The following piece made it into the final ten for a writing competition for the magazine New Philosopher and is previously unpublished.
It is becoming an accepted scientific idea that we are
living in a new geological age, the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is
characterised by a profound disruption of the relatively stable climate
humanity has enjoyed over about 12,000 years, during the period known as the
Holocene. We have come to take this stability for granted; it’s the period
where civilisations have arisen, characterised by structured states reliant on
agriculture to feed growing numbers, writing, art, religion, trade, and the
beginnings of science. Few of us can appreciate a time when summer did not
follow spring, when crops were not disrupted for more than a season or so, and
food was not plentiful.
This is not to say that the Holocene has been all beer and
skittles. The Little Ice Age in Europe saw the rise of witch trials in
politically insecure states, played a role in the French Revolution, and was a
factor in the writing of Frankenstein. A prolonged change in the state of El
Niño helped drive the collapse of the Mayan Empire. History is littered with
such examples. But the Anthropocene is different; it involves moral agency. Not
only do we remake the world in our ignorance, but we also do so intentionally.
We have released enough carbon dioxide to warm the planet and make the oceans more
acidic, manufactured enough nitrogen based fertiliser for agriculture to
produce dead zones in lakes, rivers and oceans. We’ve filled our oceans with
plastic, cleared vast tracts of land and threaten many species with extinction,
maybe as many as 50% by 2050.
One could make many pragmatic arguments for protecting a
natural world that gives us clean air and water, food and medicines, timber and
other raw materials. But these don’t seem to work. And while an impulsive
survival instinct will drive us in adrenaline driven sprint to protect what we
have, it is neither sustaining nor effective. Instead, I believe beauty will
save us.
For some, beauty is ephemeral, subjective, and a luxury at
best, if not a distraction. Philosophy has not always done us favours. How do
we approach beauty? For Kant, our experience of beauty is a “disinterested
delight.” Beauty is something to be catalogued, analysed, and objectified. We
analyse what makes something beautiful and miss the beauty itself. We need to
transcend such analyses.
What seems to me a right reaction to beauty can be found in
the writings of Alfred Russell Wallace. Wallace spent many years in the Malay
Archipelago, collecting species and theorising about their origins. He was the
co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution. His paper was
read at the same time as Darwin’s at the royal society. Wallace’s reaction at
discovering a new species of butterfly is worth quoting at length from The Malay Archipelago
“The beauty and
brilliancy of this insect are indescribable, and none but a naturalist can
understand the intense excitement I experienced when I at length captured it.
On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to
beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting
than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death. I had a headache the
rest of the day, so great was the excitement produced by what will appear to
most people a very inadequate cause.”
Note Wallace’s
reactions. The experience of beauty is indescribable, i.e. it transcends his
training and experience as a naturalist. It goes beyond language, and hence
represents a visceral, emotive response. And yet at the same time, his
expertise is what brings a certain attention to detail, a way of framing this
discovery in the context of the search for true knowledge about the world. He
acknowledges that to some, his strong reaction will seem over the top. Yet this
is not a man who has lost leave of his senses or himself, but has discovered
them in the presence of the other. That other happens to be a species of
butterfly.
I’m reminded of
Keats’ poem about Newton. Keats accused Newton of unweaving a rainbow and
conquering mysteries. And yet any scientist will tell you that the scientific
discipline will never run out of things to probe or objects yet more beautiful
to appreciate. What if we understand laws that govern how light bounces around
in a rain drop, or how natural selection works, do we marvel any less? Are not
the grains of sand under a microscope or dark voids shown to be filled with
galaxies by telescopes, all the more beautiful for our technological wizardry?
Beauty is part of
the fabric of what exists, both the things that prompt our sensory,
intellectual and personal experiences as Richard Cartwright Austin noted, but also
the existence of beauty perceivers themselves. Beauty exists for a reason, it
is true in that it exists as a quality or experience meant for creatures other
than us, and is therefore is independent of humans. Beauty is also good, in
that it fulfils the purposes for which it exists. Those purpose might be to
warn off predators that you are protected by toxins. It does no good to die in
the process of killing your killer. Beauty might be to attract a pollinator, or
a mate. It might be the display of fitness that says ‘don’t eat me’ or the
fleetness of foot that escapes the jaws that are also beautiful. Beauty might
be the destructive power of shifting plates in forming pleasing mountains, ice
sheets scraping away to produce deep lakes, forms of beauty quiet independent
of an eye to see.
Beauty’s
appreciation is found in the eye of female birds of paradise choosing a mate,
or bower birds admiring their own constructions. It is hard to imagine that the
complex mind of a cuttlefish does not in some deep sense appreciate the
beautiful patterns a mate produces. And what creature does not enjoy the taste
of their favourite food? Is it survival instinct alone or aesthetic
appreciation also? Do humans alone make art? Do we alone appreciate the beauty
around us? Surely our aesthetic senses are finely honed, but let us not miss
the forest of beauty for the tree of objective analysis.
And neither let us
become so reductionist that evolution explains away beauty. Am I back tracking
on my disavowal of Keats’ charge? Not as such. Take for example evolutionary
biologist E. O. Wilson’s idea of biophilia, the contention that we find
beautiful in nature that which reminds us of life in the Pleistocene on the
African Savanna. Our tendency to like habitats that resemble this environment
have been mirrored in observations made by Europeans new to North America and
Australia, who appreciated those landscapes that made them think of orchards or
an English gentleman’s garden. The flipside of this preference was the attitude
toward Australian rainforests, or native fauna, and the desire to import British
wildlife. We can become stuck in our aesthetics, either by biology alone or also
by culture. Surely then we need to transcend either thinking we are, or being
bound by our genes in what we find beautiful.
The flip side of
beauty is ugliness. English theologian John Wesley preached against ugly
predators because he didn’t understand them. Predation might be hard to
stomach, yet the Platonic triad reminds us that what is beautiful is also true
and good. In the Anthropocene, what is not good and therefore not beautiful is
what we have done to planet Earth. Australian politician Tony Abbott find winds
farms ugly, but polluting, greenhouse producing coal fired power stations are
not beautiful, what they do is not good for any creature, and to deny this is
not being truthful.
The future must be one
of pursuing beauty. Humans must live and eat, we seek a good life marked by
truth and beauty in our relationships. Shouldn’t our technology be more
beautiful, not just more efficient? Alain de Botton says that our buildings
should do justice to the land that they occupy and the creatures that they have
displaced. Perhaps even more now, our civilisation can become more beautiful by
displacing less, more being in harmony with its surroundings, like architect Elora
Hardy’s magical houses of bamboo.
The last word must
be given to love. Austin claims that ‘the experience of beauty creates
and sustains relationships.’ And what are relationships founded on, if not
love? Can we come to love the world, form relationships with landscape and
creature and appreciate their beauty in a manner analogous to the way in which
we appreciate the beauty of a lover or spouse? Surely we must, for while having
an environment that allows us to survive is important, humans long for more
than mere survival. In learning to love the beauty of the world around us, we
will do more than survive, we will thrive.
