Mutual aid societies have a reason to be together: they want a more secure life that comes with communal support. However, “we should support each other” is not a great rallying cry. It merely reminds us that others might depend on us. (What if they take advantage of us?) It’s not especially productive to fixate on these mutual needs.
Instead, societies throughout history have used shared aesthetic experiences to bind people together, including:
- Beautiful music and dancing at gatherings.
- Delicious food at festivals.
- Exciting myths and stories, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey.
- Identity-forming artwork, such as the Statue of Liberty.
The family can absolutely be a locus for aesthetic experiences, and that is a major way in which it produces bridging social capital (connecting with other families) rather than just bonding social capital (within itself).
For example, when the family:
- Hosts a Dungeons and Dragons game for children from other families.
- Decorates our car in a trunk-or-treat (a Halloween event where families give out candy from the back of their car).
- Attends a school orchestra event or a school play that includes children from other families as well as ours.
- Collaborates on art projects with friends.
- Serves a dinner to friends, or has dinner at a friend’s house.
The family connects with friends and with other families through a shared aesthetic experience. This, in my view, is the most important psychological bonding and bridging mechanism for humans throughout history. It is a kind of relating.
Aesthetic experiences ties people together, but there need not be a central aesthetic experience (a “grand narrative”) that binds an entire society together – not even Science. To assign too much value to a single grand narrative is to discourage the diverse social ties that can form around a wide variety of aesthetic experiences. If we say “no, it’s right that Science is beautiful and wrong that X, Y, or Z is beautiful” then we’re discouraging a connection that could be made.
The fundamental skill is to enter the other person’s aesthetic world without converting it into your own. (Note: this specific wording was invented by ChatGPT under my direction.) Science may have a tendency to convert in this way; so, when someone explains their aesthetic experience, the scientist transforms it into rational terms.
The psychology of bonding (and bridging) uses aesthetic signals to decide whom to bond with – a process that likely evolved to mediate human connections long ago. Today, our society consciously decides which aesthetic signals to acclimate its young people to. (Quite often, young people take matters into their own hands, however!). But since society’s “wise elders” can consciously choose to put just about any aesthetic experiences in front of young people, society can choose to offer art from either narrow groups or diverse groups, or can choose to tell young people that certain forms of art are “higher”, or “objectively good” or any number of other things.
The exact mechanisms by which humans choose to appreciate something aesthetically in spite of their elders’ best efforts to the contrary are, of course, the Big Mystery.
In American society, the most important aesthetic axis is sameness vs. difference. Valuing difference marks one as a liberal and valuing sameness marks one as a conservative, although neither group is likely to value the liberal-conservative difference. But ultimately, relating requires some sameness while autonomy requires some difference; one cannot absolutely pursue either.
The “sameness” perspective is the we belong to a tribe that shares our aesthetic preferences. We may not need to expend much effort to relate to each individual member of our tribe, because we all like the same things (church, Taylor Swift, Dungeons and Dragons, or whatever it might be.). The “difference” perspective is that it requires significant effort to relate to a person, because we have to come to understand their “personal culture,” and they have to understand our personal culture.
Nexus State Theory 