The Meaning of Beauty in the Human Story

Perhaps it will be our love of beauty that saves humankind from self-destruction.

When I was a boy, my mother required me to try on the various arts: at least one year of piano lessons, a painting class for kids at the university. I gave up on the piano, but when I was 15 I had an almost spiritually transformative experience when I heard deeply the beauty Bach had captured in his 5th Brandenburg Concerto. Nothing I ever did in the visual arts was worth saving, but the experience of seeing Michelangelo’s David in that white marble was filled with the kind of pleasure that leads people from around the world to seek it out.

Beauty takes a great many forms, and the boy I was took more naturally to the “beautiful catch,” like the one Willie Mays made over the shoulder in the 1954 World Series. In time, I began to try to “catch” things just right in how I composed ideas an images in words. Le mot juste, as the French phrase has it—the exactly right word, suggesting that something of value has been captured. And what would Shakespeare’s marvelous works be without his characters expressing themselves so beautifully that we continue to quote them centuries after they were penned.

“Done just right.” “The way things ideally should be.” That seems to be the essence of Beauty, that possibly “sacred” thing that we humans take such pleasure in. The painter carefully placing a dab of color on the canvas to get just the right effect for the painting as a whole. The beautiful face, the beautiful body—something that approaches the ideal. Even neighbors rallying to help another family in an emergency is something that we could – rightly – call beautiful. A world in which swords have been beaten into plowshares, a world in which there is justice and kindness—these ideals, too, we would call beautiful.

An aspiration to the ideal seems to be built into us, and built into us also is some important pleasure we get when we behold the beauty of those things that approach that ideal.

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There must be a reason why our species – of all of earth’s creatures — evolved to get such pleasure from beauty.

“It is there for a reason” is a good general rule when it comes to what evolution – with its mechanism of natural selection – constructs in the various species. And that applies not only to the “hardware” of anatomy, but also to the software of experiential tendencies. Generally speaking, if some trait became part of a species’ nature, it is because those who possessed it were more likely to get their DNA into the future than those who lack it.

(There are exceptions to that general rule, but it is most improbable that humans’ tendency to take pleasure in beauty is one of them.)

If taking pleasure in beauty were to be shown to be part of the naturally-selected inborn nature of many species – or even of other species — that would lead us in one direction. That direction would be to ask: “Why would a beaver or a leopard or a chimpanzee acquire some advantage from being motivated to seek out beauty because the encounter with it was experienced as a positive thing.”

Presumably, when it comes to mating behavior, there is something of the sort at work as many animals evolved to want to mate with those of their kind who’s appearance was attractive. And has been shown that we humans find beautiful a whole range of qualities that are signs that some potential mate is a good bet to help one get one’s DNA into the future.

But the issue of finding certain qualities “beautiful” in a mate seems like just a small – vital, but small – part of the total picture of the many ways we humans employ the word “beautiful.” Not just the beauty of the “beauty queen,” but also the sound of a Mozart quartet, the soliloquies of Shakespeare, the society that is committed to justice, and the pass Lebron James made behind the back to his teammate streaking to the basket.

I am betting that our species is quite unique in our relationship with beauty. We may be joined by the bower bird, who attracts a mate by creating a whole beautiful collage with sensitivity to color. But still, the role the pursuit of beauty plays in our lives seems quite unique—from how we furnish our homes, to the music we surround ourselves with, to the people we make movie stars because of the pleasure it gives us to watch them on the screen.

So the question arises: If we are quite unique in how much of a role “taking pleasure in beauty” plays in motivating us, what has it been about the evolution of our species that made it advantageous for our ancestors to take the path drawn by seeking out beauty because it feels good rather than to be indifferent to this quality that we respond to as “beauty”?

One can sense that the answer will illuminate something profound about the path our species — uniquely among the earth’s creatures — has taken: developing a culture far deeper and more elaborate than anything our chimpanzee cousins ever created for their lives.

It turns out that our pleasure in beauty is a clue to the unique kind of danger that homo sapiens undertook when it began doing something no creature on earth had ever done before: using an unprecedented creative intelligence to invent more and more of its way of life through culture.

For a creature capable of inventing culture, the possibilities would include not only new paths toward cooperation, fulfillment, and thriving, but also paths toward disorder, cruelty, destructiveness, and social breakdown. A creature no longer tightly confined within a narrow inherited way of life would face a new challenge unknown elsewhere in nature: the challenge of choosing well among widely differing possible ways of being.

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The idea of how things “ideally should be” – the idea of “just right” – is like a compass laid across the whole human world.

Before the rise of the cultural animal, every species was pretty well confined to a narrow range of ways of living. If you’re a grizzly bear, you are going to live pretty much the same kind of life as every other grizzly bear. The same is true of sloths and octopi. Evolution will “find” no reason to be concerned that the creature might take a really wrong path, because the general outlines of its species’ life are so reliably consistent: not only the inborn nature of the creature, but also the way it feeds itself and its relationship with other members of the species, including the reproductive process. All of them reasonably well-defined, with no risk of the creature taking a really wrong path.

Then comes the cultural animal. It is born with a less complete set of instructions. The issue of language illustrates the new mix: the human has evolved to learn a language in the community into which it is born—it has anatomically evolved since splitting with the chimpanzees to have that kind of a brain and an apparatus suitable for speech. What is left undetermined is just what language the newborn human will grow up to speak. Likewise, people are molded into different sorts of people depending on the cultures in which they are raised.

The path of culture required that degree of plasticity: different cultures can develop only because they can shape people into the kinds of people they require.

A range of choices that had always been very narrow for every species on earth was now becoming vastly wider for the one animal that made CULTURE its main strategy for survival.

The range was wide because viable cultures could differ so greatly from one another. As cultures evolved along diverse paths, the creature increasingly escaped from the tighter guidance that had kept other species reliably on paths that worked.

That widened range of possibilities was a mixed blessing for the cultural animal: our species gained the flexibility to generate, through cultural innovation, many different paths for human life, but also had to confront the unique challenge of choosing well among them.

For something genuinely new had come into the world: the possibility, with the flexibility that comes with culture, that the creature might choose badly– badly enough to be its undoing.

Lots of possibilities, some of them bad.

With the possibility of making BAD choices hanging over bands of our ancestors — presumably increasingly as the role of culture expanded over hundreds of thousands of years — natural selection favored giving the cultural creature an eye for “how things should be.” That is, it favored those with an inborn tendency to find attractive the kinds of paths that had proved viable in the ancestral past.

By that means, whatever temptations might draw people toward destructive ways of living, there would also be a force pushing the human creature toward better, more life-serving paths.
The evolution of a craving for beauty became one of the forces that could help guide the cultural creature toward more viable ways of living — not just in the arts, but across the whole range of human activity.

• History would say that humankind accomplished something beautiful if we found a way to order civilization so that wars no longer could happen.
• And history would look upon the transformation of our industrial civilization into one in harmony with the planet — sustainable — as something beautiful as well.

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Fittingly, we find ugly the destructive things that degrade our world.

Evolution shapes motivation. To survive, a creature must do whatever survival requires. A rabbit that does not want to mate will not get its DNA into the future. A rabbit that does not flee the fox will not live to see another day.

So the selective process inscribed into the motivational structure of the cultural animal a desire for ‘the way things should be’ — finding beauty in the kinds of paths that have been life-serving, and being repelled by those it sees as ugly because those paths led toward death and destruction.

And the heart of what’s beautiful for the cultural animal is that the human world does a good job of making things right—all the way up to creating a culture that fosters a reasonable amount of human thriving and life-serving order. And the heart of what’s beautiful for the cultural animal is that the human world does a good job of making things right—all the way up to creating a culture that fosters a reasonable amount of human thriving and life-serving order. If culture offers up the possibility of a way of doing things that is counter to human-flourishing, and leads to the suffering that comes from disordering forces, our chances for survival will be greater if we
possess both of these two highly motivating reactions:

1) We will take pleasure in beauty, and we will seek it out—in our music and in how we order our society. And
2) We will be repelled by what is ugly.

Many people these days in America are experiencing that second motivational reaction.

We are seeing so many things that are so profoundly ugly that our repulsion motivates many people to enter the battle against them. It is life-serving to reject the ugly, because it is allied with suffering and death. It is life-serving also to yearn for a just society—a society where power is used constructively and people can thrive.
Pleasure in beauty includes the pleasure of recognizing the beauty of what we’ve lately lost, imperfect though it always has been.

Our love of beauty does not require perfection, but only that what we perceive embodies something of the ideal.

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Every moment – every word and deed – affords an opportunity for artistry.

The painter carefully places the dab of color onto the canvas to get just the right effect for the painting as a whole. The writer seeks le mot juste. In each case, there is an effort to bring things into a form that approaches the ideal for what that thing should be.

Artistry in words is not just about the matter of literary skill, or intellectual clarity, and artistry in deeds is not just about sticking the landing. It can also be about mercy and kindness. About loving one’s neighbor as oneself. About fair dealing. This is how things are supposed to be.

So too with life. How to greet one’s neighbor. How to discipline one’s child — so that, if one watched the scene in a film, one would think: “That was well done.” How to exercise power.

One can live one’s whole life as if each statement, each action, each interaction with others and with the world, is an opportunity to enact a work of art: an attempt to make things the way one believes they should be. As part of caring whether one’s words and deeds move the human world toward greater beauty, harmony, truthfulness, kindness, and life.

The cultural animal must choose among possible ways of being, some of which are better than others. Some of which lead to destruction.

The embrace of artistry as an attitude toward life is a way of exerting oneself toward what enhances life—as part of the struggle of the cultural animal to make things as they should be before the ugly forces of brokenness drive the human world to make choices that lead toward suffering, death and systemic self-destruction.

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Devotion to Beauty is both a labor of love and a burden.

The artist does not find the task of creating beauty an imposition. The artist is called to make beautiful the painting or the symphony or the poem or the raising of the child or the conversation with a friend in need. It may take effort, but the impetus comes from the heart and is therefore not imposed. The love of beauty makes the pursuit of it a labor of love.

But such is the human condition that serving beauty – working for things to be as they should be – is also a burden. Because our circumstance compels us to deal also with ugliness. Our circumstance is that of a creature who is not just a cultural animal, with the dangers that came from a widened range of possible paths. We have gone beyond that in becoming the civilized animal, which means having left the natural order in which we evolved. The widened range that culture created dropped into a wholly new situation, that made ugliness an urgent problem.

In this new situation of civilization, not only has the range of possibilities grown vastly larger, but the departure from the natural order inevitably unleashes a Force of Ugliness into the human world. [ title and link, to P of T stuff ] In civilization, unlike in the hunting gathering societies in which we evolved, ugly things like tyranny and chronic aggression become prominent aspects of the human world.

So the service to beauty cannot ignore that aspect of the task. Going beyond putting a dab of paint on precisely the right spot to make the painting what it ideally should be, we also have the task of fighting to prevent ugliness from reigning over the world.

Beauty can take other forms in that domain where the battle against Ugliness is what’s called for.

There’s a scene in the World War II movie, The Longest Day, which depicts D-Day, the invasion of continental Europe by the forces of Democracy to free the continent from the ugly domination by the Nazi regime.

In this scene, it is the morning of the invasion, and a German soldier in a bunker by the beach is peering out toward the ocean where a great bank of fog prevents him seeing far enough to see what is gathering to push back the ugly force he is there to defend. Then comes a moment when the low clouds lift like the raising of a curtain and there before him he sees an astounding sight. For the curtain has raised on an armada of thousands of ships that has been assembled to be as the Fist of the Lord to strike down the Ugly Force of cruelty, domination, and murder.

The movie has led us to feel, at that moment when we see this impressive force, that this is a picture of something beautiful, as the life-serving force rises up to drive out of power the life-degrading force that always works to degrade the world.

In our world, where Ugliness seems as mighty as Beauty, we have to be moved by our love of beauty to deal with the burden that a messed up human world has placed on us. Where Ugliness rules, it must be fought.
And this is an especially urgent predicament for us Americans in these times.