Alexandre Lacassagne, the French forensic pathologist who published a book on tattoos in 1881, would have been astonished at, and puzzled by, the explosion of elaborate and professional tattoos in the general population in the last three decades.
In a small village in France, near a restaurant where I sometimes have lunch, I recently noticed a new establishment offering something called “Alternative beauty.”
I was puzzled about what that could be. I am familiar, of course, with alternative medicine (so-called), which a doctor friend of mine researched and found, in most cases, not to be alternative but additional—certainly whenever the patient had a definable disease. The healing chakras of the earth, the windchimes, or the crystals worn round the neck were not alternatives to antibiotics, but auxiliary to them.
But what could alternative beauty be? It is true that standards of beauty vary between ages and countries: de gustibus non disputandum and all that. Nevertheless, in any one time and in any one place, what counts as beautiful is widely shared, especially in the matter of personal pulchritude. There is even some agreement across ages and cultures; no one has ever found gross deformity beautiful.
The only alternative beauty that I could think of was ugliness. It so happened that, a few days before I lunched in the restaurant, a man called Ozzy Osbourne died. He was world famous. I had heard the name, but it is no doubt a symptom of my voluntary withdrawal from much of contemporary life that I knew almost nothing of him. The news coverage of his demise, however, was very extensive: it was as if some world-historical figure, such as David Beckam, Madonna or Vladimir Putin, had died. I performed a brief search on the internet. The material was extensive, but it did not take long to establish that the late Mr. Osbourne had not been an aesthete as commonly understood. He had been what one might call alternative aesthete, that is to say someone who had promoted, and benefited from, the greatest possible ugliness in public.
Of course, one might consider him to have been a clown, a court jester, a satirist, a provocateur, the kind of non-conformist that any free society must tolerate and perhaps even needs. But I think his espousal of ugliness, including of gesture, was more significant than this might suggest. He was both symptom and cause of an espousal of ugliness as a desideratum in life: for the fact is that while beauty is elitist, ugliness is democratic.
It is a sad fact of human existence that we are not born with equal physical attractions. The English novelist L.P. Hartley satirised the modern preoccupation with equality by imagining a society in which persons of above average physical attractiveness were compulsorily subjected to plastic surgery to render their appearance average. The book, Facial Justice, took as its target the common confusion between unfairness and injustice, and the disastrous consequences of the failure to make that distinction. People who, through no merit of their own, are born physically attractive, have an unfair advantage in life—the reverse, of course, also being true. Hartley’s novel was an early criticism of the drive to what Thomas Sowell has called “cosmic justice,” according to which not justice but fairness must be the goal.
If not everyone can be beautiful, everyone can be (or at least make himself) ugly. To make the most of oneself is to espouse an inherently elitist ideal: but whatever one does, one will never be Clark Gable or Audrey Hepburn, and the unearned privilege of such fortunate people will remain intact.
On the other hand, to make the worst of oneself is within everyone’s capacity. Everyone can be a slob, with the added advantage that it is not difficult to be one: indeed, it comes almost naturally. To be anything else requires a certain care and effort, and should not care and effort have a higher goal than mere appearance?
The convention of such qualities as neatness, smartness, and elegance as far as they are possible is, of course, socially conservative. The convention is to a degree collectivist rather than individualist, insofar as —within limits—the person who obeys it seeks not to draw attention to himself but to please others. The dandy takes concern for appearance to extremes and makes of his appearance an identity and a fetish. But as the English novelist, Arnold Bennet, pointed out long ago in a beautiful short essay, this fault is a minor and harmless one, and is at least a straining after perfection of a kind. The absurdity of dandies may also add to the gaiety of a nation.
Slobbishness, by contrast, is purely egotistical. In essence, the slob implies by his mode of dress that others will have to take him as he is, that he is not going to waste his time just to please their eye. Implicit in this is the assumption that the slob’s mind is fixed on higher things than mere appearance: as if 95% of the time we have anything else to go by. It is true that to look reasonably smart takes a little time, but I doubt that even Kant had his mind fixed on higher metaphysical problems at every waking moment of his life such that he could spare no time for anything else.
Even in its own terms, this attempt to escape conventional judgment fails. One convention is simply replaced by another: the attempt itself is conventional. The question, therefore, is not whether a mode of dress is conventional, but which is the better, more civilised convention.
Besides, the convention of slobbery misreads the struggles of mankind to emerge from poverty. I have travelled extensively in countries where poverty has been of the absolute, not the relative, variety; and I have been deeply impressed—moved, even—by the efforts of very poor people to present themselves as well as they can. Not for them torn jeans and crumpled T-shirts: if their clothes are ragged, it is because they have no others or are saving the others for special occasions.
But there is something more to modern ugliness than mere neglect of appearance. Neglect will lead naturally enough to shabbiness, raggedness, dirt, and so forth; but great attention is often paid to ugliness, as if it were something that was positively desired. Ugliness is not therefore simply something negative, a manifestation or natural consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, where it is merely not resisted. It is something positive, in the sense of something being targeted.
Thus people often go to considerable trouble to make themselves ugly, or as ugly as possible. Nor is this simply a trait of rebellious youth that is trying to assert its independence and that will take the easiest route available to shock its elders. Such youthful rebellion is for most people a phase, as stamp-collecting or interest in dinosaurs used to be. But now, perhaps for the first time, the ugliness of youthful rebellion has become inscribed deeply into society, virtually as the norm.
The inversion of the value ascribed to beauty and ugliness has an intellectual, or at least an ideological, root. When we look at something beautiful that has come down to us from the past, we are now encouraged to view it not through the lens of aesthetic appreciation, but through that of supposedly historical understanding—which in our present intellectual climate is that of the backward projection of current grievances and detection of past injustices. According to this historiography, the beautiful was produced in conditions that we find repugnant: of hunger, poverty, yawning inequality, serfdom, slavery, and so forth. Unselfconsciously to appreciate beauty produced in such circumstances, when life itself for many or most people was far from beautiful, is to heap retrospective or posthumous injustice and humiliation on those who already suffered enough. The new museology in Anglo-Saxon countries increasingly partakes of this historiography.
Ugliness, then, stands guarantor that we are not so trivial as to concern ourselves with beauty while there is so much suffering in the world. No one will ever be able to accuse us of indifference or callousness in the face of that suffering. Not evil, but ugliness, be thou my good.
