Aesthetics are facts too

You could probably guess at the number of definitions of ‘culture’ floating around out there. Like ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ it’s one of those things that’s somehow both incredibly real and incredible unreal, so very sexy to study. But we’re not interested in the impact of culture, nor do we need to bring it into any kind of serious focus. We just need a handhold, and trivially, we can sort of distinguish cultures by their:

• Norms: the ways people expect things to be; what’s normal; how people and things should or ought to be;
• Values: the importance we assign these norms, and why;
• Beliefs: from where the values and norms are derived.

And it’s the belief part that’s interesting to me, since it’s these that determine the things. And there’s something quite interesting about how belief becomes culture.

¶Facts are just a special kind of belief

When I teach on this subject, I try to draw out that it’s quite difficult to distinguish belief from knowledge. As I say around here:

Knowledge is a peculiar concept. It’s a form of belief, really. We believe in things and some things that we believe in, we feel so sure about that we call it knowledge.

Because there isn’t really anything tangible that distinguishes a belief from a fact. So, people often like to point out that facts are proven. But science doesn’t really prove things, so much as disprove them:

The fact of the matter is that the scientific method is, by design, destructive. It was developed, in part, as a tool for dissolving the dominant institutions of the time both religious and political.

A tool for refuting claims does not spend a great deal of time building them.

Or, you be inclined to argue that facts are true, but we don’t really have access to any kind of objective truth:

The world that humans live in is a very different world to the one birds live in. Humans are trichromats: because our eyes have three kinds of photoreceptor, we have three colour channels. There are, thus, three dimensions to our colours. We can see light on wavelengths that correspond to red, green, and blue. Birds are tetrachromats. They have four dimensions to their colour vision. They can, for example, see ultraviolet light. We cannot.

Being able to see ultraviolet—or rather having four-dimensional colour vision—is not quite the same thing as being able to see a colour you’ve never seen before. We can get a better flavour of this if we add our sense of time to our colours. Rather than pink, we might also have ‘fast pink’ or ‘slow pink’. Something like this better approximates the world that birds live in.

This might seem trivial but, as I point out elsewhere:

Is the bird’s perception of the world more true? Is it useful for me or you to model ultraviolet as a dimension of visual perception when it doesn’t serve this purpose in our lives? In some circumstances, yes. If you need to know things about birds. But day-to-day, probably not so much. There might well be some objective truth to be had regarding colour, but usually, working out what are ‘true’ colours and what aren’t is going to be an exercise that depends very much on just what it is you’re planning to do with that information.

There might be some objective truth sitting at the bottom of the world, but it’s largely irrelevant to us, because what matters is stuff that’s meaningful. Stuff that has an impact on the way we need to be in the world.

And some of this stuff demonstrates it’s impact more often than other things—like gravity, or the role of DNA in biological processes—and the more often it demonstrates itself, the more likely we are to want to call it ‘fact’. But equally, that means that facts have careers:

Facts have careers. They’re born, they ascend, they decline, and they die. This isn’t to say that facts don’t exist. It’s just that facts about the world don’t merely sit about waiting to be ‘discovered’. Facts are constructed to fill a need, and the dimensions of the world that these facts reveal to us will reflect less the world, and more the need.

Take the atom. Dalton proposed atomic theory to help explain chemical reactions, and this helped us quite a bit to understand physical and chemical reactions. But eventually, the atom itself could take us only so far, so we started to concentrate on the relationships between protons, neutrons, and electrons. More recently, we’ve started to find limits there, and pushed into the unpredictable nature of quantum mechanics. But the facts there have yet to prove particularly useful, so we still wait, poised in the career of the atom as a composite of protons, electrons, and neutrons.

But the fact of the atom as an atom still exists, as does the fact of the atom as some composite of as yet mysterious quantum relations. For the average person, the ‘facts’ of protons and electrons are as irrelevant as the ‘facts’ of quantum mechanics to the average chemist. Indeed, that quantum mechanics seems not only to co-exist with the fact of atoms as protons and elections as to violate it, is irrelevant, because at the level we apply them, our current set of facts are good enough.

The beliefs that generate cultures are exactly these kinds of facts. Facts about the world borne of times, places, and histories that are good enough at the level they’re applied. And although they are not as reliably demonstrable as these other facts, that doesn’t mean they’re any less real. It’s knowledge that helps describe something meaningful in the world. Reflections of certain patterns in the world for that person.

It’s no coincidence, then, that most of our beliefs aren’t derived from objective measures of truth, but rather from the stuff in the world that most resonates with us—ideas about beauty and comfort and familiarity and hope and fear and outrage. Our sense of aesthetics shapes and is shaped by how we come to ‘know’ the world, because these things have very striking impact on our lives. Ideas, or leaders, or political platforms make us feel, and that affective appeal has a very real impact on our lives, often far more than stories about the atomic properties of the universe and whatnot.

To say that people who are paying attention to these things and ignoring the ‘facts’ are missing the point.¹ Just because some facts come into conflict with our aesthetic judgements doesn’t make our aesthetic judgements untrue. It’s not that we’re responding to style over substance when we choose a more beautiful or more charismatic option. It’s that we’re choosing from a different set of facts; we’re prioritising different meaning.

I’ll take one more stab at making this tangible before closing. In another article, I quote Christopher Alexander:

for example … a fishpond … Obviously the water is part of the fishpond. What about the concrete it is made of? .. the air which is just about the pond? … the pipes bringing in the water? These are uncomfortable questions … The pond does exist. Our trouble is that we don’t know how to define it exactly … When I call a pond a center, the situation changes … the fuzziness of edges becomes less problematic. The reason is that the pond, as an entity, is focused towards its center. It creates a field of centeredness … The same is true for window, door, walls, or arch. None of them can be exactly bounded. They are all entities which have a fuzzy edge, and whose existence lies in the fact that they exist as centers in the portion of the world which they inhabit.

All facts are like this, at least from the perspective of the human. And when we talk about the shape of our ideas, it’s no different—we’re tracing the fuzzy boundaries of our religions, theories, personal and cultural convictions to put certain meaningful aspects of the world at the centre, and we keep them there for as long as they help us navigate the world. Often these things are deep and personal, and often they are malleable and effervescent. But they’re just as true as the facts that are shallow, stable, and objective. They’re just centring on something different.

Instead of trivialising aesthetics, this seems like a more useful approach. We shouldn’t be trying to avoid aesthetic decision-making, but attuned to it. It’ll help us recognise different ‘facts’—different meanings. And maybe it’ll help us be a little more intentional about choosing the aesthetic stories we live by too.