know with The Epoch Times sometimes they’ll paywall some of the content, but you can make a free account and get access to quite a bit of it.

On my Substack, I’m republishing stuff usually about a month later—that’s mostly because I get behind—but then that’s all free on the Substack. I do have a paid level if people want to do that; I appreciate the support. You get a free reading journal that I put together if you do that, but there’s really not, at this time, any exclusive content. It’s just if people want to support out of the goodness of their hearts.

Angus (51:38)
You’ve got a couple of novels out, is that right?

Walker (51:43.98)
Yes, that’s correct. I have self‑published two novels. Song of Spheres could be interesting to your listeners. It’s not about architecture per se, but it’s definitely about the conflict between a materialistic scientific worldview versus a more spiritual cosmology, and how those end up shaping human society and human character, and the importance of that debate. It’s also kind of a thriller adventure story.

My second one is Hologram, a dystopian novel set in the future where holographic technology has been perfected so that it’s possible for people to project illusions that look completely real—three‑dimensional things that look completely real but are not. The main character is the only person who can see through those illusions. It’s a sci‑fi novel. The main character is young—he’s 18—but I think it appeals to adults as well. I’m currently working on a third novel, but that one’s a ways from finished yet.

Angus (52:49)
Good. You bring up a question that I was going to ask you, and maybe we’ll close on this. We obviously live in a technological age, and our primary audience is land surveyors who are working now with drones and GPS and scanning and virtual and augmented reality and AI. We’ve been talking about AI quite a bit on the podcast and in the magazine.

Given everything we’ve been talking about—old versus new and beauty—how do you feel about our absurdly technologically advanced age, AI in particular? Does that help or hinder our efforts to make the world more beautiful?

Walker (54:22.73)
Another good question. Off the bat, I would say tools are always a question of what we make of them. That would be the first principle I’d put out there. However, at the same time, some tools tend toward abuse more than others. I think a lot of the technologies we have today tend toward abuse in the sense that we end up using them in ways that are harmful to our true good rather than helping it, and perhaps work against beauty.

To address that part of your question: the style of the modern city that we’re criticizing is very much a style tied to a mechanistic and technological worldview. It’s an expression of a love for technology and a confidence in technology that is sometimes misplaced. When it comes to the structures you see in a modern city, it’s more like a computer chip than a tree. That’s the kind of aesthetic at play: a very technological aesthetic.

Walker (55:28)
Now, that has its uses; it is efficient. These technologies do help us—that’s how we’re talking to each other right now, and I’m grateful for that. At the same time, we have to really ask questions right now at this moment in history about whether these technologies are serving us or whether we are serving them. We have to be really intentional about whether this technology interferes with our ability to live a fully human life.

Whether it’s the internet or AI, I’m pretty critical of AI. If people go and read my Substack, they’ll find that out quickly. I think there you have an example where the exchange is, in my opinion, not worth it. I don’t see the increase in efficiency that might come from AI as being worth it when you consider the cost to what it might do to the human soul.

Something I write about a lot there is the intersection of AI and the arts, because I’m a literature guy—that’s one of my focuses. When you have an artificial “intelligence”—and we can get into what that even means—that starts to replace fundamental human activities that are part of what make us human and part of what make life worth living, such as creating art, then I think you’ve gone to a point where your technology is no longer serving you. It’s warring against you.

Walker (56:47.26)
So I, for example, am really opposed to artificially generated music or artificially generated novels or videos, which are popping up all over now. I think we need to tread really carefully there, because we’re outsourcing the activities of the human soul.

I often go back to C.S. Lewis on this. In his great work The Abolition of Man, he asked some of these questions and warned people about technological progress. We can get behind technology in a certain sense, but we have to ask ourselves what the final goal is. His argument is that the technologically progressive ideology runs the risk of ultimately trying to transform human nature itself.

When you get to that point—when you go from trying to control nature in the sense of “I want to have a warm house; I don’t want to be out in the snowstorm,” to trying to control nature in the sense of “I want to reformulate my very being”—then we’ve crossed a line. He argues that this will lead to what he calls the abolition of man. You will destroy yourself at a certain point if you try to remake yourself at such a fundamental level through technology and other means.

Walker (58:06)
I think that’s an important, articulate, and prophetic warning. So I’m trying to stake out a middle position here.

Angus (58:47.63)
By the way, this is something that I ask myself a lot, and I’m happy to hear your evolving thoughts on the matter.

Walker (58:55.64)
Yeah, this is very much an evolving thought. I’m not someone who’s going to say, “Oh, we have to go back to pre‑modern times, a pre‑industrial world.” Maybe that would be nice in some ways, but it would be not nice in others, and also it’s not practical. That’s just not going to happen, as far as I can see.

So we have to find a way to live with the technologies we’ve made without letting them militate against the most important values that we have. I even think about the internet. I have a very complex relationship with the internet, because on the one hand it allows me to do what I do. I’m able to freelance write because of the internet. I don’t think it would be easy without that. I get so much information from it, etc.

Walker (59:51)
At the same time, it’s easy for me to become addicted to it and to get sucked into just watching things on YouTube or something instead of doing activities that are more engaged with the real world and with human flourishing—such as spending time with my family, getting outside, or creating something meaningful. The human tendency to want to create things is good. But it’s so easy for the internet to suck up so much of my time that it’s no longer serving me; it’s warring against me and against the best use of my time.

How do we balance those things? That’s a great question. I don’t have all the answers. It’s a really important question for us at this time in history. Just because we can develop a new technology doesn’t mean that we should. Even with the technologies we have, just because we can use them in a certain way doesn’t mean that we should.

I want to get to a place in my own life where I can use the internet as a tool for specific tasks instead of this omnipresent reality that I have access to all the time, constantly drawing me in and away from things that would be more useful.

Angus (1:00:59.66)
Thanks for listening to this 25th episode of Everything is Somewhere, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. An interview with a fellow writer who is also interested in urban aesthetics, spirit and matter, and who lives in the country by preference hit a lot of my buttons when it comes to preferred topics for this podcast. That I got to geek out a bit about my new commitment to Catholicism was just a cool bonus.

Speaking of bonuses, a week ago I released a short bonus episode of Everything is Somewhere, and I hope you will take a listen and tell me what you think. It is a short audio essay, and I look forward to releasing these weekly. This week’s show notes include links to Walker Larson’s writings and books, a transcript of today’s episode, and a few other random treasures.

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As always, I welcome feedback. You can send me feedback directly at angusstocking at gmail.com or anonymously at amerisurv.com slash podcast. You can follow me on X or Twitter at twitter.com/Surveying

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