The Museum of Things We've Lost

Exhibit #2

I want to assert something I feel but cannot prove: we are the generation most exposed to ugliness. We are drowning in it.

This thought struck me with some force last year as I wandered slightly overwhelmed through the marbled halls of the British Museum, somewhere between the po-faced Lewis Chessman and the glitter of the Sutton Hoo hoard.

I recognise the irony of this assertion, given there are few places less representative of the everyday past than the British Museum. But hear me out.

You may have seen these two images before. The one on the left circulated as a meme; the other has been liked over 14,000 times.

So much of modern life has a quality of shoddy ugliness: flatpack furniture, cam locks already stripping the particle board; single-use plastic; polyester; cinder blocks; malls; chip-sealed roads; box houses in a row; concrete slabs stained with oil; trucks belching black smoke; cables tangled on the floor; chipped chrome faucets; faux leather; Styrofoam; disposable vapes in the gutter; parking lots with stunted trees; dust covered fake flowers in a cafe beneath fluorescent lights.

Everything cheap, shoddy, disposable—ugly. Not to mention the AI slop flooding our online world with an ugliness so deep and wrong it feels existential.

This series, this virtual museum, aims to catalogue some of what we’ve lost in the mad rush into modernity. I want to name (following Zadie Smith) the “local sadness” of this shift, the places where it touches our lives. Exhibit #2: in our modern world, we have lost regular and intimate proximity to everyday beauty.

I’m not an expert on the causes, but it’s clear that industrialisation, urbanisation, and globalisation have all played a role. These tectonic forces have made it possible and even preferable (according to a certain logic) for cheapness, artificial materials, and industrial processes and efficiencies to be prioritised over craft, goodness, durability, and beauty.

People in the past owned far fewer objects, but what they did own was made of natural, local materials by skilled hands in traditional forms, employing crafts passed down and perfected through long generations—“the shape for an axe handle, a yoke, for a pair of tongs; the proportions of cottage doors and windows, the designs for smocking, lace-making, embroidery” (Jacquetta Hawkes, A Land). And because they were well made of natural materials, they carried their own beauty, their proportion, clarity, and fitness for purpose.

But this is not our world; not our stuff.

Perhaps it’s all been inevitable. Maybe ugliness is the cost of feeding, clothing, and housing 9 billion people. But inevitable things can also be grieved (death the most obvious example). And where we possible, resisted.

I want to argue that to be surrounded by such ugliness, for it to be the context of our lives, causes a type of spiritual nerve damage. We grow numb or feel ourselves plagued by phantom pains, aches, and longings. We are maimed by all this ugliness, made less than we are. You are right to feel angry.

We struggle to think in these terms because our feel for our own nature is weak. If we consider our nature at all, we tend to think of humans as specimens of the species homo sapiens, characterised (though not necessarily defined) by certain capacities—to plan, imagine, make tools, and so on. In this view, beauty may well be a preference, a pleasure, but not something constitutive to our health and flourishing.

But this scientific minimalist view of humanity misses something essential. There is an older, richer understanding of what it means to be human. In the Christian tradition, our senses were made for beauty. Humans are creatures placed in a world that is beautiful, and given senses to perceive and enjoy this beauty and, indeed, capacities (and a calling) to contribute to it through our making.

Beauty is part of the good order of the created world. The human longing for beauty is, therefore, a natural appetite. To be denied beauty, to live in a desert of ugliness, is to feel ourselves starved.

Like all appetites, the desire for beauty may become disordered, become greed or lust, lead to violence (launch a thousand ships) or theft (the British Museum) or environmental devastation (few things are uglier than a diamond or gold mine). But the disorder does not invalidate the right desire. You were not made to live among such relentless ugliness. It is, properly speaking, unnatural.

But frustrated desire is only one dimension of our loss.

In classical and Christian thought, beauty, truth and goodness—the so-called transcendentals—are inseparable. Neglecting one threatens the other. In an ugly world, goodness and truth are also scarce. As theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar writes (incidentally pitching what would be a brilliant movie): Beauty “will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters [Goodness and Truth] without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.”

Think of it this way. An ugly tool is rarely a good tool. A good tool is fit for the world as it is, and to ends proper to the world. It is, in a sense, true. And in being fit for the world, it is often also beautiful, is made of natural materials. In the British Museum, even the stone age axes are beautiful and functional.

There’s an old instinct in some fairytales to suggest a moral dimension to ugliness. Characters who are ugly often reflect on the outside a disorder inside. And beauty, in contrast, embodies a type of moral purity. Cinderella vs the ugly step-sisters. At the level of people, this is often false. An “ugly” face (by today’s standards) may in fact simply wear the creases of a beautiful life well lived. And much of what passes for beauty today masks an inner corruption (our Instagram feeds are a parade of white-washed tombs). But at the level of what we make—the things we fill our cities, neighbourhoods, and homes with—there is truth in the old instinct.

What we make declares who we are—what we value, what we can imagine—just as the heavens declare the glory of God, the Creator. But it is also the case that what we make, makes us—provides a horizon or ceiling to moral action and thought. To be surrounded by ugliness is to have our capacity for beauty, goodness, and truth curtailed.

We know this instinctively. Again, consider our stories. When we read of loved characters drawing near an ugly city or tower, we sense with unnerving instinct the risk of evil: Barad-dûr, Minas Morgul, Isengard, Gormenghast. Do we not feel the same in our own cities?

A longing for beauty strikes some as a type of nostalgia, a naivety, an escape from the real. The assumption is that ugliness—physical, spiritual, or moral—is somehow more real. We see this in modern art, which flees beauty to confront the viewer with the truth of modern systems of injustice and oppression. What art critic Grant Kester called an “orthopaedic aesthetic,” which seeks to correct what is broken, has replaced a desire to reflect and deepen the beauty of people, places, and things.

But theologically speaking, beauty leads us to reality, not away from it. The world, deep down, in its intention and nature, is beautiful. Ugliness often unsettles because it disrupts right order, a sense of the way the world really is. We see this in a simple sense with the way ugly buildings sit on a landscape—a type of rejection of natural form and lines. Perhaps this is most evident in ruin. The buildings of pre-historic Europe, for instance, had a fittingness to the land that when fallen to ruin caused them to fall back into nature. As Jacquetta Hawkes writes in A Land.

The gentle knolls of chieftains' graves adorn the horizon, fortress walls become grass banks for lovers' meetings.

The wreck of our industrial civilization is different.

Iron and concrete are not readily softened. A robin may nest in a rusty kettle but that is about the largest scale on which adaptation is possible. The present derelict parts of industrial Britain assume a degraded ugliness never before known. Who can ever express the desolation of these forlorn scenes?

The grey slag heap, the acres of land littered with rusted fragments of machinery, splintered glass, tin cans, sagging festoons of barbed wire; vile buildings, more vile in ruin; grimy stretches of cement floors, shapeless heaps of broken concrete. The air about them still so foul that nothing more than a few nettles and tattered thistles will grow there; not even rosebay and ragwort can hide them with a brief midsummer promise. This is the worst that has happened to the land.”

Ugliness as shoddiness, lack of care, is not more real—it is a type of false relationship with the created world that is beautiful. It arises in a context where people have lost a feeling for the way things are.

There is a final, related dimension to the damage done to us by the loss of everyday beauty and its replacement by ugliness.

I described the harm as spiritual nerve damage because our senses were designed through beauty to call us toward God. Beauty is a means of our participation in the life of God. The Christian tradition holds that beauty’s native country is God. God is beautiful. And the beauty we see in the world is a reflection, a trace, of God’s own beauty. As Lisa Coutras puts it: “God’s activity as Creator infuses the realm of creation with a beauty derived from his own Being.” This is why objects made of natural materials often maintain a beauty that artificial materials cannot mimic—like embers which skilled hands can fan back into flame.

I had a friend from Sweden who once told me his sense of calling was simply to “maintain the rumour of God.” We often think of secularisation as about beliefs, but consider instead the impact on our built world. Everyday ugliness is a type of secularisation of the ordinary world, because beauty, theologically speaking, is a rumour, a trace of God.

Beautiful things can mediate God’s beauty, because he is the source of Beauty. To be surrounded by ugliness is—in one sense—to be made more distant from God, to stop our ears to persistent rumours. (In another very real sense, this is false: the strong claim of the Gospel is that not even the ugliness of the grave is a barrier to God’s love and presence).

So, The Museum of Things We’ve Lost, Exhibit #2: Everyday Beauty.

It’s a tragic dimension of our history that no one wanted this. Jacquetta Hawkes’s startling words about the Industrial Revolution applies to all the great processes of uglification that have shaped our world.

No one planned it, no one foresaw more than a tittle of the consequences, very few people said that they wanted it, but once begun the impetus was irresistible; more and more individual lives became helplessly involved, drawn into the vortex.

And few of us are happy amidst such relentless ugliness. We were not designed to be.

It is one of the more bizarre results of industrialism that the rich will now pay great sums to obtain goods that were once taken for granted by quite humble people. Such things as real honey, fresh butter and eggs, hand needlework, tiles made of real stone, reed thatch.

Alan Jacobs asks us a confronting question: “As we observe the world that we have built and are building, what do we prefer to beauty, and why?”

Jacob quotes the great British polymath, John Ruskin, who said: “God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail.” An entail in English law is an estate inherited with conditions (key, for example, to the plot of Pride and Prejudice). Often the condition is that it cannot be sold, but must be cared for and passed on to an heir after death. The earth is a great entail, for Ruskin. As Jacobs summarises, “we cannot sell it and pocket the cash, we cannot despoil it for our profit; we are legally and morally obliged to conserve it ‘for our life.’”

The earth belongs as much to our descendants as ourselves. What is it they will inherit from us? What have we built worth passing on? What will the future British Museum remember of us?

It’s not easy. We are uprooted by forces greater than us, and we have not been taught. But we have a choice. Ask, where can you conserve or add to the beauty of the world? What will you pass on? How might you maintain the rumour of God by resisting the ugliness of the modern world?