Choosing beauty over optimization
The pursuit of beauty will nourish our souls as we do the work of building a more sustainable world
In a way, obsessing about carbon footprints has a lot in common with obsessing about quarterly corporate earnings. Both are examples of optimization, a type of narrow thinking that focuses on increasing a quantity, and sacrifices a wholistic worldview.
I wrote my last newsletter about “The Baby Question” and a reader pointed me to this fantastic essay by Charles Eisenstein, where he says that:
The practice of navigating choices by the numbers is what has to a large degree gotten us into this mess. The reduction of the world to number and morality to a series of calculations leaves out everything that we cannot quantify. Can you quantify beauty? Can you quantify joy? Can you quantify love?
In a similar vein, Wendell Berry talks about two minds, the Rational and the Sympathetic:
The Rational Mind is motivated by the fear of being misled, of being wrong. Its purpose is to exclude everything that cannot empirically or experimentally be proven to be a fact.
The Sympathetic Mind is motivated by fear of error of a very different kind: the error of carelessness, of being unloving.
Long ago, I thought that the answer to our ecological predicament was for humans to have fewer children. Our environmental problems were a simple matter of carrying capacity: too many people, too few resources.
Nowadays, I think that the answer to our pickle is both simpler and more radical. I believe we need a whole-hog upgrade to our consciousness. We need to start seeking beauty and love, rather than focusing on any specific quantifiable tweak. It’s like the Einstein quote:
A problem can’t be solved with the same level of thinking that created it.
We need a different level of thinking, a new worldview. Buckminister Fuller called this worldview “spaceship earth.” A more recent, but similar perspective is that we need to stop playing Game A (competition, extraction, growth), and start playing Game B (cooperation, regeneration, sustainability).
Here’s a great video that explains the Game B concept:
Long ago, I watched this video about why beauty is important:
My take-home is that we protect what we find beautiful, whether that’s a building, a household item, or an ecosystem.
As Charles Eisenstein wrote, there is no way to quantify beauty. No way to optimize for it.
Organizations are often focused on optimizing quantities. Quantities make for good headlines: Life expectancy is going up! or Our carbon footprint is going down! or Our hospital has great patient satisfaction scores!
But there’s much that a given quantity leaves out of the story. And though we can get a dopamine high off of optimizing quantities and hitting metrics, this high will be short-lived. It will not be soul-nourishing.
Beauty is soul-nourishing. If we focus on creating a way of living on this planet that’s beautiful, a way of living that makes our hearts sing, then we will be inspired to keep going, to keep creating. We will have the wind at our sails.