Insist on beauty for the poor

Patriarch Pavle of Serbia

I am, and have been, a firm believer for a long time in the idea that the poorest people in our society deserve both bread and roses, that there should be space for both labour activism and Liturgy in their lives. That was, and remains, one of the most attractive things to me about the Anglo-Catholic socialist tradition which somewhat adopted me during college. It’s one of the most attractive things to me about the early Renovationists – before, and in opposition to, the hæresy of the Sergianists – and the legacy of the Vekhi group in Russia. It remains one of the most attractive things to me about the Eastern European socialism that understands proportionality, preservation both cultural and natural, physically-beautiful built space that’s friendly to young families and old folks to be vital parts of its programme, and not merely optional.

For all of this, of course, I’ve had it put to me that I’m a secret reactionary. Wait, let me put this in the most literal possible way. A certain commenter told me – because I am opposed to rule by tech-bros, mind you – that I am actually ‘an eccentric right winger whose views occasionally overlap with leftism… gung-ho about early twentieth century Marxists and rural Maoists… because they provide a leftist outlet for [my] regressive social views’.

There may be a certain grain of truth to this. I do have certain views which range quite close to classical reaction – particularly in the mode of Pobedonostsev and Leont’ev, and to stretch that definition a bit, Khomyakov and Kireevsky as well. And yet I am forced to wonder. Is it right-wing not to want to live in a world dominated by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk? Is it right-wing to want working-class people to be not merely seen but heard as well? Is it right-wing to want for those same working-class people, the same things those working-class people say they want? In many cases, that includes beauty. It’s something of a bourgeois assumption that poor people desire convenience and efficiency over elegance. This assumption is often massaged and conditioned into a belief that they deserve only those things which are convenient and efficient, and no more. As Reina Sultan puts it, writing at Intersectional Feminist Media:

Rich people in the U.S. (but also in most of the west) think that poor people cannot manage their own money — for no other reason than the fact that they are poor. I work in international development at an organization that provides unconditional cash transfers to women. This means they can spend the money however they want. It’s theirs. Without fail, we are bombarded at every conference with the same questions, “How do you ensure that the women won’t spend money on frivolous items like lipstick?” We don’t. It’s not our money. It’s theirs.

In prosaic terms, the real, physical needs of the working class often depend on more than mere convenience and efficiency. Women in particular, need to wear make-up and need to dress smartly for job interviews, if they want to get hired so they can feed themselves and their families. Oftentimes this presents a not insignificant financial hurdle for them. Efficiency is clearly not the only consideration. Of course there’s a double standard at play in this, and perhaps more than a whiff of sexism as well. But it’s hardly out of line to say that poor women – and men, for that matter – are no less apt to enjoy looking and smelling nice as much as rich women and men do. On a related sidenote: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed may be dated, but it deserves to be on every single American high-school curriculum.

But this anecdote actually reminds me of one of my very favourite CS Lewis anecdotes. On the way to an Inklings meeting Lewis stopped to give money to a street beggar, and his friend asked him if he wouldn’t merely spend it on drink. Lewis retorted: ‘Maybe – but if I had kept it, so would I.’ What this anecdote does particularly effectively, is that it eliminates the idea that the beliefs and desires of needy and stressed people are somehow of a different quality than ours, as well as the assumption that poor and wealthy people are any different in terms of what they deserve.

The spiritual needs of the poor are real and must be considered. When I was still going to S. Stephen’s Church in Providence, there was a middle-aged homeless lady who often stayed in the back pews. I was told, sotto voce, that she occasionally or more-than-occasionally struggled with bipolar or a similar disorder. But she loved coming to the church. She told me herself that she loved particularly the sensory dimension of the Mass, the approach of Christ before all five senses. It was clear to me that she felt most herself when she was in the presence of the Eucharist, listening to the hymnody of the Church, smelling the sweet smells of the censer and lifting her eyes to heaven. It would be a particularly cruel sort of person to want to take that away from her.

One of the great attractions of Orthodox Christianity, for me, is the insistence that the poor have their own sort of beauty that demands respect, even if it isn’t readily apparent. The face of Christ may be seen in the beggar at the church door, to paraphrase Chrysostom. You see this in Dostoevsky particularly – think Sonya Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment – but it’s present in Greek Orthodox theology as well. The sacrifice of Christ and the defeat of death by God was not efficient – on the contrary, it was gratuitous – but it accomplished a remarkable symmetry, even if it came at the expense of the overthrow of all worldly logic: the power of death defeated, by mere human flesh in the Resurrection. What place can austerity and the exaction of pettier debts and satisfactions have, in the light of this awesome and indescribable reality? What do we ungrateful servants mean by laying hold of our fellow-servants, by grudging the poor a moment of æsthesis, when the King of All has forgiven us everything with such wild and reckless abandon? If there is an austerity to be performed, it belongs to the self: an austerity of gratitude, the tears and toil of grace.