Postscript on plastic

What better way is there to start off the new year than with another blog post about plastic?  You’ll recall that in a post from last year, I raised the question of why old plastic -- unlike old wood, glass, or metal -- seems invariably ugly.  I argued that none of the seemingly obvious answers holds up upon closer inspection.  In particular, I argued that the “artificiality” of plastic is not the reason, both because there are lots of old artificial things we don’t find ugly and because there is a sense in which plastic is not artificial.
 

On that latter point, it was fun recently to read the Bruce Jones and Adolpho Buylla story “Plastic” in Alien Worlds #5 (from which the illustration above is taken).  Set in a war-torn and plastic-filled future, it features a character who complains that the everyday plastic objects that surround them “ain’t even real plastic” but are made from the hides of the alien creatures that are central to the story.  A world with fake plastic.  Wrap your mind around that!

On the question of why old plastic is ugly, a novel possible answer is suggested by a passage in Donald Fagen’s book Eminent Hipsters.  Fagen writes:

A lot of the malls and the condos are much nicer now than when I was a kid in postwar New Jersey, at the beginning of all that.  But, like many of my generation, I’m afraid I’m still severely allergic to all that “plastic,” both the literal and the metaphorical.  In third world countries, lefties associate it with the corporate world and call its agents “the Plastics.”  Norman Mailer went so far (he always went so far) as to believe that the widespread displacement of natural materials by plastic was responsible for the increase in violence in America.  Wood, metal, glass, wool and cotton, he said, have a sensual quality when touched.  Because plastic is so unsatisfying to the senses, people are beginning to go to extremes to feel something, to connect with their bodies.  We are all, Mailer thought, prisoners held in sensual isolation to the point of homicidal madness. (p. 130)

As with pretty much everything Mailer said, the only sane reaction is: “Seriously?”  The idea that plastic has anything to do with an increase in the murder rate is obviously too stupid for words.  However, the suggestion that plastic lacks the sensual appeal that wood, glass, etc. have might seem plausible. 

But it isn’t, really.  Think of small children, who are the most sensation-oriented of human beings and whose taste for plastic is pretty obvious.  Some of my most vivid memories from childhood have to do with the strange appeal certain plastic toys had.  There was, for example, that Fisher Price Milk Bottle set that so many kids in the late 60s and early 70s cut their teeth on.  I’ll be damned if that orange bottle in particular doesn’t still look pretty good.  Even adults chew on plastic all the time -- pen caps, straws, the frames of their glasses, etc.

So, once again it’s Mailer 0, Reality 1.  My own suspicion is that the correct explanation of the ugliness of at least the most extreme cases of ugly old plastic -- such as the detritus that washes up on beaches -- might lie in a consideration raised in another post from last year, on technology.  Recall that from the point of view of Aristotelian metaphysics, the distinction between what is “natural” and what is “artificial” is more perspicuously captured by the distinction between what has a substantial form and what has a merely accidental form.  For some man-made things (e.g. new breeds of dog, plastic) are “natural” in the sense of having a substantial form, even though the usual examples of man-made things (e.g. tables, chairs, machines) have only accidental forms.  And some “natural” things (e.g. a random pile of stones) have merely accidental forms, even though the usual examples of natural objects (e.g. plants, animals, water, gold) have substantial forms.  (Full story, as usual, in Scholastic Metaphysics.) 

Now, things having substantial forms are metaphysically more fundamental, since accidental forms presuppose substantial forms.  But as I noted in the post on technology just linked to, in a high tech society, the metaphysical priority of the “natural” world (in the sense of the world of things having substantial forms or true Aristotelian “natures” or essences) is less manifest, since in everyday life in such a society, we are surrounded by objects whose raw materials are so highly processed that it is their accidental forms rather than the underlying substantial forms that “hit us in the face.”  Furthermore, many of these objects consist of materials -- such as plastic -- which have substantial forms and are thus in an Aristotelian sense “natural,” but nevertheless don’t have the “feel” of being natural in the way wood or stone do, since unlike those substances, they don’t occur “in the wild.”  So, in a high tech society, the forms of things we encounter in everyday life -- the order they exhibit -- can easily seem to be all of the “accidental” kind (in the technical Aristotelian sense), and in particular of the man-made kind.

Now, consider what happens when something having an accidental form but nevertheless made out of manifestly natural (in the sense of substantial-form-having) materials decays -- an old castle or wooden shack, say, or a tank rotting in Truk lagoon.  The accidental forms disappear, but the underlying substantial forms only become more evident.  This may be the reason they don’t seem ugly, and can even seem beautiful.  For as Aquinas says, “beauty properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause.”  As the relatively superficial accidental forms give way, but the very well-known to us and metaphysically deeper substantial forms of things like stone, wood, and metal become more manifest, the objects seem no less beautiful.

Contrast that with objects made out of plastic.  Here the raw materials also have a substantial form, as all raw materials underlying accidental forms do.  However, it is a kind of material -- and thus a kind of substantial form -- which does not occur “in the wild” but takes much human effort to bring into being.  Hence it doesn’t have the feel to us of a natural kind of stuff.  It is also a very protean stuff.  There is no one shape, texture, or color that plastic tends to have.  So, it can seem that the only form -- the only order -- a plastic object has is the kind we have imposed on it for our particular purposes.  When it loses that -- as when a plastic toy becomes seriously damaged or a plastic bottle melted or a plastic plate brittle and missing pieces -- it can intuitively seem like something having no “formal cause” or principle or order at all.  And thus it seems ugly.

If this explanation is right then it would seem to follow that if plastic occurred “in the wild” in the way that stone, metal, and wood do, we might tend to find decaying plastic objects no more ugly than we do decaying wood, metal, or stone objects.  It would be hard to test that implication, since we just know too much about plastic ever to get it to seem like a wild kind of stuff on all fours with rocks, wood, etc.  But maybe Fagen would disagree.  He laments that, unlike people at the time Mailer was commenting, “the Babies seem awfully comfortable with simulation, virtuality, and Plasticulture in general” -- where by “Babies” he means the “TV Babies” born after about 1960, for whom television has been “the principal architect of their souls.”  So, perhaps the Babies, or the babies of the Babies, or maybe the babies of the babies of the Babies, will eventually come to see broken old plastic the way people have always seen old stone and wood.  Maybe yellowing cracked plastic lawn furniture will become a regular sight in high end antique shops, and old broken pocket calculators and telephones will become highly sought-after conversation pieces for the coffee table.

Nah…