BEN J. writes:

I was delighted to read Thomas F. Bertonneau’s comments on the growing popularity of tattoos and scarification.

He writes: “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.” I had to look up “invidious,” but I believe Dr. Bertonneau is on to something very important. Calculated to cause offence, envy, that is perhaps the best explanation I have seen. I think this carries over to many aspects of modern culture, I see it in not just tattoos but also branding of consumer products.

Dr. Bertonneau also says: “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.” They try to find this belonging in marking their bodies, clothing, vehicles, everything with some sort of brand, decal, or marking. As a child I found my maternal grandmother’s aversion to wearing anything overtly branded with a company’s advertising to be strange. The popular culture was telling me that the way to belong was to wear a certain company’s shoes and shirts, drive a particular brand of vehicle, eat this breakfast cereal, etc. My grandmother did not need any artificial thing such as a logo, just the thought of her getting a tattoo makes me start laughing. She projected her identity as a Christian, a mother, and housewife through her relationship with God and her church, the way she kept her home, her skill as a musician, and how she loved her family. She was a different and exceptional person, and that is evident to all who knew her. Perhaps it was her influence that helped rescue me from that aspect of modern culture. She didn’t need to shock people or make them envious of her wealth.

Dr. Bertonneau’s final question: “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?”

As a young man and current college student, I fight the culture by trying to cultivate said virtues by engaging in civilized institutions. I pursue activities that require great physical and mental discipline to master. I fight to keep the ugliness out of those institutions by refusing to use my body or clothing to advertise and draw attention to myself. I do not want someone to see that my bag contains so-and-so’s golf clubs, or my safe a particular brand of gun over another.

We can also fight ugly by choosing beauty. Clothing is one of the front lines of that battle. If it’s hot outside, instead of wearing a so-called ‘muscle shirt’ aka male tank top, wear a nice guayabera. If I am not coming from my job, I will wear nice clothes to class, slacks and a blazer for example. Going to church? Wear a suit, and a nice tie. Even at work, I refuse to wear denim, my favorite olive colored dungarees and an inexpensive button down short sleeve shirt look far more dignified than a t-shirt and jeans, and still stand up to the rigors of physical labor. When I wear a hat, I always try to choose a traditional style instead of the now ubiquitous baseball cap.

Thanks for fighting the ugly battle. You are not alone.

— Comments —

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

I wish to thank Ben J. for taking the time to read my discussion of contemporary slovenliness.  I congratulate him on his resolution to do what he can, personally, to reverse our national slide into ugliness and aschemiolatry.  Ben has undertaken to do what the determined individual can and must do: He has made himself a model of deportment by choosing to dress and behave in a manner that directly and obviously dissents from the prevailing, either barbarous or childish norm.  Multiply Ben’s determination by a few million, or even a few hundred thousand, and college campuses might begin to take on appearance of dignity once again.

A graduating senior, a coed, who took one of my classes in the recently completed spring semester, and who had previously studied with me two or three times, remarked before class one day that I was one of the few professors who invariably wore a jacket and necktie to class.  She said casually in an aside that she was trying to convince her boyfriend to dress better – more like an adult.  I said to her that, in my judgment, women had a good deal of leverage in respect of their man and that maybe she should consider making use of it.  She said that she had never thought of it that way, but that she might give it a try.  What the sequel was, I don’t know, but the memory of the exchange suggests to me that Ben is not alone among college students in sensing the indignity of modern sartorial habits and lazy behavior.

Generally, traditionalists think of sloppy dress and uncouth manners as peripheral issues in the diagnosis of the contemporary cultural malaise, but my old teacher Eric Gans (forty years on faculty in the French and Comparative Literature programs at UCLA, now retired) in a recent essay has argued that simple things such as dress and courtesy and obliging the inherited image of adulthood actually stand central to the cohesion (“solidarity”) of a middle-class society.  Here is a representative paragraph, referencing the anthropologist Gabriel Tarde:

The kind of “solidarity” exemplified by Tarde’s description is implicit; it involves no act of adherence, and is all the more powerful for that. All those spectators wearing ties are affirming “non-thetically” that “this is the way things are, one dresses ‘properly’ to go out.” On the contrary, the 50s “youth” wearing pompadours and peg pants and, more recently, T-shirts emblazoned with “Hate the Haters,” are insisting on a new set of norms, one that exists only to the extent that it is foregrounded, made into a praxis. But a praxis of sacralization is essentially a praxis of sacrifice. The old norm took form by the unconscious coincidence of many wills, and to that extent expressed an unintentional harmony to which nothing was overtly sacrificed. Starting in the 50s, we had to show our solidarity by rejecting the old norm, certainly, but above all those who were associated with it. Wearing a shirt and tie or reading the newspaper was not, in the days of Tarde, an act of exclusion, but wearing the T-shirt certainly is. Thus it is false to affirm that there is no more a sense of the normative. There are conflicting norms, but the one that is more aggressive, that affirms its virtue and purity, is both the more violent and the more blind to its own violence, as the silly T-shirt slogan makes embarrassingly clear.

I strongly recommend to readers of The Thinking Housewife to read Gans’ full essay.

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