Beauty is the promise of happiness.
(Stendhal)
I’ve been reading Ted Chiang’s short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others and I have to say that I can really recommend it. I’m rarely in the mood for short stories, but every single story here presents a unique and interesting idea, usually in the realm of science fiction, and tries to imagine what its consequences would be for how the world looks like and how life is.
You may have heard of or seen the movie Arrival (2016); it is based on one of the stories in this novella collection titled Story of Your Life. The two do explore the same idea a bit differently, but both are excellent presentations in my opinion.
There are a great many other fascinating ideas in here as well, but now I’d highlight one of them: the short story Liking What You See and its idea of “calliagnosia”: technology that, when turned on, impairs your brain’s ability to perceive the looks of others as ugly or beautiful. It doesn’t impact your ability to recognize people, or to find them attractive or unattractive: it just means that the way they look no longer triggers any emotional response in you.
I am hardly going to shock anyone when I state that looks are, um, important: beautiful people enjoy a considerable advantage over ugly ones in every area of life. Social media has been recently calling this pretty privilege. The effect is in a large part due to The Halo Effect:
The halo effect is a type of cognitive bias in which our overall impression of a person influences how we feel and think about their character. Essentially, your overall impression of a person (“He is nice!") impacts your evaluations of that person’s specific traits (“He is also smart!"). Perceptions of a single trait can carry over to how people perceive other aspects of that person.
Of course, perception of beauty is subjective in many ways, but some factors are less variable than others, especially when it comes to physical beauty. For example, features like facial symmetry and a clear, unblemished skin are pretty much universally considered attractive. There is evidence that the human brain has built-in functions to judge the attractiveness of others, especially based on their face. This is an area of significant research, so thankfully I can look more authentic and serious if I cite a scientific paper and I will do without remorse: Perception and Deception: Human Beauty and the Brain:
Human physical characteristics and their perception by the brain are under pressure by natural selection to optimize reproductive success. Men and women have different strategies to appear attractive and have different interests in identifying beauty in people. Nevertheless, men and women from all cultures agree on who is and who is not attractive, and throughout the world attractive people show greater acquisition of resources and greater reproductive success than others. The brain employs at least three modules, composed of interconnected brain regions, to judge facial attractiveness […]. Key elements that go into the judgment are age and health, as well as symmetry, averageness, face and body proportions, facial color and texture.
Hopefully the idea behind calliagosia or calli for short is evident: our brains are wired to judge people in a large part based on their looks, while we are, in principle, trying to build a world that is fairer than that, for example by telling kids things like “true beauty comes from within”. From the short story:
The deeper societal problem is lookism. For decades people have been willing to talk about racism and sexism, but they are still reluctant to talk about lookism. Yet this prejudice against unattractive people is incredibly pervasive. People do it without even being taught by anyone, which is bad enough, but instead of combating this tendency, modern society actively reinforces it.
Educating people, raising their awareness about this issue, all of that is essential, but it’s not enough. That’s where technology comes in. Think of calliagnosia as a kind of assisted maturity. It lets you do what you know you should: ignore the surface, so you can look deeper.
Indeed, beauty is often weaponized: advertisements and movies feature predominantly models, and headhunters and sales people ruthlessly take advantage of the halo effect to be successful at their jobs. Then there’s the cost on the individual: the pressure to be beautiful, especially among women, is a source of endless anxiety and creates a huge demand for beauty products, making that a huge industry in and of itself.
I really like this short story not just because of the idea, or how it’s presented – as a sort of a documentary, highlighting different perspectives and experiences – but also because towards the end it asks a very important question: where do we stop? As our scientific understanding and technology develops, we will be able to affect our lives in ever more fundamental ways. Suppose that we eliminate our perceptions for physical beauty, okay, but how about the sound of one’s voice or how they speak for instance? Do we eliminate that as well? Doesn’t a person with a naturally beautiful voice enjoy an unfair advantage similarly to one whose face is beautiful? There are no easy answers:
We’ve reached a point where we can begin to adjust our minds. The question is, when is it appropriate for us to do so? We shouldn’t automatically accept that natural is better, nor should we automatically presume that we can improve on nature. It’s up to us to decide which qualities we value, and what’s the best way to achieve those.