Ted Chiang - Arrival

Daniel Taglia, professor of comparative literature at Pembleton:

The student initiative doesn’t apply to faculty, but obviously if it passes there’ll be pressure on the faculty to adopt calliagnosia as well. So I don’t consider it premature for me to say that I’m adamantly opposed to it.

This is just the latest example of political correctness run amok. The people advocating calli are well intentioned, but what they’re doing is infantilizing us. The very notion that beauty is something we need to be protected from is insulting. Next thing you know, a student organization will insist we all adopt music agnosia, so we don’t feel bad about ourselves when we hear gifted singers or musicians.

When you watch Olympic athletes in competition, does your self-esteem plummet? Of course not. On the contrary, you feel wonder and admiration; you’re inspired that such exceptional individuals exist. So why can’t we feel the same way about beauty? Feminism would have us apologize for having that reaction. It wants to replace aesthetics with politics, and to the extent it’s succeeded, it’s impoverished us.

Being in the presence of a world-class beauty can be as thrilling as listening to a world-class soprano. Gifted individuals aren’t the only ones who benefit from their gifts; we all do. Or, I should say, we all can. Depriving ourselves of that opportunity would be a crime.

Commercial paid for by People for Ethical Nanomedicine:

Voiceover: Have your friends been telling you that calli is cool, that it’s the smart thing to do? Then maybe you should talk to people who grew up with calli.

‘After I got my calli turned off, I recoiled the first time I met an unattractive person. I knew it was silly, but I just couldn’t help myself. Calli didn’t help make me mature, it kept me from becoming mature. I had to relearn how to interact with people.’

‘I went to school to be a graphic artist. I worked day and night, but I never got anywhere with it. My teacher said I didn’t have the eye for it, that calli had stunted me aesthetically. There’s no way I can get back what I’ve lost.’

‘Having calli was like having my parents inside my head, censoring my thoughts. Now that I’ve had it turned off, I realize just what kind of abuse I’d been living with.’

Voiceover: If the people who grew up with calliagnosia don’t recommend it, shouldn’t that tell you something?

They didn’t have a choice, but you do. Brain damage is never a good idea, no matter what your friends say.

Maria deSouza:

We’d never heard of the People for Ethical Nanomedicine, so we did some research on them. It took some digging, but it turns out it’s not a grassroots organization at all, it’s an industry PR front. A bunch of cosmetics companies got together recently and created it. We haven’t been able to contact the people who appear in the commercial, so we don’t know how much, if any, of what they said was true. Even if they were being honest, they certainly aren’t typical; most people who get their calli turned off feel fine about it. And there are definitely graphic artists who grew up with calli.

It kind of reminds me of an ad I saw a while back, put out by a modeling agency when the calli movement was just getting started. It was just a picture of a supermodel’s face, with a caption: ‘If you no longer saw her as beautiful, whose loss would it be? Hers, or yours?’ This new campaign has the same message, basically saying, ‘you’ll be sorry,’ but instead of taking that cocky attitude, it has more of a concerned-warning tone. This is classic PR: hide behind a nice-sounding name, and create the impression of a third party looking out for the consumer’s interests.

Tamera Lyons:

I thought that commercial was totally idiotic. It’s not like I’m in favor of the initiative – I don’t want people to vote for it – but people shouldn’t vote against it for the wrong reason. Growing up with calli isn’t crippling. There’s no reason for anyone to feel sorry for me or anything. I’m dealing with it fine. And that’s why I think people ought to vote against the initiative: because seeing beauty is fine.

Anyway, I talked to Garrett again. He said he’d just gotten his calli turned off. He said it seemed cool so far, although it was kind of weird, and I told him I felt the same way when I got mine disabled. I suppose it’s kind of funny, how I was acting like an old pro, even though I’ve only had mine off for a few weeks.

Joseph Weingartner:

One of the first questions researchers asked about calliagnosia was whether it has any ‘spillover,’ that is, whether it affects your appreciation of beauty outside of faces. For the most part, the answer seems to be ‘no.’ Calliagnosics seem to enjoy looking at the same things other people do. That said, we can’t rule out the possibility of side effects.

As an example, consider the spillover that’s observed in prosopagnosics. One prosopagnosic who was a dairy farmer found he could no longer recognize his cows individually. Another found it harder to distinguish models of cars, if you can imagine that. These cases suggest that we sometimes use our face-recognition module for tasks other than strict face recognition. We may not think something looks like a face – a car, for example – but at a neurological level we’re treating it as if it were a face.

There may be a similar spillover among calliagnosics, but since calliagnosia is subtler than prosopagnosia, any spillover is harder to measure. The role of fashion in cars’ appearances, for example, is vastly greater than its role in faces’, and there’s little consensus about which cars are most attractive. There may be a calliagnosic out there who doesn’t enjoy looking at certain cars as much as he otherwise would, but he hasn’t come forward to complain.

Then there’s the role our beauty-recognition module plays in our aesthetic reaction to symmetry. We appreciate symmetry in a wide range of settings – painting, sculpture, graphic design – but at the same time we also appreciate asymmetry. There are a lot of factors that contribute to our reaction to art, and not much consensus about when a particular example is successful.

It might be interesting to see if calliagnosia communities produce fewer truly talented visual artists, but given how few such individuals arise in the general population, it’s difficult to do a statistically meaningful study. The only thing we know for certain is that calliagnosics report a more muted response to some portraits, but that’s not a side effect per se ; portrait paintings derive at least some of their impact from the facial appearance of the subject.

Of course, any effect is too much for some people. This is the reason given by some parents for not wanting calliagnosia for their children: they want their children to be able to appreciate the Mona Lisa, and perhaps create its successor.

Marc Esposito, fourth-year student at Waterston College:

That Pembleton thing sounds totally crazed. I could see doing it like a setup for some prank. You know, as in, you’d fix this guy up with a girl, and tell him she’s an absolute babe, but actually you’ve fixed him up with a dog, and he can’t tell so he believes you. That’d be kind of funny, actually.

But I sure as hell would never get this calli thing. I want to date good-looking girls. Why would I want something that’d make me lower my standards? Okay, sure, some nights all the babes have been taken, and you have to choose from the leftovers. But that’s why there’s beer, right? Doesn’t mean I want to wear beer goggles all the time.