I’ve always found something ironic about much of the aesthetic that is marketed to rural people. Is there not, with a view to history especially, a comedic juxtaposition in, say, plastic mass-manufactured home decor designed to resemble rustic artifacts, like faux antlers and decorative wall-mounted imitation firearms? That juxtaposition seems to be between the substance of the media in question, be it window stickers, phone cases or other tchotchkes, and the more rugged realities which they evoke rather than embody. It is the language of industrial, urban mass consumption used to express an ethos ostensibly opposed to excess. But, The “medium is the message,” after all.

The irony of faux simplicity and manufactured rusticity is a useful analog for the paradox of chronically online traditionalism. It is a curious phenomenon of the present cultural moment that so many, particularly young men, seem to find such vehement expression of their often nascent admiration for older ways of life in the very new way of online life. There is nothing wrong, it should be clear, with the old finding new life, with the digital acting as a means of preservation and transmission of that which is truly good, but this phenomenon becomes troubling when the virtual becomes a vehicle for shilling a facade, an aesthetic of attunement with antiquity sold as a replacement for the substance it supposedly depicts, addictively anaesthetizing the longing of the restless youths disenchanted with modernity while subtly depriving them of the real object of their unrealized desires. Suffice to say, there is unfortunately nothing “radically traditional” about allowing social media to dominate one’s attention.

An obvious problem in this realm of aesthetically antique moodboard-style of superficial “traditionalism,” as it exists online and as it bleeds into real life, is the loss of the substance it pretends to recapitulate. Online “trads,” for instance, are often fond of appeals to the transcendentals: Truth, Beauty and Goodness. But the unholy intercourse of truth and falsehood on the internet hardly requires demonstration, and goods like kindness and compassion are sadly not often distinguishing marks of chronically online traditionalists (or anyone chronically online, for that matter). The reduction of these two to superficial, unchallenging aesthetic markers is worthy of a great deal of consideration, but it is the boiling down of fair Beauty to a thin veneer of appearances which is perhaps the most easily accomplished and no less lamentable.

The basic mistake is, at bottom, a confusion of visible beauty for invisible Beauty, or at least an erroneous attribution of greater significance to the former than to the latter. The reality of Beauty, its essence, is far deeper than mere appearances. The expression, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” holds far more cultural cachet than truth. Realistically, the only thing in anyone’s eye is perception, and perception is not identical with reality. Beauty is perfectly capable of existing where it cannot be perceived, or conversely of being imitated where it does not exist. As to the former, I think of Andrew Klavan’s musing on the wonderful sight of clouds from above while in an airplane. It is an unparalleled natural masterpiece that was hidden from view for most of human history, yet nonetheless was truly beautiful all along. Like its Transcendental sisters, Beauty is real regardless of human ability to ascertain it.

It is potentially worth noting at this point that the present diatribe was, to my own chagrin in admitting so, incited largely by an equal-parts-inflammatory-and-asinine social media post that unhappily managed to trickle through so many degrees of separation to arrive from the lowest cesspits of cyberspace into the (doubtlessly) lofty and sacred stratosphere in which I prefer to meander in enlightenedly blissful ignorance. The first of its characteristics was undoubtedly intentional, though this does not eliminate the possibility that the second was as well. As another popular expression notes, malice and stupidity often resemble each other closely. At any rate, the post in question, hopefully without giving it too much attention, insisted that beauty is relevant to moral worth, and used corresponding images of a youthful, pretty, northern-European-looking woman and an old, wizened, dark-skinned woman to illustratively insist with all the intellectual prowess and philosophic seriousness of a beached trout that pretty girls’ lives are worth more than old ladies’ because pretty girls are pretty — not to mention how race (which is really too substantive a word for such literally skin-deep analysis) certainly factors into the calculus of this fanciful moral economy of twitter troglodytism.

But it is precisely the aforementioned proviso, i.e. the desire not to devote too much attention — or worse, anger — to this cyber-species of political stupidity that complicates the question of addressing such a suggestion, and therefore simultaneously makes such an artifact worth mentioning and worth ignoring. Disregarding authorial intent being a dangerous but necessary step in parsing through such aggressive vapidity as only the internet seems capable of hosting, the reactivity of the audience may serve as a valuable barometer of how such online foolishness metastasizes into reality. The foliage of anonymity with which the internet is so thick, and which conceals intent, confounding and commingling irony with sincerity in so many cases, becomes an inviting habitation for serpents. As is so often the case with such provocative and indefensible nonsense, the defense, really an evasion, can always be offered by its proponents that it is all or partially in jest. But Proverbs 26:18-19 makes clear that this defense often functions only as concealment of malignance rather than a cure. Intent is rather immaterial to the activity of these pestilential sentiments rightly described as “viral.” No matter why these sorts of things are shared, they are powerful precisely because they are shared, they get clicks, reaction, attention.

So, though I may have injured this endeavor already, in the spirit of the foregoing thoughts I think it is of greater importance to respond to this terrific leprosy of human thought in its substance rather than what it purports as its own substance, that is, to address not just its claims, but its nature. Any attention given to this matter can only be worthwhile if it manages to subvert the virulence and virality that threaten to dominate said attention. Perhaps the risk of succumbing to the parasitic cycle of attention-farming would not be worth hazarding except that the present example has been, like many others of its ilk, presented as a Christian ethic. This not only makes it an example worth refutation for the true value and honor it besmirches, but also provides a point of contrast for examining the substance of this social phenomenon.

Essentially, the substance of Christianity is inherently at odds with the substance of this kind of viral outrage “content.” Broadly, this has to do with a kind of gluttony of the intellect, a voracity for information that, furthermore, seemingly invariably tends away from edification. Again, with consideration to the ethos of Proverbs 26, the tendency toward prioritizing and prizing “engagement,” reactions, appeasing the algorithm and playing its game even if that entails generating outrage, using anger as “bait” to the detriment of other souls, sowing discord rather than peace, insulting rather than encouraging, and, of course, including enough disingenuousness to function as a backdoor of plausible deniability, amounts to no less than a sacrifice of the Good for the most ephemeral worldly enticements. The irony of this reality when it is perpetrated in the name of Christ and of “traditional values” in the Transcendentals is exceptionally palpable and regrettable.

All that is to say, the same superficiality espoused in a unilateral equivocation of physical beauty with actual value is at work another layer down. Social media, especially in its current domination by algorithms as the gods of attention, is particularly rewarding of superficiality, of simple sensory and emotional stimulation. In principle, both the contradictory behavior of chronically online “trads” and the silliness of such views as mentioned bear resemblance to another image in Proverbs: that of the wayward woman. Her “beauty” is not real, it is a mere appearance used to mask the venom of sin. Any man who thinks the moral worth of the seductress exceeds that of even the most deformed righteous woman is hopelessly deluded, completely in love with his own perception rather than with reality, or else just more fond of rage and babbling than of peace and quiet. The godly woman is worth more than precious jewels that gleam and entice the eyes. The substantive practice of Christianity is not performative, let alone aggressively contentious or condescending. The same sort who fall prey to the lie that physical beauty is identical to true Beauty demonstrate that they’ve often already believed the lie that the aesthetic markers of “traditional Christianity” — the online vernacular, the signals and signs of tribal alignment that can be pixelated and profile-ized — constitute anything essential to the Christian faith.

A similar example made the algorithmic rounds not long ago of a small suburban church with a simple corrugated metal roof, adorned externally only with a plain, white cross, dubbed by internet detractors because of this pedestrian appearance and the structure of the roof “Pizza Hut church.” It was derided heavily by the online-trad crowd, inevitably trotted out next to images of gothic cathedrals like a child flung into the ring with a heavyweight boxer, the bloodbath taken as validation of the triumph of “beauty.” But, again, to put it even too bluntly, just because a prostitute might win the beauty pageant doesn’t make her more than a whitewashed tomb. Many such gothic cathedrals are tragically devoid of the gospel, long corrupted by false and worldly promises, and in many cases devoid of any people at all, reduced to museums, beautiful and dead. There is a beauty that goes beyond appearances, like a sincere and tone-deaf hymn, like a flock of pious believers gathered together in the only place they could afford, like faith and love triumphing over worldly concerns.

As an aside, the Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona was often presented in these sorts of online conversations as the polar opposite of “Pizza Hut church,” and frankly, I find that it represents a sort of self-defeating extreme that an emphasis on physical beauty can often reach. If beauty is all about appearance, then Sagrada Familia fails for looking in places like a cancerous termite mound. Like Rococo style as a response to the relative asceticism of the Reformation demonstrates, the underlying principles of an aesthetic are where its beauty either lives or dies, and excess is not beautiful. There is often great beauty in balance and restraint.

But, as the online crowd I’ve railed against might be inclined to respond, does all this just amount to the soft, post-Christian, liberal iconoclasm that insists ugly is beautiful and beautiful is ugly? That right is wrong and wrong is right? That terrible things are redeemed simply by good intentions? Not at all. As previously mentioned, relativism is the exact opposite of a healthy sense of beauty. The appearance of beauty is worthwhile because and only because it points to real Beauty. When it succeeds in harmonizing with Truth and Goodness, it attains value. When it is perverted, when it is used as a means of denigrating others, as a mask for evil and hatred, as an excuse to forego kindness and charity, divorced from Goodness or Truth, it becomes little else than the devil disguised as an angel of light. It is not necessary or even right to denounce the radiance of angels in order to acknowledge that their radiance can be counterfeit. “Not all that glitters is gold.”

In order to mitigate the possibility of hypocrisy, lest I be found contributing outrage rather than ameliorating it, let it be known that, though I am open to correction, my language has been less-reservedly harsh because such language is fittingly incisive for targeting evils which are sinisterly promoted in Our Lord’s blessed name. Furthermore, it is not my intention to wallow in agitation at this offense, and so it is fitting to end on a positive affirmation.

A significant part of the impetus for my wading into the muck of internet outrage is that Beauty is worth the risk. She is unique among her counterparts as the most deeply felt. In that way, it is only through Beauty that Goodness and Truth are necessarily mediated to the soul. She is the language of the other two. She is the one to which we are most sensitive, to which our senses are most vulnerable, and so the one which manifests herself with the most potency. Beauty is arresting, inspiring, terrible and uncontrollable, living in the thunderstorm which splits the heavens with light and power and then vanishes, and living equally in the verdant seedling and the chirping swallow. Of the Transcendentals, Beauty is the most immanently present and the least apprehensible, the obscurest and the most demanding of attention. And so rarely, unlike Goodness and Truth, do we find it before it finds us.

“He has made everything beautiful in its time; also he has put eternity into man’s mind, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” There is an essentially mysterious element to Beauty that makes it exceptionally precious. Beauty, so far from a cudgel to be prosaically appropriated to the pragmatic failings of political performance, is a sacred treasure to be seen, not touched, to be contemplated, not possessed. It waxes and wanes, appears and evaporates, ever phantasmal and ephemeral yet substantial and eternal. To love it will quite suffice.

But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the LORD sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.” — 1 Samuel 16:7 (RSV)

Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised. — Proverbs 31:30 (RSV)

For the lips of a loose woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps follow the path to Sheol; — Proverbs 5:3-5 (RSV)

But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. — 1 Corinthians 1:27-29 (RSV)