Tag: brutalism

Aischomania – The obsession with making oneself ugly

You’ve either noticed it or you haven’t. If you haven’t noticed it, then there’s probably nothing I can do to point it out to you. If you have noticed it, then you probably already know what I’m talking about before I explain it.

Over the last few years, there have been a number of people – a very small number as a proportion of the total population, but very noticeable online – who seemed have developed an obsession with making themselves ugly.

Again, you either know who I mean or you don’t.

This is not something I saw coming. I think it is an internet phenomenon – it’s a phenomenon, for the most part, created by the internet – social media in particular. But ten years ago I would never have seen this coming.

Why do these people do it? I think it’s driven largely by a desire to be different – to be unique. Our society values individuality, which means that anything that shows you as not being like other people is desirable. It’s a fashion to show how you aren’t following the trend – how you’re doing something different – how you’re setting a new trend.

Of course, all of these people end up looking the same. Every generation has had this: a group of people who think that they are all different and special and unique, but who ultimately all end up looking the same. In the 90s and early 2000s it was the Goths. In the mid and late 2000s it was the Emos.

But unlike the Goths, who were (as far as I can tell) just obsessed with black dyed hair, eyeliner, black nail polish, and black clothes, and unlike the Emos, who were just obsessed with eyeliner and a brightly-coloured streak of hair sweeping across their face, covering their eyes, this latest cohort seems to be just obsessed with making themselves ugly. They favour mullets (a hairstyle that I’m sure a few years ago we all agreed should never make a return) – or more often a mullet with the front half of their head shaved. They favour nose piercings – like the ones that cows sometimes have. They reject the idea that people who are slender and muscular are generally better-looking. Like their predecessors, they are obsessed with coloured hair, but it is often a garish mixture of colours that do not go together.

I think this is driven by the desire to look different, but also with the presupposition that there is no such thing as objective beauty – that beauty is wholly subjective. This is a curse that has afflicted the Anglosphere for some time. The reality is that beauty is not wholly subjective. It’s not wholly objective either – it’s partly objective and partly subjective. That explains why humans have such a terrible time understanding it – we like absolutes – absolutes are easy to remember. It’s the same with fine art – paintings and the like – the beauty of a painting is not wholly subjective. The beauty of a building is not wholly subjective. The quality of a book or a movie is not wholly subjective. All of these things are partly objective.

If you are not yet disavowed of the idea that beauty is subjective, consider this: ask a thousand people who is better looking: Chris Hemsworth or Boris Johnson. You already know, roughly, what the results of such a survey would be before you see them. You could try the same survey with many such pairs of well-known people. You would, very often, be able to roughly predict the results. How are you able to do this unless there is a pattern to them? That pattern is simply an objective fact about human beings – what human beings consider beauty to be. That pattern might vary slightly from one society to another, but it cannot be wholly gainsaid. You also may not be able to predict equally as reliably how an individual person might respond to the survey, but that does not negate the pattern for a large population. Beauty is partly objective.

And I think all of these people who are obsessed with making themselves ugly, on some level, know this. What they do is about rebellion. It is using rebellion, as fashion, as a signifier of how virtuous they perceive themselves to be (where, in a society that values individuality and self-expression, non-conformity is considered a virtue). In a society that has mastered beauty (through cosmetic products, digital photo editing, the millions-strong filter for beauty that is Instagram, and even plastic surgery and weight loss injections), ugliness is the only form of aesthetic rebellion that remains.

I have seen this phenomenon enough times now that I find I need a word for it. As always, the best English words are constructed from Latin or Greek elements. There is an Ancient Greek word, αἶσχος, aiskhos, meaning ‘ugliness’, but also ‘disgrace’ or ‘disgraceful deeds’. This would seem to be the perfect word, so I name this phenomenon aischomania – ‘the obsession with making oneself ugly, usually as an act of social or cultural rebellion’. (I have tried to mimic the usual pattern of consonant changes when words travel from Ancient Greek to English, but I might have gotten it wrong.)

This word could also be applied metaphorically to the obsession with ugliness seen in other areas of modern life. Brutalist architecture – and a lot of later styles – is an example of aischomania. Modern art is, often, an example of aischomania. Even some contemporary styles of music are.

Aischomania – the obsession with and desire for ugliness, often with the belief that there is a kind of moral purity that can be found only through disgrace and self-degradation.

Why I’m going back to B.C. / A.D.

When I first found out about B.C.E. / C.E. – standing for ‘Before the Common Era’ and ‘Common Era’ – which I think was towards the end of primary school or sometime during secondary school, I immediately found them compelling. I’d say for most of the time between 2006 and 2023, I used B.C.E. / C.E. exclusively instead of B.C. / A.D.. But now I’m going back.

You have to remember that Christianity in England was different in the late 90s and early 2000s. Nowadays, Christianity is absent from most parts of English life (if you’re an atheist like me) – a result, in part, of New Atheism (of which I was a small part). But 20-25 years ago it was much more present. More people were Christian, and they were more vocal about it – more willing to mention it in casual conversation; more willing to make their allegiance to it known.

I was an atheist from a very early age – possibly six, seven, eight years old. It was very obvious to me, early on, that there was no particular reason to believe in the existence of the Christian god over, say, the Greek gods. I recognised it straight away as mythology.

I also have a rebellious streak, and a great disdain for condescension and that kind of ‘kid-talk’ voice that bad primary school teachers do. The Christians I encountered in the late 90s and early 2000s were extremely condescending, and also quite bossy and expectant. So I found Christianity to not only be incorrect, but also detestable.

This is why I liked B.C.E. / C.E.. As an atheist, it seemed nonsensical to write an abbreviation meaning ‘Before Christ’ when I don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was Christ (i.e., the son of a god), or to write an abbreviation of ‘Anno Domini’, meaning ‘in the year of our Lord’, when I don’t believe that Jesus was or is Lord. I also disliked that our year-numbering system was connected to – what I saw as – a very annoying religion filled with quite annoying people.

B.C.E. / C.E., on the other hand, seemed perfectly clear and neutral – abstract even. ‘The Common Era’ – a term that seemed to make sense given that people right across the world used this numbering system – it really was the common era. I was also drawn to the symmetry of the abbreviations – both containing ‘C.E.’. It seems elegant. That’s the physicist / programmer in me – we are drawn to symmetry and the simplification it brings.

So for many years I consistently used B.C.E. / C.E. every time I needed to write it. But now I’m changing back.

There are several reasons for this. Primary among them is that I abhor the obscuration of history and the loss of tradition. I have always abhorred these things – from a very young age. This isn’t a new trait. (It is something that has long set me apart from a lot of the people on the political left, who generally see no value in tradition – be it national tradition or even local or personal tradition.) And the reality is, the B.C.E. / C.E. system uses the same numbers as the B.C. / A.D. system – numbers which, for centuries, were used to denote how many years had passed since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. (Whether or not they are accurate is a different matter – that is the meaning they had for centuries.) If any young person, new to all of this, were to ask ‘Why are the year numbers the numbers that they are? Why is the current year 2024 and not 3748?’, you would have to explain that they are based on the number of years thought to have passed since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. So changing the words doesn’t actually remove the meaning at all – the meaning is still there. All changing the words does is try to obscure the origin of the system – it just tries to obscure a historical fact. And I don’t like that.

Also, as time has gone on, I have gotten a greater and greater adoration for old things. I used to hate old buildings – including churches. They always stank of old building – and it’s quite an oppressive smell. This was true of churches, but also think of old pavilions on village cricket greens or football fields, or municipal libraries built in the 70s and fitted with scratchy, grey carpet tiles. Somehow they all smelled the same – of old. And they were cold – both in temperature and in lighting. I was thoroughly a modernist in this regard – I like super-modern buildings made out of shiny steel and huge glass windows.

But this was before I had really encountered the horrors of brutalism. Brutalism will make you rethink your entire attitude to modern buildings. And really, even the things that aren’t brutalist that have been built over the last 50-70 years or so are also, often, just horrid. They are ugly, stale, corporate, and bureaucratic.

Nowadays, when I go to a new town or city, the place I want to visit is the cathedral or the biggest church. They are by far the nicest-looking buildings, and the ones with the most history. I love wandering through the parts of them where all of the in-church graves and memorials are, and reading things that were carved into the wall hundreds of years ago. (It’s why Westminster Abbey is so much fun – I’d recommend to everyone to go there.)

I adore the things that have lasted for centuries – buildings, statues, artwork, and also conventions, such as B.C. / A.D.. These things connect you to the past – a past, and a society, in which all of your ancestors lived. By writing B.C. / A.D., you are participating in a system that thousands upon thousands of people have used before you. By using it, you are joining them in upholding an ancient tradition. You are passing on what was passed down to you.

And in the end, the literal meaning doesn’t really matter to me. Simply writing B.C. / A.D. – or even the full wording – has no chance of changing my mind about the existence of a supernatural being. Atheism (for me, at least) is not so flimsy.

(As an aside, I did previously wonder whether there was a technical reason to switch to B.C.E. / C.E. – that being the ‘blip’ caused by the switch between Old Style and New Style dates resulting from the change from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar. The B.C. / A.D. system, being defined from a time 2024 years ago, could be used to refer to either an Old Style or a New Style date. The B.C.E. / C.E. system – I thought – was defined from now backwards, and thus could only ever refer to a New Style date. This would have made the Common Era system more mathematically rigorous. However, I later found that this wasn’t true – B.C.E. / C.E. is just a wholesale swap-out for B.C. / A.D., with no mathematical fix implied. What rubbish. If you’re going to make the change, at least fix the mathematics of it.)

B.C.E. / C.E. are cold – devoid of all meaning and richness. They are dreary – the kind of dreariness exhibited by brown glass windows, balding civil servants, and – worst of all places – business parks (a kind of dreariness that women in HR dream of inflicting upon their prisoner-employees).

So I’m going back to B.C. / A.D.. In fact I might quite often write out the full thing: before Christ and anno Domini. In fact in fact, I might go as far as to write out their full Latin and longer variants: ante Christum natum and anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi. After all, I do enjoy writing conventions that seem unusually lengthy and detailed.