(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Talking about Beauty to Challenge My Conservative Neighbors About the Ugliness They Support [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-04-18 This piece is most deeply about what I’m calling “A Better Human Story,” i.e. a way of understanding ourselves, our history, and our challenges by making better use of the Evolutionary Perspective. (A series to provide that “way of understanding” the human story will be appearing here soon, and will begin with this piece about “The Fate of Human Civilization.”) But I am publishing this piece on Beauty next week as my weekly op/ed messages to the conservatives among whom I live in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. I’m continually feeling impelled to try to bring back to “the better angels of their nature” the traditional/conservative/Christian people I came to appreciate so much when I conducted talk radio conversations with them — many hundreds of hours spread across the decade from 1992-2002)— in which we explored together “the questions of meaning and value that we face in our lives.” I just can’t stand what’s happened to them, that they’ve been somehow led into supporting the very opposite of the admirable values they expressed to me back in the 1990s before the Republican Party got taken over by a dark and destructive force. (Nor can I understand what’s happened to them, i.e. just how that Ugly Republican Party managed to move a lot of people who had a lot of goodness and decency in them to support a Force of Ugliness.) Usually my messages are directed at them more than in this piece. But you’’ll see how I turn, in the final section of the piece, to put this dangerous moment in America into a evolutionary perspective, to clarify the nature of the battle, and to show the Ugliness that all people on the life-serving side of the battle must fight against a drive from power. All good people are called to fight against what’s ugly so that American civilization can take a life-serving, and not a life-destroying and life-degrading, course into the future. Here’s the piece as it will likely appear: ______________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________ Why Do We Take Pleasure in BEAUTY? It seems clearly part of human nature to respond to beauty with a special kind of pleasure. “Human nature” is best understood as something that got crafted in us over eons of time by a process that consistently chose what could survive over what could not, and therefore served to get our ancestors’ genetic design into the future. (We are that future.) That leads to the question: Why would an appreciation of beauty get into our nature? Meaning, how would it have helped our ancestors to survive? An important part of it may have to do with the survival-value of seeing beauty in our potential mates. (I know that in my own case, while I’ve loved beauty of many kinds, no other kind moves me so deeply as beauty in a woman.) Not only have studies shown that there is substantial agreement across cultures about which faces and body-shapes are beautiful, but also that the attributes that are widely considered beautiful (like lustrous hair and symmetry) are good signals of adaptive qualities like fertility and good health. But how would that explain the way we can love the beauty of a painting, or music, or a poem, or a sunset? (Or a “beautiful idea,” or a “beautiful moment” between people?) The question arises: Are we talking about the same thing -- called “beauty” -- when we talk about the “beauty” of the young Elizabeth Taylor, or of a concerto by Bach, or of Michelangelo’s David? They aren’t identical. But there does seem to be something common to all of them. And perhaps, if we could articulate that “something,” it would provide a clue about why it’s in our nature. Here’s my hypothesis: In every case, the “beautiful” thing exemplifies how such a thing is supposed to be. When we experience aesthetic pleasure – from the rose in bloom, the flow of the music, the “beautiful catch” an outfielder makes, the beautiful face, the statue’s form -- we feel that the elements of the “thing” have been put together in something of an ideal way. We get a satisfaction from things being just right. One can see why it might have helped our ancestors to survive if they were motivated to seek beauty, since beauty would imply things being in some kind of good order. We humans have had an especial need for such motivation. That motivation became life-serving as we became the creatures who adopted culture as our main adaptive strategy. The flexibility of culture conferred great advantages, but it also brought new dangers. The path of Culture was dangerous because it widened the range of paths any human group might take. Pre-cultural species were more confined to the path set by their biologically-evolved nature, fitting into at natural order in which they’d proven to be viable. But culture’s expanded range of possibilities included possibilities for disorder, and that danger made it adaptive for the “cultural animal” to develop new motivations to want good order. Evolution thus rewarded those of our ancestors whose pleasure from seeing things “in good order” helped guide them toward a more life-serving path. The fact that our love of beauty is part of our inherent nature implies that aesthetic pleasure was life-serving prior to the rise of civilization, which is too recent to have installed such a thing evolutionarily. (And indeed, we find that our pre-civilized ancestors made beautiful paintings on the walls of caves tens of thousands of years ago, and material objects whose shape and decorations demonstrate a striving toward beauty not necessitated by mere practicalities. Even a jug without a pleasing shape will hold water.) So culture itself evidently created dangers of getting off the life-serving track. But those dangers multiplied greatly when culture eventually took off -- mere millennia ago – into the whole new stage of Civilization. I’ve explained elsewhere why civilization was driven in life-degrading directions (Google “Schmookler ugliness history”). The fact of that danger could not be clearer: When civilization first emerged, it took the path of the tyranny and enslavement and chronic warfare. Civilized Humankind has continually had to fight a Force of Ugliness. As for we Americans now, in our present crisis. Something very ugly has been visibly working to make our civilization what it emphatically should not be. I’ve lately noticed I’ve been moved to use the word “ugly” to describe a political force that has gained great power in America over the past generation that continually pushes thing onto paths that are the very opposite of life-serving. The Force I’m calling “ugly” has been visibly assaulting that “thing of beauty” that’s always been the heart of America: the constitutional order. That force is Ugly also in how it deals in lies, cruelly targets vulnerable people, shows contempt for the rule of law, expresses an insatiable greed and the lust for power, is utterly self-serving, indifferent or hostile to the well-being of the world, prefers conflict to cooperation. The present American crisis can be described thus: “we are engaged in a great civil war” to determine whether our nation – our civilization -- will be beautiful or ugly. It seems no coincidence that now’s the moment I’m moved to write about Beauty. The more we crave beauty, the more we will be inspired to drive the “Ugly” away from the helm of our civilization. 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