Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
11th August 2025
The things around us have become plainer. In 1923, or 1823, the fashion was for intricate and richly ornamented architecture, furniture, clothes, dishware, or whatever else. In 2023, fashionable objects are plain and minimalist, if not outright utilitarian. Steve Jobs believed that every object should look as much like a featureless white sphere as possible, and the rest of us follow in his footsteps.
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When I ask people why this is, they usually tell me it’s because people can no longer afford ornamentation as a result of improved technology. This seems backwards—everywhere else, improved technology makes nice things cheap and plentiful. Why would this be the opposite for ornamentation? I’m often told it’s because of the Baumol effect—that when technology improves productivity in some fields, the cost rises in other fields where productivity remains relatively lower, such as live music performances. Because ornamentation must be handmade, improved technology does not improve productivity in this sector, and so prices rise and rise until it is unaffordable.
This is hot nonsense. Technology obviously improves the productivity of making and installing ornamentation. There is no law of nature which requires everything beautiful must be made by a seventy-year-old master craftsman peering through spectacles as he works with hammer and chisel. Men have used mass-production technology to make better and cheaper ornamentation since the first day of the Industrial Revolution—literally. James Watt, whose improved steam engine marks the Industrial Revolution’s beginning in 1776, was good friends with Josiah Wedgwood,1 an entrepreneur who used improved production techniques and advanced tooling to mass-manufacture decorative vases and tableware, including machine-made copies of ancient Greek and Roman works. Wedgwood sold to both middle-class consumers and the Queen of England.
August 12th, 2025 at 00:04
There is another explanation for the depressing conformity and lack of beauty in our surroundings – namely, the encroachment of Cultural Marxism, which is now the dominant ideology of the West. Older readers may remember the vast stretches of concrete blockhouse-type apartment buildings which characterized the old USSR. The ugliness of so much of communist-era Russia.
Imperial Russia was characterized by some of the finest high arts and sciences in the world, including world-renowned poets, authors, composers, dancers, and architects. Russia was famous the world over for her beautiful music, dance, poetry and literature. As well as for the high quality of her artisans, craftsmen and scientists. The communists destroyed all of that; an ideology which forbids differences between things or merit-based categorizations cannot believe in beauty or its lack. Only a uniformity of drab ugliness.
Cultural Marxism, which is classical Marxism applied to culture instead of economics and class, is every bit as hostile to truth and beauty as its older counterpart. Which is why classical designs featuring the beauty of the ancients are now forbidden in favor of bland mediocrity which – though it does not elevate anyone – does not offend anyone, either.
Some years ago, Sports Illustrated devoted its famous swimsuit issue to corpulent women in swimwear. The Cultural Marxists had finally gotten to the editorial staff of that magazine: If not everyone could like like a super-model in a swimsuit, then no one would. Ordinary people would take their places.
If the very idea of standards of beauty is forbidden, then don’t be surprised when your swimsuit models start appearing to be ordinary in appearance, and your buildings ugly.
August 12th, 2025 at 05:56
Well said.