A Maori chief with tatttoos

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

Aristotle remarked in The Poetics that man is the most imitative of all animals.  Two-and-a-half millennia later, picking up where Aristotle left off, René Girard developed an entire “Fundamental Anthropology,” drawing on Greek tragedy and the four Gospels, which argues (among other essential propositions) that the thing that people are most prone to imitate is the delusory impression that other people enjoy a degree of pure being greater than their own, which, as with all “mediated objects,” they strive to appropriate.  Old sayings express the same observation.  Thus “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.”  That is, my neighbor is better off than I am, and I can’t bear it.  Biblical morality, as Girard notes, enjoins imitation, as in the Tenth Commandment and for the good reason that imitation unchecked runs to covetousness and so gives rise to conflicts in the community.  Biblical religion, especially Christianity, offers consolation for the ascetic gesture of opting out of the wicked deliciousness of coveting things.  It encourages people to develop their internal, or spiritual, resources.  All of traditional Western high culture has the same aim – through ritual, philosophy, literature, and the arts to cultivate the soul by cultivating the virtues.

What has all of this to do with tattooing and the current craze for it?

People who cultivate the soul by cultivating the virtues – and who do so by engaging actively in civilized institutions – gain identity and differentiate themselves non-invidiously through the fostering of their God-given gifts and the application of knowledge and skills.  It is not that they have no models, but their models are non-present.  They are ancient philosophers and saints, writers and artists, long dead, and individuals, also no longer with us, who put a moral imprint in the histories of their nations.  People who fail to mature in this way lack those non-present high-cultural models. The entire structure of modern society encourages people not to mature in this way, but to remain childish and impulsive and without a sense of inner being.  People who live without a sense of inner being can only take their cues from others, who are present on the scene.  Their idea of being is the childish one of attracting attention and, as teenagers say, being popular.  Such people, wanting to differentiate themselves from others, so as to become conspicuous and, as they see it, acquire being, will necessarily turn to externals.

A tattoo is an external gesture aimed at the acquisition of a sense of being based on differentiating oneself from other people, so as to call attention to the ego.  What is obvious to the educated third party and yet is imperceptible to the externally fixated ego is that the gesture is not differentiating at all.  On the contrary, it is a conformist gesture par excellence, which, far from designating any actual individuality, merely attests a kind of submergence in the tribe.  In a mediated society like ours, these processes are, quite naturally, thoroughly mediated.  If rap musicians get lots of attention, and if they appear to enjoy the being that the limited subject feels himself to lack, then the limited subject will imitate the rap musician; and where he is not even talented enough to rap, he will adopt his models external features, such as the tattoo and the invariable backwards baseball hat.

From a cultivated perspective, the epidemic of tattooing and scarification (rings and studs and pins) witnesses several facts about our society.  It is a thoroughly de-spiritualized and de-cultured society, whose educational system has been worse than bankrupt for decades.  It is filled with people whose mental life is that of a child or of a tribal person of a Late-Stone Age dispensation (except that the latter was a stage on the way to better things and the re-emergence of its patterns in a modern context is a catastrophe).  He might be as ignorant as a mule, but he remains human.  This means that he retains all of the destructive impulses that the millennial building-up of culture aimed at suppressing and channeling.  He is covetous, constantly humiliated by his conviction that other people posses the being that he feels himself to lack and that he wishes to acquire.  Living in a thoroughly mediated environment, he is saturated in every waking minute by manipulative messages that exploit his desperate sense of personal emptiness and non-being.

Dan R’s semi-retarded grocery-store worker is understandable.  He suffers from the pathos of an organic deficiency and is to be pitied.  It is difficult to know how to react to the millions of childish people who populate our public scene.  To some extent they are victims of a catastrophe of cultural atavism and the deliberate destruction of traditions, including the spiritual discipline of cultivating an inner person.  On the other hand, they are barbarous or savage and it is the unenviable duty of those of us who struggle to remain civilized not to concede their election never to grow up and never to cultivate their inner qualities.  The choices that such people make, even those that concern their own bodies, have social effects that impinge on everyone.  For one thing, the vogue of tattoos and piercing has grossly uglified the public square.  It belongs to the wicked aschemiolatry of our time and should be resisted.

As I said the other day to an un-tattooed waitress in my tavern-of-choice concerning a conspicuously tattooed waitress who recently left the establishment for work elsewhere, “Sally [not her real name] is a pretty girl and it’s a shame about all those ugly pictures on her skin.”  My interlocutor agreed and added that she had absolutely forbidden her teenage daughter from acquiring any scarifications.  It is a small gesture, but very few people in a parental role are willing to exercise it.  I am lucky in a way.  My workplace is the college classroom where I am not afraid to confront students with their slavish attachment to commercial culture and to the ugliness that it purveys.  But what are people not in a position like mine to do?

— Comments —

Fred Owens writes:

I believe — at least can’t prove — that people get tattoos as a form of permanence. They have no belief, no religion, no trust in social functions, but they have a need — as we all do — for something or some one to trust, some thing that will never desert us or betray us.

And that’s a tattoo!

You can lose your job, you can lose your girlfriend, your dog or your cat might die, your friends might abandon you, you can become completely disillusioned with your family, your church, and your country — but that tattoo will stay with you and on you for as long as you shall live. No one can ever take it away from you.

The need for permanence and security in a topsy-turvy world —  that is the reason that people put these marks on their bodies, although very few people are conscious of this motive.

Eric writes:

It occurs to me that tattoos, for many people, are a way of claiming and declaring a tribal identity or a personal relationship. People get anchors inked into their arms when they join the Navy, or put the name of a boyfriend or girlfriend to declare their faith that the relationship will last. This has always been most common among people whose social networks are the weakest – convicts, for instance. It’s a sure bet that seeing a man’s name tattooed on a woman’s body meant that man and that woman had gone their separate ways, even if she had his child. Such acts are often attempts to salvage doomed romances, and the tattoos are headstones of failed relationships.

This is how people struggle to build social context in a world that no longer offers them any institutions which they can naturally occupy. I have a hunch – more than a hunch – that in times and places where people can grow into real communities and stable familial arrangements, they do not feel the need to make a canvas of their own skin.

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