Pro-nice and anti-nice
EDIT: This post is pretty flawed, but please read the comments anyway: I’m hoping to rework it into something that catches the idea better.
You can view a lot of value differences along a pro-nice/anti-nice spectrum.
Pro-nice people (I’m one) gravitate to obviously pleasant, lovely, happy experiences. We like kittens and puppies and rainbows. We like transparently “happy” music and transparently “beautiful” works of art and literature. (If you like Romantic poetry and science fiction, but not contemporary novels, you might be pro-nice.) We prefer the positive social emotions, like sympathy, encouragement, and teamwork. We may choose intellectual interests based on the fact that they make our brains feel good. We tend to be drawn towards proposals for making the world wonderful.
Pro-nice people aren’t quite the same thing as optimists. An optimist tends to anticipate that things will turn out well, or look on the bright side. But pro-nice people may well hold pessimistic ideas or have melancholy temperaments. Pro-nice is a preference for the positive. A typical pro-nice attitude is “Humanity may be destructive and cruel, but the one time when we’re at our best is when we’re doing science. Science is lovely. I think I’ll be a scientist.”
Anti-nice people have a preference for the difficult. They find pro-nice preferences saccharine. They like artistic expressions that have a challenging or negative “mood.” They prefer the negative social emotions, like antagonism, sarcasm, and cynicism. They dislike things that have obvious appeal, or things that everyone finds pleasant. As far as social issues go, they take a keen interest in potential catastrophes and what must be done to avert them; they generally aren’t drawn to proposals to “make the world a better place.”
Again, anti-nice people aren’t necessarily pessimists or unhappy people. Anti-nice people prefer to direct their attention to the challenging, the problematic, the worst-case scenario. To an anti-nice person, there’s nothing interesting to work on when everything is going smoothly; just liking things or agreeing with people or being contented is rather dull.
I suspect that a lot of conflict can be summarized by the clash between pro-nice and anti-nice personality types.
Are you pro-nice or anti-nice? Have you experienced difficulty communicating with the other type?
This doesn’t seem to carve my reality at the joints. In real life for most practical purposes, I would classify myself as tentatively “pro-nice” along this schema. My taste in fiction is the diametric opposite (and I read and create enough fiction that I consider this a significant departure from the “pro-nice” label, not a small glitch).
I think you’ve identified what Steven Pinker calls the contrast between the “utopian vision” and the “tragic vision” (based on an earlier concept by Thomas Sowell, plus of course numerous other people throughout history who have noticed the same thing in different contexts). The original meaning of those terms is political, but clearly there are also correlates in all other areas of life. So, you are likely pointing out a real contrast.
However, for some reason, you have decided to word your post in extremely loaded terms, to the point where you are getting into contradictions in terms. (How can things with “obvious appeal” and those that “everyone finds pleasant” be disliked by anyone?) This results in many inaccurate and imprecise points throughout your post, which I’m not going to address in detail, so I’ll merely point out your greatest mistake.
Namely, you assume that whenever “anti-nice” people express dislike for things that have appeal to the “pro-nice” side, this must be because they also perceive them as beautiful, uplifting, etc., but they nevertheless prefer to find some sort of perverse joy in opposite feelings. Yet, the saccharine produced by the “pro-nice” side can be honestly felt by others as the most awful soul-suffocating ugliness and dehumanized cant that breaks one’s very will to live. The same holds for the “cool/novelty” factor that the “pro-nice” side strives to introduce into everything (the prime example being modern architecture).
Voted up.
You actually expressed what’s wrong with my idea, and I’m going to have to think about it some more. It doesn’t really work as is (it’s a bit circular.) I have trouble understanding the mindset of what I perceive as “anti-nice” even when I see it in my family and closest friends, so it’s difficult for me to present it in a more positive light.
I don’t think it’s fundamentally political, really, because before I ever heard of politics, when I was a child, I was relentlessly in favor of happy endings for everyone. Whereas another child in my elementary school relentlessly rewrote stories so that the characters would suffer more, spent more time drawing the bad guys, and so on. It was some kind of temperamental difference between us that showed up by the time we were four years old.
Because I actually want to know what’s going on, I’d like to see what you’d say about the perspective opposite to the “pro-nice” one. (And I’d want to know what you’d name it, because in retrospect “anti-nice” is a loaded word.)
If at all possible, I want to keep this from being a simple political dichotomy. “Pro-nice” perspectives are certainly utopian, but they’re not all the same kind of utopia (in fact, some are nostalgic rather than futuristic.)
Also, I never thought of modern architecture as being “pro-nice,” for instance. Brutalist architecture is the prime example of something that’s not pro-nice, because pretty curlicues and adornments are replaced with starkness. Whoever invented it must have had an aesthetic value in direct opposition to naive “prettiness” and “pleasantness.” The same goes for modern art and for formal innovation in literature.
This could be a very interesting discussion, but before getting into it in any detail, I think your perspective needs some refinement. Esteem for modern art, including modern architecture, strongly correlates with the sorts of utopian thinking that you list as an essential feature of the “pro-nice” side. Imagine you read someone you’ve never heard of harshly denouncing modern art and architecture as ugly, pointless, and dehumanized garbage—what other attitudes would you guess this person probably has?
(As for brutalism in particular, it took these buildings to actually be built, and people to be exposed to them for a while, for their sheer horror to be truly felt. Once this became evident, the style was soon abandoned. But it is clear that back in the day, the people enthusiastic for that sort of thing would have been disproportionately, if not overwhelmingly in the “pro-nice” camp, just like those enthusiastic for the presently popular forms of modernism today.)
This leads to one of the major contradictions in the way you try to draw the lines. Seeking “naive prettiness and pleasantness” can have the form of desire to find for oneself a small pleasant corner of the world to live in, without any inclination for idealism—either theoretical or practical—for the rest of humanity. Often this attitude is accompanied by a strong (and typically justified) hostility towards idealism as dangerous nonsense that threatens to upset the peace. Here your model seems to break down.
Once again, interesting.
There is a connection in historical fact between modern art and architecture and social utopianism. It does seem to cut across the grain of my own ideas.
My model for aesthetics was:
Naive thought: yay for pretty things! Let’s gild our paintings and paint our statues!
Sophisticated thought: it’s vulgar/naive to just make things pretty. Often the best things are difficult to appreciate. (The first example I can think of this is the Renaissance tradition of making stone statues and leaving them unpainted.)
There have been various reactions against prettiness. Some Romantic ideas were against prettiness (the sublime vs. the beautiful.) As I understand, Communism was not particularly friendly either to prettiness or to sophisticated formalism. (e.g. composers in the USSR would be condemned for being too atonal, but painters would be condemned if they painted beautiful women in pretty dresses.)
So I don’t know if there’s a consistent relationship between prettiness and politics. I think there’s art that’s both pretty and political (Judy Collins) and art that’s pretty, and very non-political (Matisse). I’m for prettiness, either way.
Finding a small, pleasant, out-of-the way corner for myself sounds very good, actually. Utopia for me and a few other folks would be more than enough. A hobbit-hole is the very definition of nice. I would put that in the “nice” category… and yet spending time thinking about the dangers of idealism is distinctly “anti-nice.” It’s not really a pleasant corner if you spend most of your time hunkered down against foes, is it?
SarahC:
Modernism in architecture is fundamentally an expression of utopianism. Constructing buildings, public spaces, and interiors that will be pleasant and attractive for people has been a well understood problem for thousands of years. A modernist, however, sees sticking to this body of well-established knowledge and experience as insufficiently idealistic and sophisticated, and strives for more exalted achievements that he believes his brave novelty will enable—in the most extreme form, even seeing himself as a man of science proudly sweeping away the old superstitions.
Such idealistic hubris, of course, backfires in practice. This is best seen when looking at the artistic sketches of planned modernist projects that show people happily hanging out in the future modernist ambient, and then comparing them with the resulting bleak, despair-inducing, deserted spaces. (It is remarkable how not a single traditional form of architecture from anywhere in the world, to my knowledge, has ever created anything resembling the specifically modernist forms of ugliness and inhumane sterility. It takes the modern utopian thinking to discard common sense to the point where one starts to do such things.)
This example effectively answers your recent question what I have against utopianism. The utopianist ignores the limitations imposed by reality when embarking on his utopian projects, and when this backfires, others also have to live with the consequences. Some people see this clearly in advance, and understandably get nervous and aggravated.
I don’t really know the difference between the various schools of architectural design, but I do know I liked the look and feel of the Rutgers University campus a lot better than I did the Princeton University campus.
I think I must be the last person left on earth who actually likes brutalist architecture. The term seems to have become something of a whipping boy, but I think most people who use it derisively have never actually seen any good examples, and are just thinking of the big rectangular government buildings.
Maybe I’m just prejudiced because I happen to work right next to two of the most famous examples of the style, the Louis Kahn designed Salk Institute, and Geisel Library… how can you not think that looks cool? I mean come on, it’s freakin Starfleet Headquarters!
kodos96:
Do you just “like” these things in the abstract so as to signal your artistic tastes, or would you actually enjoy living your life surrounded by such an ambient?
I must note that both your examples look strangely empty of people. You know, actual humans who might perceive this space as a tolerable place to spend their time in.
Not as far as I’m concerned. I’ve seen some of the most successful brutalist buildings, and with at least one of those, I even have a slight sentimental connection.
The only examples where you’ll see actual flesh-and-blood humans willing to spend their time around such places are the brutalist buildings dumped right in the middle of dense traditional nice spaces, like university campuses, where it’s simply impossible not to have crowds swirling around.
I’m totally not an architecture aficionado—I’d be hard pressed to name 3 different styles of architecture, even harder pressed to identify them. I’m only familiar with brutalism because I happen to be surrounded by it. So there’s no signaling going on whatsoever—I’m not a part of that scene at all.
I actually am living my life surrounded by such, and although I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m “enjoying living my life”, I think that has more to do with my brain chemistry than with the architecture, which is one of the few things I see every day that brings a smile to my face.
They were just photographed that way. In real life they’re both extremely vibrant places. Geisel is always full, despite the fact that on a campus with broadband in every dorm room and downloadable e-reserves, there’s not much of a real reason to go to the library… yet people do… tons of them.
And the Salk Institute.… Kahn designed it to be much more impressive from the inside than the outside. The buildings are kind of boring from the outside, but then you go in and realize that he’s painstakingly laid out every single exterior and interior wall for the specific purpose of ensuring that every single office, every single lab, every single lab bench, has its own private, unobstructed ocean view. How’s that for a “tolerable place to spend your time”?
But that’s how it’s supposed to be done. Brutalist buildings have always reminded me of modernism meets feudalism… they look like sci-fi versions of castles. But you don’t put a bunch of castles right next to each other—you build a castle and then you have a bunch of smaller woodframed buildings surrounding it (you know, for the peasants ;)
kodos96:
Well, even though they’ll rarely admit it explicitly for fear of sounding desperate, humans are social animals and they yearn to have at least some contact with fellow humans. So if you let them choose between being alone (unless they’re extraordinarily popular hubs of social life) and hanging out in desolate modernist spaces, they will choose the latter. But all real-life experience shows that they much prefer gathering at traditional public spaces and interiors.
That might indeed be true—but, at best, it means that the architect has taken advantage of an extraordinary location to achieve that. In contrast, classical architecture and interior design manage to achieve at least a tolerable (and often very pleasant) surrounding in far less promising places.
(By the way, can you open a window in these ocean-view rooms? In the overwhelming majority of modernist buildings, you can’t do it anywhere at all. Speaking for myself, I’d much prefer to be able to open a window looking towards an entirely mediocre classical landscape than to have unopenable glass separating me from the most spectacular ocean view. The latter, honestly, seems to me no better than a poster on the wall.)
The campus has no shortage of social spaces to hang out in, most with more conventional architecture, yet many choose Geisel. I don’t think anyone thinks of it as “desolate”—I’m pretty sure that’s not the adjective the Trek producers had in mind when they cast it as Starfleet Headquarters in one of the movies. At the top floors of the inverted pyramid, 360 degrees of glass result in a spectacular view… at sunset it’s downright romantic. The stacks up there are a popular place for the undergrads to lose their virginity (or so I’ve heard).
The location alone just gets you a few rooms on one side with a view. Here though, an amazing amount of thought was put into how to lay things out so that everybody gets a view.
I can’t say for sure, as I never worked in that building. But I suspect that they do open—the building across the street from it where I used to work was also brutalist (though much less impressive), and its windows opened.
OK, since I’m writing this on LW after all, I guess it’s time to recognize that I’ve long passed the boundary from rational argument to an impassioned propagandistic defense of my own view in a value- and taste-laden controversy.
I’ve never seen these buildings that you describe, so I can’t make any final judgement about them. It could be that these are indeed some genuine cases of modernist architecture working well, though I still suspect that it’s a matter of having such a spectacularly good space that it’s extremely hard to ruin it even with the ugliest architecture imaginable. (To quote William Whyte, “Given a fine location, it is difficult to design a space that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished.”) But, yes, it might be that these buildings are really much better than I though modernism could ever be. (On the other hand, judging by what can be seen on the web, these Salk Institute spaces look pretty damn desolate.)
What I still don’t doubt, though, is that the average practical results of traditional architecture are far better than the average practical results of modernism. This seems to me overwhelmingly obvious from virtually all the examples I can think of, which includes everyday sights from several cities I’ve lived in that feature a mix of both.
These things tend to only be overwhelmingly obvious once one has picked a disputable success measure. Do these different styles cost the same to build, does one allow higher population density than the other, is demographics confounding things in some other way, what about the effects on people who don’t spend time at the places themselves but see the buildings from far away or in pictures?
Well yeah, obviously this entire conversation has been about totally subjective questions of taste. Nothing wrong with that though, as long as no one is fooling themselves into thinking it’s something other than that.
kodos96:
Still, I think that it makes sense to ask whether traditional or modernist architecture on average does a better job creating spaces that will satisfy the subjective tastes of the majority of people, for which the best evidence are people’s revealed preferences and attitudes. In this sense, there is an objective question here after all.
It’s hard to come up with better words, and (aside from “nice” and its opposite possibly not being well-defined for pleasures), the whole cognitive region is so polluted with moralism and status that neutral language may be impossible. I tentatively suggest straightforward and complex pleasures anyway.
Is this a real pattern? Does it have predictive power? How would one know?
Just personal experience.
The predictive power: people who have “pro-nice” tastes in one arena of life ought to have “pro-nice” tastes in others, and vice versa.
Without any actual arguments, or expectation that the pattern itself will be obvious to enough people, this post is only expected to introduce a superstition. There is no way for the reader to tell this post from other possible posts that talk about nonexistent patterns, and so its value to the readers is low to negative, especially if you factor in the anti-epistemic character of suggesting to pay attention to such posts.
I don’t think that’s the right prediction to try to apply this to. If you acknowledge it’s a spectrum, then it must be true that someone who likes some happy things might not like other happy things.
It might be more interesting to look at other things outside of personal taste that points along the spectrum correspond to, and consider what conclusions can be drawn from that. (Do “anti-nice” people correlate to those who’ve had rough lives, or those who’re imiting people who’ve had rough lives because it’s “cool”?) That might get you closer to a prediction.
Otherwise, merely observing that spectrum of taste exists is analogous to observing that there’s a spectrum of color taste that runs from red at one extreme to violet at the other.
Without any actual evidence, or expectation that the pattern will be obvious to enough people, this post only serves to introduce a superstition.
Here’s a mild version of moving away from nice—Golden Age vs. Silver Age art. I may have picked the distinction up from C.S. Lewis. The examples are my own.
Golden Age art consists of presenting the most pleasing visions possible. After a while, this gets cloying, and some ambiguity gets added.
Early John Carter (ERBurroughs) stories have the most beautiful women and the strongest men. Later in the series, we get focus on lower status people
Superman is pure Golden Age art. Eventually, you get Spiderman.
I don’t agree with this, it doesn’t seem to describe me or many of the people I know.
Examples: I like melodic piano and instrumental music but I prefer it to be quite minimalistic—I feel like by your criteria that’s +1 niceness for pretty melodies but −1 for starkness. Similarly I like a lot of heavy metal but I often like it more when it’s played using an orchestra/piano/guitar. So, +1 for pretty instruments, −1 for depressing subjects and often jarring repetitious sounds. I am drawn to the challenging/problematic/etc but I usually desperately want to find a solution to them that will be clean and elegant and beautiful. I absolutely can’t watch depressing movies, but I find typical happy endings to be saccharine. And so on.
I think I would classify myself as being more anti- than pro-nice, but the only pro-nice types I would definitely not get along with would be the naive idealistic types who completely refuse to engage with anti-nice concerns.
Apologies if this seems like a nitpick in context, but I am in general very suspicious of theories that don’t seem to acknowledge the complexity of aesthetic value/experience. I have cringed since elementary school at how people classify music into “happy” and “sad”, and I’m pretty sure that “beautiful” is comparable to “good” in its complexity as a concept. (It’s also a loaded word, because “beautiful” is arguably synonymous with “of high aesthetic worth”, in which case it doesn’t make sense to “dislike beauty”.)
I have a pro-nice personality, a melancholic temperament, and a taste for the entire spectrum of emotional nuances present in art.
I’ll tell you one realm in which I definitely see something like this, and it’s one I know you’re familiar with: mathematics.
There are some mathematicians who greatly dislike “pathology”, and prefer that all intuitively natural conjectures be true, and steadfastly avoid subjects where this isn’t the case. This is the “pro-nice” camp.
Then there are the “anti-nicers” who delight in the exotic, bizarre, and counterintuitive, and are attracted to the very subjects that the pro-nicers do their best to stay away from.
I think I would place my own sympathies with the latter group, in the sense that I have a taste for exoticity and take pleasure in expanding my intuition beyond the mundane. On the other hand, nothing pleases me so much as an elegant theory that makes the previously complicated look simple.
A list of pro-nice tastes, as I understand them:
Decoration vs. plainness.
Fantasy, romance, or lyricism vs. realism.
Innocence vs. experience.
Agreement vs. disagreement.
Bubblegum pop music vs. heavy metal music.
Comedy vs. tragedy.
Sunshine vs. storms.
The “inspirational” vs. the “critical.”
For some reason I’m also finding the “pro-nice” side more stereotypically feminine.
This looks like it corresponds closely to what’s usually called “beautiful” versus “sublime”.
Definitely. Nice == sugar and spice. Not nice == snips and snails and a fascination with dinosaurs. With repeated emphasis on the word “stereotypically”. Most people are a mix. I notice I have become more nice with age—a process which I analyze as becoming less insecure about whether I am perceived as sufficiently macho.
Some additional random comments:
Comedy can be either nice or not nice. Same goes for tragedy.
Is this a 5th dimension to add to the 4 Meyers-Briggs dichotomies?
Would an OkCupid test be an easy way to collect empirical data?
Would this make an interesting case study to supplement EY’s old postings about “rubes” and “bleggs” and naive Bayes classifiers?
It would be interesting to find out for sure …
I like agreement in general, especially in real life.
I favour heavy metal/alternative music.
I like playing with kids and fluffy animals. I am unsure of exactly why, I think it is because of their innocence and simplicity of motive and emotion.
I like both sunshine and storms.
Where do I fit on the spectrum?
This first one seems off to me, because it seems that simplicity should be on the “pro-nice” side and complexity on the “anti-nice” side.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe that there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.
Consider if you had started your post with: Amongst other possibilities, value differences can be analysed on a pro-nice / anti-nice spectrum. And ended with something like: This distinction can facilitate a quick assessment on the emotional impact (positive or negative) dealing with other people will probably have on you.
Well, if it’s preferable to state it that way, I don’t mind changing the wording.
To the degree that these things are really correlated, I usually interpret it as signaling being a good member of society vs. signaling being above/better than/outside of society.
But I fall pro-nice on five and anti-nice on three of your examples, which doesn’t seem too far from chance. If you want to investigate this further, consider getting a few more examples, then making a poll about which sides of each issue different people are on, and seeing whether you end up with mostly half-and-halfs, or with two very different clusters of near-zeros and near-alls. Insofar as you get the two very different clusters, you’d have evidence that this is a real phenomenon worth investigating.
I don’t think it’s that simple. I don’t like the bleakest science fiction, Sometimes I like horror. I don’t like endurance sports. I do like spicy food. I’m pretty conflict averse in personal relations. On the whole, I like accessible music, but I can enjoy the Sun Ra Arkestra—these days, only a little of it sounds like a traffic jam.