  
Talented beauties: Avril Lavigne, JoJo Levesque, and Eliza Dushku
|
The
Idea:
By making beauty scarce, we have paradoxically lessened, rather than
increased, its value. This article explores how and perhaps why this
paucity of beauty has come about, and the damage it has done to our
psyches.
What
is it about extraordinary beauty that takes away our breath and tears
away our reason? The words we use to describe it, drawn from many
languages, all suggest madness or physical incapacity: stunning,
knock-out,
mesmerizing,
hypnotic,
pretty
(from the Germanic word meaning 'pratfall-causing'), spell-binding.
Exceptional beauty can literally render us speechless, weak at the
knees, without volition. All we want to do is stare, and sometimes we
simply cannot help ourselves.
What can nature have intended to make us this way?
I believe that in nature there are 'three beauties', and each has an essential
purpose, one which succeeds in an evolutionary sense, making us better
able to survive and thrive and desirous of doing so. The purpose of
beauty is attraction.
The first beauty is beauty
of place. It is what keeps us
from going elsewhere and disturbing the ecosystems of others. We are
drawn to certain places because of their unquestionable beauty, as if
they were always calling us home. We still love, and consider
beautiful, forests and streams and waterfalls and hills and flowers and
wild animals, because they are all part of our natural home, and were
essential elements of our
place for three million years
before we strayed. It is only if or when that beauty is destroyed that
we wander, looking for the beauty we have lost. It is no surprise that
today we travel incessantly, almost automatically. We have lost our
place.
The second beauty is personal
beauty. It is what attracts
us to community and drives us to procreate. It comes in two forms:
physical beauty and beauty of personality, often called charisma. It
makes us want to be with those people, be a part of their community,
surround them and protect them. This is the beauty whose purpose
civilization has most perverted -- I'll return to that in a minute.
The third beauty is beauty of community. It is the joy of friendship
and of play and of collaboration. It is collective spirit and
companionship and creating and doing things together that make us say: We
did that! This kind of
beauty, too, is now scarce. Here's how I think that happened:
We love all three types of beauty, and our lives are stories of our
love. When we first appeared on the planet our lives were full of love
and beauty, but then civilization was invented (for well-intentioned
reasons) and it produced, for the first time, a scarcity
of love and beauty. Civilization required people to behave in
unintuitive ways, so its inventors had to create a motivation for these
strange new behaviours. What better motivation than to allow only the
obedient to experience beauty? So the concept of hierarchy and private
property was created, and all things beautiful were appropriated for
the elite and apportioned sparingly to their obedient followers. The
most beautiful land was restricted, or destroyed to create artificial
beautiful things for the elite and the obedient. The most beautiful
people were no longer a gift that held the community together, bestowed
in return by the community with breeding privileges so they could
produce more beauty; they became chattels owned by the elite and
jealously kept from the gaze of others. The concept of the 'family' was
invented to break the bonds of community, limit and destroy the
expression of love, lock beauty out of sight, make it a scarce and
coveted possession.
The family was designed to encourage everyone to procreate, and hence
produce more workers for the farms and then the mines and armies and
factories and offices owned by the elite. Adultery and coveting beauty
became sinful, and people were told by the lords and generals and
preachers that they had to work hard and individually both in their daily labours and in
their family lives, and that this work was its own reward and necessary
to deal with growing scarcity. This scarcity was, of course, created
by the exploding human population, and by the destruction of beauty and
natural wealth to keep all those people alive and obedient. It was also
created by the ever-widening gap in wealth between the elite and the
rest of the people, needed to keep the masses worried about survival
and hence obedient and busy procreating the only useful resource that
isn't in short supply: babies. The human gene pool has been diluted by
making everyone want to be, and able to be, a parent. I suspect that, on average, we're getting less beautiful every year. Other creatures must find us now, on the whole, a pathetically unattractive species.
In nature, beauty is a gift. It is the attractor that keeps the
community together, and it gives the community great and endless joy.
The astonishing plumage and preening of birds is for the pleasure of
the entire community (and judging by the number of birdwatchers in the
world, that pleasure is not limited to their own species). We mimic
this ancient longing to see beauty with our films, rock concerts and
'beauty pageants', nature documentaries and 'homes of the rich and
famous' tours, but the effect is perverse: Because this joy is no
longer from beauty that belongs to the community, it merely reduces our
pride, increases our longing, and 'brings home' the scarcity, the
distance, the inaccessibility of beauty in our modern world. Instead of
the delight and gratification of belonging to a community replete with
such beauty, we jealously guard what little beauty we have, and covet
and seek to possess
much more of it. All the conflicted and deviant emotions and behaviours
that now so often stem from beholding or imagining beauty may stem from our
civilization's obsession with making it perpetually scarce.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
