A Good-Enough Utopia

Contra Tomas Bjartur on Chiang's "Liking What You See"

I must have some disorder of trusting too much. I blame God for this. As a child whenever I was alone and afraid I would reach out to God, and I would be slowly soothed, and in the end everything worked out fine. Many nights I lay in bed while Satan prowled under it, reaching for me, and I trembled terrified and helpless. I tucked all my covers around me and prayed over and over for protection until I fell asleep in exhaustion. Satan never got me.

Indeed, nothing ever “got” me. I never experienced a major injury or physical harm, never witnessed horrors. Praying worked. When God left the world and it snapped into a realm of entropy and infinite distance between minds I suddenly had a vast reservoir of learned unconditional trust and nowhere to place it. It spilled out over the rest of the world. I ended up believing things like “men and women are basically indistinguishable” for decades.

• or more likely its some weird hormonal defect, idk, this is the real world after all, no gods here

I also believed that “looks don’t matter.” Every source in my world declared that physical attractiveness is blind dumb luck and says nothing about one’s character or intellect or virtue or value. It means nothing and must be ignored. Indeed, I believed it was ignored by all normal people. Is it racist to think of oneself as color-blind? For much of my life I think I was attractiveness-blind. I assumed all good people where, and almost all people are good.

• maybe i just found everyone attractive. probably it’s the same defect that makes me trust everyone.

So it hurt a lot when I got in shape and started caring about my appearance and I realized just how differently the world treated me. It turns out being attractive is one of the most important things in the world. I could not believe that almost everyone is secretly evil. I had simply been so wrong about the world.

• or maybe the world is broken and wrong and we can still make this right

Quoting me on becoming attractive:

I had my same ideas and my same personality and same energy. And yet everything was different. I was treated well by everyone. My coworkers were more helpful and cheerful. My (older, male, straight) boss was more impressed with my (same quality) work, and generally more interested in my input. […] People are on your side by default.

I grew up ugly. I didn’t realize it at the time. I wish I hadn’t been lied to about it, but I wish far more that I didn’t need to be lied to about it. I hate that our bodies are these weak, corruptible things with incredible control over our dispositions and actions. Was it always this way? Or did this only happen after the withdrawal of God? Why would he prepare us for a world where beauty is internal, and the external doesn’t matter, and then dump us into a reality where the external is so extremely important? Did he not know he was going to leave?

I hate having a body. I hate that our bodies have so much control over our minds. That our bodies can be attracted to things that are evil, to violence and aggression, and reward them in that way. To punish things like having bad acne or twisted-up teeth, even when the people behind those traits and smart and kind and cry when they read Yudkowsky or watch Rocky Horror.

Tomás Bjartur recently wrote objections to Ted Chiang’s story “Liking What You See.” Tomas is our generation’s Ted Chiang (seriously, go check out his writings), so this critique is significant. Also his post on beauty decaying to age is wrenchingly good. So how is it that he can be so wrong about “Liking What You See”??

Quoting Tomas:

Its central conceit is a technology that induces a condition called calliagnosia, which eliminates a person’s ability to feel the valence associated with perceiving physical beauty.

From Chiang:

it doesn’t interfere with one’s visual perception, only with the ability to recognize what one sees. A calliagnosic perceives faces perfectly well; he or she can tell the difference between a pointed chin and a receding one, a straight nose and a crooked one, clear skin and blemished skin. He or she simply doesn’t experience any aesthetic reaction to those differences.

“Liking What You See” is a dream of a better world. It gave me hope. I now have in my mindscape a place where the ideal is reified, where looks honestly don’t matter. The mythic realm is brought into the physical and we no longer have this horrible divide inside us. It isn’t a perfect world, but it is perfect in that respect. There is a way forward to making “it’s who you are that matters” actually be true, and that world sings with a joyous hum.

To hear someone I admire say it was Chiang’s worst work is shocking. It’s borderline blasphemous, as this is the world God had been pointing us towards. I jump into reading the post with my “I’m gonna tear this up” attitude on (but with the friendliest possible affect, because Tomas is awesome and I often argue as a bonding activity). By the time I get to the end I realize I had been ready not to immanentize the utopic, but to destroy it.

Tomas:

their qualia would be diminished from our perspective. Their inner lives would be less rich. […] Memories, once precious, stripped of their lustre. To gloss over such things is to ignore another huge dimension of beauty. […] We are always biased to those aspects of ourselves that can articulate themselves. The chattering part of our mind thinks itself the only thing of value, thinks the world would be better if there was selection only for chattering. Here, it is talking its own book. And we should be suspicious.

Dammit all, he’s right.

If beauty is subjective, “Liking What You See” is the correct way to alter the world. Turning down the volume on our collective perception of beauty is ideal. Everyone will be beautiful when no one is, because beauty doesn’t mean anything at all. The real things will finally matter, and no longer be overshadowed by perversion.

But beauty is a real thing, external to us. It exists in the world. Some of our most important work is in creating it, finding it, sharing it. Things can be beautiful in a thousand different ways, and it is good that not everything is beautiful in the same way. I want more beauty. I want to overflow with beauty. I want to weep because I cannot touch all the beautiful people in my life and hear every voice at once. I want to watch my girlfriend cry when she sings her favorite songs. I want to stand before a marble statue in a cathedral and tremble at the months of life poured into making such a perfect thing. How could I have thought to give all that up? I would rather have the entire world be a blazing kaleidoscope of gorgeous shards next to ugly corners, dazzling lasers over grimy floors.

Thomas:

Sacrificing fairness for fairness, they lose the former and gain nothing of the latter.

For over a decade I dreamed of gouging out my eyes. The unfairness of being ugly was too great to imagine. The nightmare of growing ugly too horrific. I had settled into longing for a good-enough utopia, where ugliness was crushed not by ending ugliness, but by ending our ability to see it. This was weakness. Tomas pointed out the true utopia I would have destroyed We would have been left impoverished and unable to see our own poverty.

So this contra-post is not contra Tomas at all, but contra my past self and all those who told me beauty isn’t Real. I was taught that beauty is subjective, it doesn’t exist in the real world, and to try to identify it is bigoted and within the acts of evil. This was wrong, and self-destructive. I was also taught that for all humans to be loved and appreciated regardless of their physical attributes is a beautiful world. It is, and I want it. But not at the cost of being able to recognize that such a world is more beautiful. That ability shouldn’t be sacrificed for anything. To do so is to destroy what makes humanity glorious.

I will bear my growing decay and work to make my surroundings more beautiful. Intellectually, emotionally, and yes, also physically. It is better to stare into the sun for as long as you can and live temporarily in its glory than to hide forever in the caves.