Guilt, mascara, and the progress of modernization

Credit: Jinjin Sun/YH

The French sociologist Émile Durkheim argued in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that faith is little more than socialized power deified. Because the essential power relations that drive a society’s basic functions operate so far over and above the individual’s existence, man copes with the existential conundrums those relations create by assigning divine origins to the norms they dictate.

By this model, “secularization” involves no loss of a transcendental social lynchpin but in fact only religion’s dissolution as a necessary intermediary between independent agency and communal control, coupled with the direct worship of society’s metaconsciousness, which by its very collectivity, Durkheim says, sees things “only in their permanent and essential aspects, which it crystallizes into communicable ideas.” Basic financial, cultural, and communicative structures remain relatively unchanged, but when we step outside the moral boundaries those structures demarcate, we express our guilt over violating not the divine order of things, but the social order of things.

Of course, guilt expresses itself socially regardless of the order by which society organizes itself, but this fact obscures the more important realization that the outwardly-directed soothing of guilt performs nearly identical functions in the religiously-ordered and social structurally-ordered community. The historical test case is Renaissance patronage of religious art, which often received the majority of its financial support from the great usurers of the day, who attenuated the feeling of moral ambiguity their ruthless careers created within them by participating in the honorable decoration of a sacred site. A famous example is the main chapel of Santa Maria Novello, Florence, which Domenico and Ghirlandaio painted with financial backing from Giovanni Tornabuoni, treasurer to Pope Sixtus IV, the fastidiously nepotistic pontiff who commissioned the Sistine Chapel and awarded church titles and salaries in return for sexual favors.

The thickly-described story does have far more nuance. Certainly after 1600, families would sometimes plainly exalt their prosperity through thinly veiled religious allegory in the style of Pieto da Cortona’s Triumph of the Barberini, a ceiling fresco in the Grand Salon of the Barberini Palace in Rome, painted from 1633-39. Then, by the nineteenth century, with the rapid rise of industrialism and equally precipitous fall of parish devotion, the more personal system of one patron/one artist/one site became collectivized into a model under which apolitical consortia, committees, and corporations underwrote the areligious activities of museums, playhouses, and public charities.

This modern arrangement remains largely in force today—even individual philanthropists tend to donate through incorporated trusts that draw upon their estates—but the guilt that operates beneath it has rested immutable since the Catholic quattrocento. Take as an illustration the case of Latisse, the only FDA-approved treatment for hypotrichosis (no, not trichinosis, but doesn’t it sound ominous?) applied nightly to the upper eyelid margin at a cost of 140 dollars per month from now until the end of life, Latisse has been clinically proven to grow eyelashes, making them longer, thicker, and darker. (See their ad in Glamour magazine). The drug is in fact only a diluted form of Lumigan®, the world’s most popular glaucoma treatment, which rakes in approximately 300 million dollars per year for maker Allergan. The Irvine-based company hopes that within five years, the Latisse brand will squeeze another 200 million dollars yearly from the versatile chemical, not counting the extra revenue Allergan will gross when the 30-something soccer moms currently using Latisse find a wrinkle or two in the vanity mirror and, loyal to Allergan for transforming their tattered lashes, turn to Botox Cosmetic, the company’s flagship product, for help with their falling faces. (And just maybe, when the Botox stops working, these soon-to-be-bifocaled 60-somethings will need some Lumigan, eye drops commonly used for glaucoma.)

The choice to manufacture Latisse in the first place can be seen to represent a secular devotion to social power insofar as it confirms and sacralizes contemporary norms of superficial comeliness, but if such worship were entirely unashamed, Allergan would feel no need to be a proud sponsor of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. “Borne out of the tradition of blowing on an eyelash to make a wish come true,” reads the foundation’s website, Allergan this year donated 500,000 dollars to the foundation, with a promise of up to twice that again, meted out in five-dollar increments for each suburbanite who registers online to receive email promotions for Latisse. The Make-A-Wish logo appears at the bottom of Allergan’s ad in Glamour, a chapel fresco in a world of usury, a corporation’s flimsy attempt to reassure itself and its customers that at least some of the time its concerns lie beyond the ephemeral. Allergan is merely a latter-day Tornabuoni, Make-A-Wish its bureaucratized Domenico. But the similarity does not end with the fact that the foundation and the fresco exist at the behest of a guilty conscience. Indeed, both rely on a certain psychic serendipity to ensure their effect: the occasional evening news-watcher seeing a broadcast about a recently-granted wish, thinking for a moment, and volunteering his time; some or another young artist looking at Domenico’s frescoes, thinking for a moment, and changing an element of his own work. Much progress, then—real “progress,” the sort in which we would like to think ourselves involved—is not and perhaps has never been a deliberate phenomenon. Rather, it occurs upon society’s edges, financed in moments of confession and effective by happenstance.

by Noah Ziggy Gentele SM’10

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