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By Root 920 0

wilt, and except to look pretty have no use. They communicate “I love you,” but more important is what they signal: I have the resources to buy thoughtful and beautiful but completely things for you, my dearest. And please also enjoy these fine, expensive Belgian chocolates.” Consider the alternative: if natural selection governed courtship, the boy would show up at the girl’s apartment clutching, instead of flowers and chocolates, a lovely potato, or perhaps couple of thick steaks, or, being even more inventive, a new ratchet wrench set for her. After all, natural selection favors practicality and (The young couple would then go out to a serve-yourself, can-eat restaurant, since natural selection also favors economy.)

That we smile at this indicates how counterintuitive it is. The real world, operating according to the imperatives of sexual selection, works differently. If the male is serious, he will take the female to a lavish, overpriced restaurant serving mere smidgens of food. He will order champagne and make sure she notices his large tip. (The all-you-can-cafeteria comes later: after they’ve married and have to feed the children.) With respect to proving access to resources and commitment, nothing beats the gift of a diamond, parpaticularly as an engagement ring. Diamonds, since they are both expensive and useless, are indeed a girl’s friend. They prove one of two conclusions: either he has the he claims—money to waste on useless minerals—or, if he does he is so committed that he has gone into debt (or robbed a bank, which must also be attractive, since Mafia chieftains do find their molls). Any way a woman looks at it, the gift—not just the promise— diamond marks a significant step in a courtship situation. (The Beers slogan, “A diamond is forever,” is widely regarded as the most single advertising statement of all time, and Darwinian theory explains why: it connects serious wealth display with the loving commitment women seek in establishing a house hold.)

V

Thorstein Veblen, the economist who a century ago coined the phrase cultures from the ancient world to the present. He also argued, more controversially, that high cost and waste are intrinsically mixed with our concepts of art and beauty. Veblen’s central claims about people’s responses beauty are most forcefully (and cynically) expressed in the chapter entitled Pecuniary Canons of Taste” in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Here, in a move that foreshadows Arthur Danto’s favorite argumentative strategy, he has us imagine two nearly identical artifacts: a pair of spoons, of solid silver, appearing to be handmade, and costing perhaps twenty dollars (a lot of money in 1899), the other machine-made out of silvery base metal and costing twenty cents. As eating utensils, each is as service-able as the other. We can also imagine, Veblen proposes, that as sheer visual objects (seen in terms of “intrinsic beauty of grain or color”), the spoons are identically attractive. Now suppose, Veblen says, we discover on careful inspection that the signs of having been wrought by hand are case of the silver spoon actually faked: the spoon, though made of silver, turns out to be a machine-made object that cleverly imitates the small irregularities of a handmade artifact. Immediately, he observes, its value decline by as much as 90 percent. Moreover, even if the spoons were visually indiscernible and only the weight of the cheaper utensil gave away, our sense of the overall beauty of the objects would still be affected knowing that one was mass-produced, the other handmade.

With regard to the concept of beauty itself, Veblen is not entirely clear or consistent on what his analysis means. Sometimes he seems saying that costliness and beauty, while logically distinguishable concepts, are inevitably bundled together by human nature in our minds: when an observer realizes that what he thought was handmade silverware is actually something stamped out by a machine, the gratification derives from “its contemplation as an object of beauty” is instantly But Veblen also says