“Our world has become obsessed with appearance, with image, with persona, with what’s in the store window, with how we’re perceived. Today it’s more important to look good than to be good, more important to look healthy than to be healthy, and more important to have a good- looking surface than to have much in the way of integrity and depth underneath.”
My old philosophical mentor, Eric Mascall, used to say that, in our time, all the goods are in the store window and there’s little under the counter. He was commenting on empiricism as a philosophy and how it was slowly robbing life of its mystery and depth. Sadly, that comment, made years ago, rings true today at a different level.
Our world has become obsessed with appearance, with image, with persona, with what’s in the store window, with how we’re perceived. Today it’s more important to look good than to be good, more important to look healthy than to be healthy, and more important to have a good- looking surface than to have much in the way of integrity and depth underneath.
We see this everywhere, in our obsession with physical appearance, in the cult around image, in our worship of celebrity, in the imperialism of fashion, and in our not-so-disguised efforts to be perceived as connected to all the right things.
For example, typically, more and more universities are handing out honorary degrees to two types of people, celebrities and highly recognized justice advocates. I’m not sure that many of those institutions actually care about the poor or intellectually endorse what the entertainment and sports industry (which produce most of our celebrities) are doing, but a Desmond Tutu, a Mother Teresa, a Meryl Streep, a Michael Jordan, or a Tom Brady looks mighty good on a university’s public face: “Just look how caring, beautiful, and energetic we are!”
In the end, and I hope I’m not being cynical, it seems it’s less important what an institution believes in, or how it treats its employees and students, than how it’s seen and perceived from the outside. Giving a doctorate to a Mother Teresa doesn’t do much for the poor in India, but it does a fair amount for the institution that’s honoring her.
The same is true in politics. Image has triumphed over substance. We tend to care less about policy than about appearance, and we elect people to political offices more on the basis of their persona than anything else. To be elected to a public office today, it’s more important to have the right image than to have substance and character.
But we shouldn’t be too hard on the triumph of appearance over substance in public life, because this simply mirrors what’s happening in our private lives: More and more, appearance is the first thing, the whole thing, and the only thing. It’s not important to be good, but only to look good.
Cosmetics is becoming the biggest industry in the world, and concern for how we look, for the perfect body, is now a crucifying anxiety that’s leaving more and more of us, especially young people, dissatisfied with our own bodies and deeply restless within our own lives. The prevalence of anorexia, among other eating disorders, more than bears this out. Too often, we’re dieting not to be healthy but to try to attain and maintain an impossible appearance. Everything is about how we look, and so we exercise more, diet more strictly, and spend yet more money on fashionable clothing in an attempt to look right, even as we remain forever disenchanted with how we look and know deep down that we’re fighting a losing battle as our bodies age and society’s standards grow ever more unattainable – and all because our worth lies in looking good.
Not that all of this is bad. Concern for physical appearance is a good thing, as are concerns for exercise and diet. We are meant to look good and to feel good. Neither bodily health nor healthy anxiety about our appearance should ever be denigrated in the name of morality, depth or religion. Indeed, lack of concern for one’s physical appearance is a telltale sign of depression or even some deeper illness of soul.
But concern for appearance should never replace a concern for substance, depth and integrity of soul, just as, conversely, concern for substance and depth may never be an excuse for shoddiness and sloppy appearance. Still, today, we’ve lost the proper balance.
Faith is built on the blood of martyrs, and the institutions that bind a society together (marriage, family, church, politics) are sustained largely on the basis of self-sacrifice. But ninety-nine percent of that martyrdom and self-sacrifice remains hidden, silent, anonymous, unnoticed, unglamorous, blood sweated in secret, love given for reasons beyond appearance.
If this is true, then the prognosis for the future leaves me uneasy. When appearance is everything, we soon stop focusing on deeper things and then slowly, imperceptibly, appearance begins to look like character, celebrity begins to replace nobility of soul, and looking good becomes more important than being good.
Ron Rolheiser, OMI is a Roman Catholic priest and member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Theologian, professor, and award-winning author, Rolheiser serves as president of the Oblate School of Theology. He holds Bachelor’s degrees from the University of Ottawa and Newman Theological College Edmonton and Master’s degrees from the University of San Francisco and University of Louvain, Belgium along with a PhD/STD from the University of Louvain. Apart from his academic knowledge in systematic theology and philosophy, he has become a popular speaker in contemporary spirituality and religion and the secular world. He writes a weekly column that is carried in over 70 newspapers around the world.