What did Fyodor Dostoyevsky intend by his best-known words? What is beauty, what will it save us from, and how? In the century and a half following The Idiot’s publication, no interpretation of Prince Myshkin’s words has been definitively accepted. Yet today, they echo with a newfound tenor. There is a beauty that we have forgotten, one achieved directly through the amount of human effort imparted into the creation of something. The pursuit of this beauty may, in fact, be the path to saving the world from our contemporary crises.
Why is it that our walls are empty? The products we produce, buy, and live within shine with the sterile glow of embalmed corpses. We may habituate ourselves to ignore it, but the construction of modern civilization pointedly lacks a specific aesthetic quality. Meditate sincerely on the simplified cheapness of gentrification-style apartments and McMansions, the thin polyester and poor fit of mass-produced, machine-spun clothing, and the dazzling computer-generated graphics of blockbuster superhero films. Each of these frustrates our most human sensibility. Many find themselves nostalgic for preindustrial society, which seemed alive with some quality that we today lack.
A medieval English peasant house | Image Source: Current Archaeology
A typical American suburban house | Image Source: Adobe Stock
In a 2004 study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, experimenters presented a group of participants with two paintings. They told them that one of the paintings took 24 hours to complete, while the other took only four. The experimenters presented another group with the same paintings, informing them that the reversed amount of time was taken. The results revealed that participants significantly preferred the paintings that took more time. This experiment suggests that at least a portion of our aesthetic judgment is defined by the amount of human effort expended in creating something. No definition of beauty will be all-encompassing, but the metric of effort is uniquely significant — and it is by this metric that modern attempts at beauty are failing.
To illustrate this factor in beauty, consider vintage fashion. A thrifted item of vintage clothing took more personal effort to make, as more archaic production methods involved slower, bespoke, hands-on techniques. It will have a sort of effort imparted into it by its history as well as by the owners who have worn and used it. It may even have marks of wear and tear, which many fashion lovers adore. Finally, it takes much more effort to find (and often to pay for) than clothes bought from a mainstream brand. These degrees of effort bestow upon vintage clothes a sort of richness, spirit, even tangibility, which is missing from their modern, mass-produced counterparts.
By contrast, consider plastic. Plastic is remarkably easy to produce, given industrial technology and infrastructure. It is cheap, widely adaptable, and abundant — therefore, easily replaceable. Consequently, it is used whenever possible, from automobiles to clothes. It is also quintessentially unappealing. Reflect on an everyday plastic object, like a desk chair: its smooth perfection is hollow and stale. It is unnaturally identical to countless replicas produced in massive factories. It feels not merely foreign but alien, even unreal.
Before the industrial revolution, even a peasant’s chair would be hand-carved from wood and imbued with an authentic humanity which its modern counterpart frustratingly lacks. That “humanity” is the heart of the matter. We universally appreciate the labor of our fellow man and find beauty and personality in its fruits. Perhaps this phenomenon stems from an innate value of the human. We are drawn to effort insofar as it authentically confers the humanity of its maker, even enjoying the imperfections associated with human work. The efforts of nonhumans, like art made by AI (whose human-made training data is plagiarized), do not carry the certain “soul” of human beauty. Plastic, and other products of modernity, do not either. They are both artificial and soulless.
There is another glaring issue with the use of plastic: it is infamous for harming the environment and our health. Plastic production can require fracking and result in the infiltration of toxins into the environment. Plastic disposal has created a well-publicized waste crisis. Meanwhile, our bodies are intoxicated by microplastics, which threaten fertility and increase the risk of cancer. To use plastic so widely is not just psychologically disagreeable, it is materially harmful. Yet, motivated by efficiency, we continue to use it as much as possible.
Efficiency is the primary aim of modern civilization. To optimize production, we adopt techniques and technologies that minimize the amount of individual human struggle imparted into products. We do this by maximizing production per unit of resource expenditure and by specialization, which inherently limits the amount of personal attention a producer can provide to their product. Thereby, we directly minimize its amount of effortful, human beauty. This principle of efficiency is perhaps augmented by a competitive market, but is by no means absent from noncapitalist nations. It must therefore be a broader, social decision.
The societal prioritization of efficiency has not, however, been an unadulterated evil. Naturally, when we produce things more efficiently, we have more things. Civilization is now wealthier, more technologically advanced, and more accommodating to its lowest members. It is now easier to feed, clothe, and house oneself in lower economic classes. And yet, if humanity continues on its charted course, it will destroy itself. It is in the name of efficiency that workers are paid as little as possible, that rents are charged as high as possible, that we use toxic nonstick pans, steal from our fellow man, invest in the race towards AGI, and burn fossil fuels. The word “efficiency” does not truly encapsulate our doctrine; it would better be described as expediency.
And so, humanity finds itself in a fittingly Dostoyevskyian moral dilemma. Given that it is exactly antithetical to expedience, our appreciation for the beauty of human struggle can act as our criterion of virtue. If we prioritize it over our compulsion to optimize, we would create not only a more human and beautiful world, but one defined by the ascetic, the principled, and the salutary. However, reorienting society towards this beauty would be, by definition, difficult. Expedience is not just temptingly pleasurable; it is often morally palatable. Can we bear the pain of surrendering it, even as a matter of survival? Will we let beauty save the world?
Featured Image Source: Adobe Stock