Alignment ⑨ aesthetics

with a ranty middle take

intakes

Axiology is the study or discussion of values, it has various subsets including talk of ethics and morality, and is so under-valued that it has to eke out an existence as an interdisciplinary activity when it escapes from its ghetto in philosophy.

Another subset of axiology that people tend to have a more direct connection to is aesthetics. How things look good or not, in which proportion and its reasoning is often occluded by more immediate sensibilities. This occlusion is why some people who rate the aesthetics of their fellows' features can be regarded by their peers as superficial.

Indeed some people have so much connection with looks and appearances and style and mode that they find the idea of beauty being a ‘value’ as a somewhat ugly thought, and would like to reject the idea that aesthetics relates to anything else, especially as a subset of something called ‘axiology’. As if, like art, aesthetics for aesthetic's sake was possible.

If you do not like big words like axiology you can call it 'value theory', but I find "I just don't like it". 'Value theory' lame, generic, bleh.

old takes

In Alignment ⑥ Values are an effort not a coin I address this broad topic of axiology by arguing, or at least advocating, that all values reflect effort, and not any particular outcome of effort. That a value we feel, when we self in the world among others, and which we share, or seek to share, is not a coin that can be hoarded.

As such I also argue that ‘alignment’ is a key effort in value formation and maintenance and as such is a major activity to the worlding we self, and the self we world. It is the act of recursive minding folks.

I cover this a bit more in alignment ④ if it quacks like a duck in a row.

Not getting your ducks in a row with respect to aesthetics is an effort in alignment worthy of Pygmalion.

taking out the trash/rubbish/garbage

When aligned (beauty, order and reason) will support each other in their efforts, each represent the others, not just in symbology, as emblems of concern or identity when we socialise our alignments in the world, but in actually structuring the things we put into the world with effort (including the social theatre of: houses, HOAs, cults/religions, markets/firms and various tiers of government).

The trouble is that order, and the urge to align our efforts (if only to economise on effort by simplifying the number of efforts we have to get done in the days of our lives) as the basis of our order, is not born in logic, but in the effort it takes to be alive. This 'life' or 'living' is a partial aspect of the universe which is maintained by survival in evolution and, much more recently, by social learning (worlding the self among others).

You can think of Order as a type of statue, a hard thing sculpted by our recursive abilities to double down on good ideas, a meta-alignment of aligning stuff. ALigning is good, or produces good, therefore more is better. More better good. Order is a statue of life we make in getting our ducks in a row. See again Pygmalion.

And so nothing is there to stop you doubling-down again on Order into beauty, monotheism, and empire. I mean it is just neater. Look on my work ye mighty and tremble.

Our gods/ideals are over-wrought statues, and the better they are, the more beautiful they are, then the more they fall into line with the black-holes of our egos. This is why narcissists love gold trim. This is why they spray themselves orange. It is never tacky and never gets old. LOL. Sad.

through takes

In this re-doubled down world of efforts hardened into coin ugliness raises its ugly head.

In particular the ugliness of people either rejecting that re-doubled down ideology or ego, or just doing it slightly differently for some Swiftian reason (which end should you open a boiled egg?).

Ugliness is feared to have undone all that good work. It can, in extreme cases, be disgusting. Ugliness can be triggering. In ugliness there is less to fall in love with, more gets in the way, more effort is required to order things, but by the same token, there is less to confuse with the good, less to re-double-down on, especially where we see effort as values in a line towards truth. We confuse our comfort with reality. We mixed up a job done with capital. Values are an effort not a coin.

Ugliness underscores what is to be done, is Sisyphean. Order undone is a reality some prefer in getting their ducks in a row, and not to face up to the routine of life… (at which point we invent blame/credit games and the idea/alignment of balance as to what should be done.)

Beauty comforts, beauty maintains, beauty cleanses. But we do none of those things without effort.

by takes

Apparently, in WEIRD psychology data, there is an strong association between looking good, or at least an appreciation of looking good, neat, tidy, etc with tradition/conservative efforts (as views or values). "Why don't you wear a suit? Or eyeliner?"

Pygmalion makes out on a lawn

taking it to the next level

This is a long rant about grass.

Once I had a disagreement about grass, or lawn as some think of it. Monocotyledons are plants that grow from the base and not the tip, it’s a response to the impact of herbivores: kangaroo, bison, antelope. Grasses thus co-evolved in a landscape of animals that eat them, which can get quite large, and where condition are right, the landscape scale of life’s activities gives us the prairie and the steppe.

People who expect a lawn as part of a house do not give a fuck about any of that. Often because: "because, feelings."

Nor do they care about how the modern lawn is a direct descendent of the ‘killing field’ which surrounds castles, such that no one can approach the fortified building without coming under the surveillance of archers. And because of garden history the closest they get to in this historical fact, is the English Garden of parkland with deer around big manor houses in England (i.e. the turrets and crenellations has not survived whereas the killing field has).

Nor do they care about the medieval ‘flowery mead’ —basically a more pasture-like lawn with herbs and blooms, which might have been a part of a walled garden (i.e. when an old castle or fort was upcycled).

Nor do they care that lawns are bad pastures (domesticated animals are not part of the beauty to be enjoyed here) being so monocultural as to exclude flatweeds like dandelions, and outlaw nitrogen-fixing legumes like clover. The lawn is a type of statue made with living plants (so fuck Jeff Koons' puppy of flowerpots).

It's all about the comfort of the gaze as it looks at the looks of grass cut to a certain height. And for no other sensible reason at all. It is literally fucking insane OCD behaviour, born out an effort to align the comfort of order into the order of beauty using the technology of killing people for….. $@^#&@^@%!$!$!&^%@*^@!

At this point I'd like to thank blogger/substacker @tdtstreams for their post A major weakness of liberalism is that it has no aesthetic. Which made me comment and so finally get these notes together even if the post is way too long now, and ugly.

These alignments of efforts (order, beauty, wholesomeness etc) and especially as they are doubled-down on into each other as co-supportive themes or modes or totalities, are certainly preferred by those who are easily disgusted and those who do not see them as efforts/labours but as values and treasures, in museums and temples (one is reminded of that West African group who pile all of their waste and abject goods into one village pile or heap and use it as a mark of their civilised natures).

Values as coins piled high on a lawn in front of their house, sheltering their temples of the soul, who would world that self into a neighbourhood of those who should do the same. Rather than have conversations with neighbours and friends, a community, they see the neighbourhood as a bunch of stuff aligned in a certain way. And certainly not ugly conversations about ecology and evolution or the history of killing fields and Capability Brown.

Such peeps may feel disgust or alarm when they notice the earth pop up over the lawn, up into mounds, molehills perhaps, that show the very soil that allows the grass to grow in the first place. Part of the disgust is that the dirt indicates that cutting the grass into the order of a trim killing field (AKA lawn) does not it itself make the grass grow. The hard work of tidiness is a mindfulness they do not want to take responsibility for, and the mess must be blamed on others, because feelings.

Tidiness has an ecological impact, it disturbs, degrades and destroys. But this mess means nothing to them.

Order, beauty, reasons beyond a certain point is delusional, and thus becomes proud of its delusions because the delusions can be so successful. It gilds the lily with "You ask anyone."

So the aesthetic of which you speak … is an outcome of their worlding (urge) when the selves worlding among others, restrict the world to some arbitrary boundary around others — which an authoritarian feels comfortable with. I.E the easily disgusted or scared will restrict membership of the world to their own easily disgusted types, and call them, as any narcissist would, heavenly, godlike, pure, perfect, the mystery of the one.

This means two things:

① The totalising aesthetic is an outcome of social forces which sees the values and the aesthetic as one and the same thing, they are aligned, and they are aligned as an alignment, by those who prefer to align things in the name of the one-oneness so aligned… —which calms their senses, because feelings.

(Which exact feeling, or even, what oneness, varies across time and geography. So they will disgust themselves if they travel or look back into the past, that foreign country.) (The golden age is a recursive let’s-pretend cosplay effort of this preference to align alignments.)

This means any attraction it may have is restricted to those who are similarly easily disgusted by the odd, the abject, and those for whom morality (or other outcomes of the worlding urge) are felt to be fragile and require constant re-reinforcement (which of course eventually lead to the chaos that disgusts/ scares them in the first place. FAFO being an example of this).

② So this means that where there is a lack of such total aesthetics (ugly or beautiful) that this is more a sign that such a preference to align alignments with preferred favourites is not required. It’s absence is a sign that the community, the world, is well supplied with various vittles.

I.E. the axiology of non-baboon hierarchies that Homo species developed in the hundreds of thousands of years of the palaeolithic, does not require the subset that is aesthetics to align into the one-oness of authoritarian efforts towards simplicities. This is because it is recognised that the debate itself is society, that the symbols are not order in the real world (the lawn is not causing the grass to grow).

Further it recognises that politics is only social theatre, that the market is the hubbub, that values are an effort and not a coin, and as such, politics, markets and a variety of effort we each live (i.e. living as a self worlding among other selves) is not an existential threat that the easily disgusted might feel (I say disgusted but this includes the starved, the PTSDed etc). (the dis-eased)(and the narcissist who cannot differentiated between the self and the world which adults do all day long).

Out take

It occurs to me re-writing and working this writing of takes on lawns and aesthetics that the word alignment can help worlding by way of avoiding useless arguments that minecraft the day away.

I disagreed with the direction of causation of an aethetics and its power response to @tdtstreams' post A major weakness of liberalism is that it has no aesthetic as I felt the vector on offer was the wrong way around, and what was see as cause I regard as better described as an outcome of unseen histories and ‘alignments’.

However it is possible to avoid that disagreement, and its useless lek-like posturing (crisis acting/performative mettle/poseur stances). And it is possible by using the word alignment instead of causes, or lacks, in such worlding-based discussions (morality, politics, philosophy, religion i.e. everything covered by the term social theatre) those arguments of one way or the other are then made unnecessary (their logical import not withstanding).

I.E. alignment is a an example of a blurry mindfulness that brings clarity to potential unnoticed category errors. Or indeed 'category routines' of thought/habit/order.

If we say there is an alignment between X and Y from the viewpoints of Z, K, P etc. then we do not have to worry to much about the direction a discourse of logicality may require. We have it covered.

Such that the momentum of a movement in the self worlding, especially in social systems which circulate or orbit around the strange attractors of the choices we each make as a self worlding, alone and together, and the efforts we go to to avoid effort in the name of comfort, or peace, or order, beauty and godhood, is best done by thinking of them as examples of the urge to align.

Crossposted from whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com, under the Alignment entry in the [taphonomy of worlding] project.