Midweek Musing: The ugly society

And why Beauty is the cure

I can just about recall those happy days when I read our local licence plate proclaiming Beautiful BC with a straight face. Now I regard it as a highly ironic comment on a place that has a Woke Premier who is firing cabinet ministers for saying the wrong thing and telling parents they do not have the right to know that their kids have been infected by the Trans virus and want to ‘transition’ to another gender. In addition, there are homeless camps all over the city sidewalks, break ins, assaults and legal (!) drug use in parks and on the streets. We hand out fentanyl and heroin to drug users around here because we don’t want them to ‘feel marginalized’. It’s dystopian and ugly and it is happening not just here but all over the western world. Well, maybe it’s a bit more extreme here; especially our drug culture. But you get my drift. The society we took for granted has morphed into its evil shadow and we are now left wondering what to do.

One can spend thousands of words coming up with well-reasoned essays on how to fix all of that. Frankly, I don’t have the stamina to do that. Instead, let me introduce you to a demonstration of a life that not only works, but makes the world into a more beautiful place. Come with me to the Italian Alps and meet the world of Martijn Doolard, a 40 year old Dutchman who has attracted a half million YouTube followers making two ancient stone huts habitable. It’s taken two years already and he isn’t done yet though he is now able to actually live in the bigger hut. His second year summary was a hit; more than 2 million views.

While Doolaard is a master of video, overall, this doesn’t sound exciting, does it. And you’re right, it isn’t. Most of the time, what you see is Doolaard doing hard labour digging trenches, preparing a septic tank, and heaving huge stone plates onto the newly finished roof with the help of five other men. Or maybe you see him building a spacious chicken coop and bringing home four chickens for whom he clearly has a special kind of affection. So what is it that makes him and his chickens so fascinating? There is a hidden reason.

It’s only when he surveys one of his projects and uses the word ‘beautiful’ to describe it that you realize that this man is not simply driven by practical considerations alone. For example, instead of buying new gutters, he decided to carve them out of long logs and even carved the gutter holders himself. Watching him do that with the skill, attention to detail and patience that he brings to everything he does, is somehow highly satisfying. And when he has installed those handmade gutters, he is satisfied because they are beautiful and will last a long time. And every time I look at them, I feel content, he says. This man has an aesthetics of manual labour and making gutters. I kept being reminded of my husband, who was a master wood carver. He had that same devoted attention to detail and doing things right. It’s possible that Doolaard is a sculptor but doesn’t know it.

The same spirit of making something perfect and beautiful is evident when he is installing a huge masonry fireplace in his small living room. It’s a beautiful fire, he said after the first one was lit and burned for hours because of the airtight construction of these fireplaces whose technology was invented by the Romans. It captures and recycles the heat so that the stove radiates its heat instead of losing it through the chimney. The Austrians know this type of stove as a ‘Kachelofen’, a ‘tile oven’’ and it used to be built by hand by specialists. During the middle ages, the aristocracy used highly ornate versions of it to heat their huge palaces. That Doolard discovered this not very well known type of fireplace shows that he does his research. He found something unique and beautiful and so he lugged it up the mountain and built it into the stone hut. Beautiful.

As far as I am able to tell, this is why watching an essentially boring tale about homesteading is so satisfying. This is a demonstration of a life that works, that makes sense, and creates Beauty with a capital B. In an ugly society fraying at the edges and bitterly divided, this is a vision of something we seem to have lost. Something that we need to re-gain, re-value, and re-store.

While watching Doolard, I was simultaneously re-reading a long forgotten bestseller, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I had picked up a second hand free copy and realized pretty soon that I had never really understood this book or what Pirsig was talking about in his frantic monologues about how to define the word Quality.

I am now more than halfway through its 540 pages packed with philosophy, madness and the love for his son and his motorcycle, playing out on an epic journey across middle America. Pirsig is one of the great troubled and troubling spirits of our age. And he has something important to say, both as a genius level thinker and as a madman. A final interview in 2006 gives a complete picture of this fractured man:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/nov/19/fiction

A goodly chunk of the book is about this highly intellectual quest to define Quality, and I believe Pirsig is talking about what Doolaard is demonstrating. It’s an easy jump from seeing the essential Quality of his life to the intellectual discussion of what the word means. As I read, I became frustrated with Pirsig because it was so clear to me that he is actually talking about Beauty. Quality is just another name for it. And it has been demoted in our technocratic society to the lowest rungs. It’s not important, and nobody except people in the arts community discuss it. But even there, Beauty has very little cachet. Ugliness is better, we are told. If you enjoy Beauty, you’re labeled a philistine or worse, a naïve consumer. You must first be educated and told explicitly what you are looking at. Reason has beaten Beauty to the punch and there is a reason for that as Pirsig explains here:

From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly described only as upward progress, and the sole agent for this progress is quite clearly reason itself.

It’s such a powerful, all-dominating agent of civilized man it’s all but shut out everything else and now dominates man himself. That’s the source of the complaint.

So. These two men who have never met and are as different as can be, are wrestling down Beauty, each in their own particular way. Together, they point at how our ailing western world could move towards mending the pain and ugliness that besets us. More next week…