Virginia Postrel has a great post today on Dove’s "real beauty"
campaign (pictured).  In her clear eyed way, she takes issue with the notion that
we should consider everyone beautiful.  She insists that it is more
accurate, more sensible to see that differences of beauty exist and
that these differences confer relative advantage in the world. 

I think this is right, and that it has the corrective effect Postrel
intends.  Some heart felt notions about the world render us incapable
of thinking about it clearly.  This is bad for many reasons, and
especially because it frustrates our efforts to understand the
operation (and interaction) of factors anthropological and economic.
Advantage and a certain social capital is apportioned according to
relative beauty, and culture decides, to some extent, what this beauty
is.   

On the other hand, I think that we may be seeing a general shift here.
If we are rethinking beauty, I think this might be because we are
rethinking value.  Our culture is changing. 

There are three propositions at work in the world of beauty:

1. beauty contest

The old fashioned one, the beauty
contest notion, says that beauty is distributed with almost perfect
clarity.  Relative beauty makes for a single, steep, zero sum
hierarchy.  There may be some points of contestation, but generally
speaking, we could line up all the women (and men) in the world, from
the most beautiful to the least.

2. many kinds of beauty

The second proposition says there are "many kinds of beauty."  In this
case, we suppose that there many dimensions of beauty and that each of
these may be used to fashion a different hierarchy.  If it’s all about
elegance, then one hierarchy results.  If it’s all about voluptuousness,
another.  And so on.

I think in the real world we oscillate between these propositions.
Ideally, we think of beauty as something absolute.  Practically, we are
hard pressed to show why Penelope Cruz should be considered more
beautiful than, say, Aishwarya Rai or Audrey Hepburn.  We end up saying
things like "well, it depends, you see, there are different kinds of
beauty."

There is a strong form of proposition 2.  In this case, we all agree on
a universe of beautiful women and then we organize this universe into
different hierarchies according to the dimension in hand.  Cate
Blanchett takes one contest.  Oprah takes another.  Angelina Jolie, a
third. 

The weak form of proposition 2 says that there are many, many
dimensions, and that it is possible to use them to give most women a
claim to relative beauty.  This expands the universe of women
with a claim to beauty, and it expands the number and the kind of
dimensions that may be used to find them so.  I hope this is not
demeaning, but I find that women who sell cosmetics in drug stores
often fall into this category.  Quite often, they have a feature or two
that are remarkable, and they are otherwise unexceptional.  Hippie
beauty seemed to turn on this principal as well.

3. every woman is beautiful

The third proposition says that every woman is
beautiful.  I think this is a question of using evaluative dimension in
new ways or adding evaluative dimensions if necessary.  The defining
phrase here is "every woman is beautiful in her own way."
And I think this says that if there is no evaluation dimension, we will
make one up.  Finally, if this doesn’t work, the proposition resorts to
the notion that all women are beautiful because they are women.  The
attack on  zero sum hierarchy is absolute and complete. 

I like the inclusiveness of this proposition 3.  It’s now up to all of
us (and especially every male) to discover the beauty in a female
companion, and this is an interesting, generous and generative way to
proceed.  But I agree with Postrel.  The notion that "everyone is
beautiful" violates the law of non-vacuous contrast according to which
no assertion may refer to everything in its universe of discourse.
More simply: if everyone is beautiful, how can anyone be beautiful?  If it isn’t relative, it isn’t real.

the death of zero sum 

But here’s the thing.  Zero sum is dying in our culture.  The notion
that there is one single hierarchy of any kind is now in question.  No
one knows this better than Virginia Postrel, whose pioneering work on
dynamism helps us understand why this should be so.  Ours is a
splintering culture.  Some of our new social species, punks and hippies
say, arose precisely to take issue with conventional notions of beauty,
and these groups leave in their wake new evaluative standards. 

The death of zero sum is especially evident on the internet where it
turns out crowds matter more than elites.  The new media emerge and they
create a multiplication of value, a new superfluidity of admiration.
This may be because people are prepared to "pay themselves" in
admiration they do not deserve…but if it works, it works.  There is nothing in the
anthropological rule book that says that a culture may not make every
individual an arbiter of his or her own value.  (And indeed the American
psychological and therapeutic communities have been insisting on this
approach to self esteem for some time.) 

Of course, we have all by this time seen enough delusional American
Idol contestants to know how tragic the outcome of this cultural
approach can sometimes be.  Still, it is possible for a culture to
equip individuals with the right of self invention and self evaluation,
and that is precisely what our culture has done, from the avant garde
artist who perseveres with the conviction that some day that the world
will see what he sees to the lonely entrepreneur who insists on her
vision of the world in the face of an overwhelming indifference from
the rest of world.  Our culture of creativity depends upon the
destruction of zero sum evaluation.  And the more dynamic we become,
the more surely we will and must move away from absolute hierarchies. 

As a Canadian coming south to Chicago in the 1970s, this struck me
forcibly.  Americans were much more demanding of effort and
accomplishment than my Canadians friends, but they were also much more
prepared to expand the competitive domain to give everyone, or almost
everyone, a place to play.  Being the best at something was important,
but it was ok if you were merely taking gold at an obscure bowling
tournament in the rural Midwest (which I am proud to say I did on
several occasions.  Kidding.)  And that’s when I came to understand the
penalty of being good at nothing at all in America.  I sometimes wonder
if this is the unexamined motive of self destructive behavior (drug
abuse, etc.).  In Canada it’s ok to be unexceptional.  In the US, God save you if this is so. 

America has always been relatively generous in supplying extra
competitive domains and evaluative dimensions with which individuals
could pursue the self esteem and social capital that success makes
available.  And this was true before the advent of the plenitude and
dynamism made possible by the new expressive domains (zines, blogs,
home made music, transmedia, self made movies) that emerged in the 1990s.   But
again Postrel knows this perfect well. 

The death of zero sum and the expansion of social capital has potentially explosive consequences for our culture.
Elizabethan England makes this case quite well.   The likes of
Shakespeare, Bacon, Sydney, Raleigh, Elizabeth herself made the world vibrate
with new ideas.  There are lots of ways to explain this explosive
cultural moment, but I wonder whether it was largely because Elizabethans had
access to a sudden superfluidity of status.  There were new ways and
new dimensions for claiming rank.  The (relative) decline of a zero sum
social hierarchy had the effect of flooding the world with novelty.  Ours is a new Elizabethan age.

summing up

Here’s my argument.  The Dove campaign for real beauty and new ideas of beauty may be
seen as a reflection of a larger culture shift.  In every domain of
taste, we are seeing a willingness to expand the tools of judgment and
the size of the winner’s circle.  Zero sum is dying as the logic of our
evaluative activities.  As a result, our culture is entering a new multiplication of
capital and creativity.  This is not to say that zero sum is dead in all sectors of our world.  It is just subject to new cultural forces here and there that blunt its prevalence and power.   

References

Postrel, Virginia.  2007.  The Truth About Beauty.  The Atlantic
Monthly.  March. here. 
[this link is good for 3 days beginning February 13, 2007]

Postrel, Virginia. 2007.  Beauty is.  Dynamist Blog.  February 13, 2007.  here.

for the Dove campaign for real beauty, go here.   

Note:

I promise to get back to the pet post tomorrow.