The Beautiful

I’ve been struck by this passage from a rationalist essay. It imagines two people arguing over whether minimum wage laws are helpful or hurtful, both citing facts to support their respective cases. Then it zooms out and suggests that it’s really a conversation about aesthetics. In other words, they are really arguing about whether capitalism is beautiful or ugly, which is why facts are often unpersuasive.

(The lead photo of a dense collection of gas stations in Breezewood Pennsylvania is a meme that socialists like to use to argue that capitalism is ugly.)

In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt describes a patient who has brain damage affecting the emotional part of his brain. Ostensibly, he seems completely normal. But after several failed relationships, he sees a shrink. At the end of a session, the doc asks when he wants to book the next appointment. The patient lists the pros and cons of all possible dates, but cannot decide because he cannot assign any emotional valence to anything. He’s always stuck.

It’s an interesting case study because it suggests that humans actually need to be a little bit emotional in our decision-making. We need to see the beauty in things.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator describes his friend's relationship to his motorcycle. His friend bought a BMW because he didn’t want to deal with any problems. But they invariably happen.

The narrator tries several times to show his friend how to fix his motorcycle, but he stubbornly refuses to even listen. It’s not that he’s lazy or incompetent. Instead, the narrator describes him as a romantic thinker who sees the beauty of the motorcycle, but breaking down its component parts is ugly to him.

So it wasn’t a question about whether or not he should learn how to fix his own motorcycle, it was a question of whether the mechanical parts of a motorcycle are beautiful or ugly.

I think this framing is helpful because sometimes it’s the reason people in dialogue get stuck; they’re arguing about beauty. And you can’t, and shouldn’t, try to convince someone that what they think is beautiful is not.