The sad crisis of uglification

Jamie Wilson's written about the modern obsession on the left with uglifying everything, and how beauty's suffered from it as a result:

Tolkien shows us exactly how it works. The ruffians and “gatherers and sharers” that took over the peaceful Shire don’t just loot; they uglify. They close the old inns, fell beloved trees, replace hobbit-holes with ugly, mean brick houses, pollute the water, and craft and post ugly rules and propaganda. But why bother making things hideous? Why is it important to destroy beauty?

Because beauty is quietly powerful. The ordinary hobbit could go outside in the evening and smoke his pipe, gazing out across the lovely green hills of the Shire. Daily, they saw that life could be ordered, delightful, and worth defending. Once beauty is ruined, there is less to care about, less to fight for. Compliance becomes normal — after all, the Party Tree has already been cut down and left to rot, so there's nothing to fight for. Quaint Bagshot Row is an open quarry. Gatherers take surplus and more, despoiling what they don’t take. The hobbits grumble, of course, but they are demoralized, hungry but not starving, and much easier to control because they just don’t care anymore.

We saw the same things in the old Soviet Union. Socialist realism, with its austere lines and solid colors, replaced real art with propaganda posters praising the USSR and the worker. Beautiful, graceful cathedrals and exotic Russian onion domes were replaced by brutalist concrete blocks. Fashion and music and gathering places, things of delight, were flattened into drabness, functional but not fun. Because the state could not redistribute beauty, and because beauty gives people joy and hope, beauty was pathologized, called bourgeois, and replaced with an antiseptic, dark aesthetic. The common man was given enough “culture” to be sated, but never enough to satisfy the hunger of his soul for beauty. Other, darker things filled that void.

Today’s Quiet Uglification

We’re watching a softer version play out in real time, especially in the cultural sphere. One of the most visible symptoms is the trend toward ugliness among segments of young liberal or feminist women in America and Europe, especially: deliberate androgyny, rejection of makeup or feminine presentation, garish and jarring hair colors, glorification of obesity under the banner of “body positivity,” and an overall embrace of what can only be called uglification. This is not simply a trend or fashion or a fad, but rather the same dynamic we saw in the Soviet Union and the Shire. But this dynamic uses guilt and fitting in as enforcement mechanisms. Striving for conventional beauty is “internalized patriarchy,” “fatphobia,” or complicity in oppression. The message is don’t try too hard, or you’re betraying the group. The result? Personal self-sabotage that signals virtue inside the subculture, transferring the ego boost young women once got from looking nice to the “you go girl” affirmation from her peers.

Obviously, this is terrible it's happened over the past decade, and we can only hope the art scene will recover. But what's also angering is that in the past, religious hysteria also played a part in leading to this. Locally, I've felt extreme ultra-Orthodox influence had its own role in damaging women's dignity, along with imagery in advertising, by seeing to it said imagery would be censored altogether, along with singing/music. Such cases make me wonder if leftists thought that the religious communities weren't serious about supporting women's rights and dignity, to the point where they believed said religious communities wouldn't give a damn if they turned everything ugly. As a result, the left filled a vacuum that was shamefully enabled by hysterical pious folks. And of course, that means religions that aren't Islam, or anything similar to it.

I'm very disappointed in western religious movements that came within even miles of leading to the situations they did in past years, because they put the keys in the ignition for what the left brought about in the past decade. And any religious figures who don't address this, and don't have the courage to, are only furthering the disgrace. So I'd highly appreciate it that after October 7, 2023, Judaist religious figures who really don't want to let division continue in any way kindly address issues like what Wilson's spoken about, and call for stopping all the anti-sex hysteria they led to that's deeply hurt women's status and civil rights. The atrocities that the Haredi extremists caused in the past decade and more can't go ignored anymore by anybody who understands the issues involved.