What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish? Son of Man. You cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images...." T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

For the last six months, millions of Americans have tuned in every week to watch the exploits of an unlikely band of superheroes: Jai Rodriguez, Kyan Douglas, Ted Allen, Thom Filica and Carson Kressley a.k.a, "the Fab Five." They're the stars of the breakout hit "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." "Queer Eye" has single-handedly put the Bravo cable network on the map and has inspired lame knock-offs like The Learning Channel's "Date Patrol."

On "Queer Eye," a hapless heterosexual male benefits from the cultural, grooming, culinary, design and fashion expertise of the five gay males. (Hence the title.) While it's hardly the only makeover show on cable television (more about this in a moment), it's easily the most popular. Part of it is the premise, one that the five gay men play up to great comic effect — specially Kressley, the "fashion savant," who comes off like Isaac Mizrahi after estrogen therapy. The other is that they actually seem eager to help and treat the clueless "straight guy" with affection and respect.

Not surprisingly, the show has set teeth on edge on both sides of the culture war divide. Cultural conservatives rightly see "Queer Eye" as yet another attempt to situate homosexuality and the accompanying lifestyle within the American mainstream. It, along with shows such "Boy Meets Boy" and HBO's "Angels in America," is part of what Richard Brookheiser once called the "homosexual moment" in American life.

On the other hand, some gay activists, Andrew Sullivan among them, view "Queer Eye" as a kind of gay minstrelsy. In this line of thinking, Americans have embraced the Fab Five because they confirm the worst stereotypes of gay men and, as such, do not pose a threat to the cultural status quo.

I think both sides are right but that's not what I find most noteworthy about "Queer Eye." That designation is reserved for the way that the show embodies the triumph of "style" in American life. While the expression "style over substance" has been part of our cultural lexicon for decades, this is something else. It's more like "style is substance." It's the belief that all there is to a person — and to some extent, to human institutions as well — are surfaces.

To use a culinary analogy, it doesn't matter how the food tastes as long as the presentation is excellent.

To be fair, gay men didn't invent this notion. (Although, there's probably a book waiting to be written about how such a cultural shift was a necessary pre-condition for the emergence of the "gay moment.") Domesticity without the domus, a rightly-ordered household, is Martha Stewart's stock-in-trade. The average American wedding costs $20,000 yet people understand less about the institution of marriage than ever before.

Or, look at the magazine rack at the check-out counter. Most of the magazines are about "style:" who's got it, how to get it and how to avoid a stylistic misstep. Go home, turn on the television, and there's more of the same. If your concern is your inner life, they've got bupkes. If you're decorating a room, accessorizing, or worried about making a good first impression, there's no shortage of "help."

Why? There are several reasons, but the one that immediately comes to mind is that we've concluded that the interior of a person, institution, custom or ritual is basically unknowable or, in any case, immune to criticism and judgment. In other words, it's so subjective that it's impossible to talk about it.

So, all there is to talk about are appearances, what we call "style." In this context, people who can tell you the best way to shave ("slowly and with the grain") or accessorize ("holding a new belt over a pot of boiling water can give it a nice matte finish") are superheroes of sorts, protecting the innocent clueless from making una brutta figura. And, ironically, whereas being judgmental about a person's interior dispositions is verboten, being so about their "style" is almost mandatory.

This is not to say that appearances don't matter. They do, but not in the way our culture thinks. Just as the word "relationship," which The New Republic's Lee Siegel defined as two autonomous selves negotiating the terms of their encounter, is a impoverished version of love, "style" is a impoverished version of "aesthetics."

Unlike "style," "aesthetics" goes beneath the surfaces. In fact, it regards the surfaces, however pleasing, as merely an invitation to look deeper and see more clearly. We appreciate beauty to better understand truth and goodness. Of course, that assumes that we believe in Truth, Goodness and Beauty as something that transcends mere opinion or taste — something that can, however haltingly, be talked about.

In his magisterial "The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics," the theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar described our dilemma:

We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past — whether he admits it or not — can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.

The years since Von Balthasar wrote these words have turned him into a prophet, as well as theologian par excellence. A people who no longer believe in beauty have had to settle for style and, along the way, have forgotten what it means to love, settling for relationships instead. We dare not believe in beauty because, once you do that, there's no telling where you'll end up.

Actually, there is. It's just not a place we want to go. Better to spend our time shaving slowly and steaming our belts.