Is Ugly the New Beautiful?
Summer has become a season of strange and stark irony. While it brings forth the beauty of the world, it also brings forth the ugliness of the age. The warmth and light are invariably attended by trashy fashion and tattooed flesh. These dog-days, there is hardly a street or a store without people who appear to be strumpets or savages, to say nothing of those wardrobe decisions that go no further than torn jeans and a wife-beater. The glories of summertime now go hand-in-hand with the sloppy, the slinky, and the uncivilized with studs and gages punctuating permanently-inked eyesores. The temptation often arises to proclaim the words of Shakespeare’s Polonius: “the apparel oft’ proclaims the man.” Pause there. The strangest thing about those who surrender themselves to ugliness is that they are oblivious to the ugly—which is at once a mercy and a tragedy to the blind victims of the age of the ugly.
The standards of personal appearance have fallen from what has been traditionally held as beautiful. St. Thomas Aquinas defined beauty as the result not only of due proportion or harmony, and brightness or clarity, but also of integrity or perfection (Summa Theologica, I, 39, 8). Accepting this definition, ugliness would be applied to all things that are disproportionate, and to forms that St. Thomas called shameful insofar as they were impaired or diminished. This diminishment in perfection is a lack of the good, of light, and order. By all appearances, current modes of public presentation are along the lines of darkness and jarring disorder. Shock value seems more valued now than aesthetic value. To be “cool” is now more desired than to be comely. Tattoos are becoming more prevalent, more extensive, and more outrageous. Bizarre facial piercings are quite common. Short shorts are on the rise. Clothing trends are trending towards nudity and grunge. Indeed, the croon of Macbeth’s weird sisters may well provide the motto of modern style: “Fair is foul and foul is fair.”
This decline in personal appearance has been parallel with a decline in social morals, especially in the millennial generation. The rise of relativism has rendered the common Christian code of conduct obsolete. Virtue and vice are now terms that are up for individual discernment and definition, no longer subject to magisterium or tradition. As people lose their conscience, they also become less conscious, for ethics—the principles of accepted human behavior—are an orienting influence.
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