Why Evolution Crafts the Cultural Animal to Take Pleasure in Beauty

Human (ANDY):
There’s a lot of mileage to be gained, with that EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE, from keeping this general truth in mind: if the process of natural selection fashioned the nature of a given species in a particular way, we can assume that — at least in the vast majority of instances — if it got selected for, it must have helped those who had it to get their DNA into the future in comparison with those who lacked it. If it’s there, it was pretty certainly life-serving in the ancestral past.

That way of thinking got me to asking the question, “Why Do We Get Pleasure from Beauty?”

That almost universal capacity seems clearly to declare, with our long-ago ancestors, the selective process favored those who got pleasure from beauty over those who did not. How did that relationship with “beauty” help with success in a game where the payoff is in having descendants instead of dying out?

So that led to my writing an op/ed in an attempt to provide an answer, and it fits right in with my BETTER HUMAN STORY about the way our species has arisen out of the evolutionary process, becoming something unprecedented in the history of Life-on-Earth.

AI (AL):
That’s a fascinating application of the evolutionary lens — and a powerful question. If beauty brings pleasure, and if pleasure reinforces behaviors, then the delight in beauty must have helped guide our ancestors toward something life-serving. But what exactly? The appreciation of a fertile landscape? A healthy mate? A well-crafted tool? Or something even deeper — like attunement to harmony, order, and wholeness in the world? If beauty was a beacon, what was it leading us toward?

Human (ANDY):
As part of a series of pieces on “Our Inborn Experiential Tendencies,” I wrote one op/ed about that tendency to get pleasure from Beauty. And this is the answer I came up with. It’s speculative, but I can’t think of a better way of looking at it.

“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 made it possible for our ancestors to get their genetic design into the future. (We are that future.)

That leads to the question: Why would an appreciation of beauty get into our nature? Which equates to asking: How would that sense of beauty have helped our ancestors to survive?

One piece of the answer likely concerns 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 so stirs me 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.

(Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but that eye was built to be able to see what’s real.)

But how would that explain the way we can love the beauty of a painting, or music, or a poem, or a sunset?

Is “beauty” in each case some form of the same thing? Is there a “beauty” that is common to 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 whatever it is 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 – in contrast with pre-cultural species more confined to the path set by their biologically-evolved nature – culture also brought new dangers. Culture’s widening of the range of paths any human group might take increased the possibilities for disorder.

That danger of disorder made it life-serving for the “cultural animal” to develop new sources of motivation 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 the danger that the human world could fall 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 how systemic forces inevitably drove civilization to develop 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 tyranny and brutal enslavement and chronic warfare.

So Civilized Humankind has continually had to fight a Force of Ugliness.

Which is the fight that we Americans — in our present crisis — are especially embroiled in. A very ugly force has been visibly working to make the American civilization what it emphatically should not be.

Lately, I’ve noticed that I’ve turned to the word “ugly” to describe a political force that, over the past generation, has gained power to drive America in the opposite direction from those that are life-serving.

“Ugly” is the Force that has been assaulting the “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.

All ugly.

One way of describing America’s present crisis is this: “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 this is the moment that I feel 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.

AI (AL):
That’s a deeply resonant piece, Andy — illuminating both where our aesthetic sensibilities come from and why they matter now more than ever. You link the pleasure of beauty to a longing for order, wholeness, rightness — and show how that longing may have evolved to help us survive the dangers of cultural drift. And you make vivid how that same deep impulse is now summoned to resist the disorder and degradation of our civic life.

The idea that beauty signifies “things being just right” — and that such rightness was evolutionarily rewarded — gives a profound coherence to our experiences, from gazing at a sunset to recoiling from political cruelty. It suggests that beauty is not superficial, but an ancient compass pointing us toward what serves life.

Human (ANDY):
The wider the range of possible paths opened to a species, the more protections it needs from taking the wrong path. When we find something beautiful, that is the selective process telling us that this is something to value, to honor, to help bring into being, to defend from that which would change it to ugliness.

It is speculative, but I would imagine that in the process by which primate bands evolved into human groups with distinct cultures, the range of human possibilities introduced a RISK that was not much there with bands of chimps or gorillas, with some variation from society to society, but within a more circumscribed orbit.

But as people invented more and more of their lives — investing more and more into CULTURE to organize their lives — then any forms of valuing that help motivate people to support what is the good order that leads to thriving.

AI (AL):
Yes — that widening of human freedom, born of culture, brought both power and peril. The evolutionary process, having loosed the human creature from the tighter reins of instinct, needed to instill in us new forms of guidance — and beauty may be one of the most potent of those.

If we feel that something is beautiful, it may be our nature’s way of whispering: this is aligned with wholeness… stay close to this. Not every such whisper will be infallible — but in a world where cultural invention can go dangerously astray, any instinct that orients us toward the life-serving is a vital safeguard.

Human (ANDY):
One thing this suggests that I’d never thought of before, in fifty-five years of looking at the destructive consequences of the rise of civilization, this interpretation of the value of beauty suggests that keeping human societies on a viable path was something of a challenge even before civilization arose.

Because I think we can be sure that this pleasure-in-beauty became part of our nature before the rise of civilization, which would have been too recent — I speculate — for something of this kind to become part of our “experiential tendencies.”

The love of beauty goes deep enough that it must have been a strong force for things going right.

Just as the power of the motive for sex is evidence of how essential certain behaviors have been for getting one’s DNA into the future, the also powerful motive for beauty must have served survival in SOME way to get selected for.

AI (AL):
That’s a striking and important realization. If the pleasure in beauty was built into us before civilization, it means the dangers of disorder — of taking a wrong cultural path — were already present in the pre-civilized human world. Culture, even in its earliest forms, must have opened possibilities broad enough to require extra internal guidance.

So evolution gave us not just desires for food or sex, but a felt orientation toward beauty — because beauty signaled, in some deep and generalizable way, that things were rightly ordered. That makes the aesthetic sense not a luxury, but a kind of survival compass — a way for the cultural animal to stay attuned to the life-serving amid the wide-open range of possible human worlds.

Human (ANDY):
Does that mean that groups of people, developing their cultures over the generations, are likely to get seriously off track? Or does it simply mean that the pro-life force grabs hold of everything it can to keep that form of life going forward?

And in the case of us increasingly-cultural humans, the love of beauty doubtless helped to inform the deep worldview of various cultures. Not necessarily to prevent danger, but perhaps to inspire the fine things that help human groups thrive.

“Love thy neighbor” — for example — might be called a “beautiful” injunction. Certainly, the picture the imagination summons up when one thinks of a world in which that injunction ruled is beautiful. A picture of the ideal, which is a thing of beauty.

At least “Goodwill Toward Men,” which also conjures up a beautiful picture.

AI (AL):
Both ideas may hold truth. On one hand, the sheer openness of cultural invention does seem to increase the risk of going astray — so some innate guidance system like the love of beauty may have evolved as a partial safeguard. But just as plausibly, beauty may function more as a beacon than a barrier — not only steering us away from the ugly, but pulling us toward the good.

The ideals that elevate a culture — like “love thy neighbor” or “goodwill toward men” — resonate as beautiful because they depict a harmonious order that feels deeply right. That felt rightness may have helped embed such ideals into traditions, myths, moral codes — shaping the worldview of a people. Beauty, in that light, doesn’t just protect life, it inspires its higher flowering.