World

From Iraq, a defence of beauty

November 05, 2009
Bright idea: can beauty and create a more peaceful world?
Bright idea: can beauty and create a more peaceful world?

Poverty, for the outsider, is often picturesque. But not here. This neighbourhood on the outskirts of Amara in southern Iraq has got to be the most hideous place I have ever seen: garbage, dirt, battered metal carcasses of "dead" cars, deep holes gouged out of the ground, dusty children wearing filthy clothes, the houses simultaneously decrepit and unfinished.

But it isn’t the poverty that is shocking, it is the ugliness. Yes, the people here are poor, but I’ve been to poorer places in Afghanistan, and in India. But even in those places at least your eye could rest somewhere and find something of beauty.

What, I wonder, would it be like to grow up here? Not in terms of the danger or the poverty—we can all pretend to imagine what that is like. But what would it be like never to see anything pretty—only brown dirt, brown houses, dirty red cloth, and dust everywhere?  In the middle of a warzone, do I sound like an effete aesthete? Maybe. But there are worse things to be in the midst of a warzone.



We need beauty, not perhaps as much as we need water, not as much as food, not as much as love, well, maybe just as much as love. Think of the tribal carpets woven in Samarkand, think of that Anglo-Saxon hoard of gold recently discovered in Staffordshire. Without beauty, and without the ability to appreciate it, are we fully human?

Back in London, the guy at the electrical shop down the road from my house suggests I stock up on lightbulbs. He tells me that the EU has legislated against inefficient incandescent bulbs and insists we replace them with low-energy fluorescents. It will lessen CO2 emissions, and perhaps help to slow global warming. But my God! Fluorescents are ugly. Incandescent light, like candles, makes skin glow. Fluorescent light sucks out our soul, making us look half dead.

I used to joke, sitting in hotels and offices in Ramallah or Jerusalem, that maybe the middle east crisis is caused by the fact that most of the rooms there have fluorescent lighting. Pretty lighting won’t bring peace to the area but it is a step in the right direction. How can a child’s soul develop if he or she never sees anything beautiful? Can we write poetry if we live in a world of fluorescent lighting?

Beauty is deep, deeper than our skin.