The Proof is in the packaging

Look, my crème caramel today has a rather big hole in its side.

Let me see... It sure does, but I'm certain that it will be as good-tasting as the one you ordered last time.

...

Come on, aren't you complaining about something insignificant here?

It's true that a hole does not affect the overall taste, but in terms of presentation, it has failed.

... Comrade, I just decided to enter your name in the King and Queen of Crankiness Contest.

It's not a matter of crankiness! If you are thinking that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, you are gravely mistaken.

What if the pudding looks nice, but tastes bad?

All right, you have a point, too. But, the presentation, the packaging and the like play a much bigger role than we usually are aware of.

It's your urge to dig out the unsung heroes and bring them to the limelight...

The problem is bigger than that. We tend to underestimate the value of appearance, because we are taught to judge anything by its content.

It's good, because it means that we are acting as we are supposed to.

It's bad, because we are under the wrong impression that we attach little importance to the way things look.

I don't judge a book by the cover, either in literal or figurative sense.

I'm sure that you have bought a book, or at least took one in your hands, because the cover looked interesting. It could be that the title was intriguing.

Am I supposed to be interested in a book with awful covers and inane titles, and not others?

I didn't say that, but that given a choice, we would pick one with the presentation that arouses our curiosity.

I may take a look at a book that goes against my aesthetics in a far-fetched way. In other words, I would examine a copy because its unpleasantness makes me want to know its creator or source, but would not purchase it or read it carefully.

You see, you are greatly influenced by the appearance.

I thought you have been telling us that we shouldn't be.
 

We shouldn't be if the appearance has nothing to do with the qualities that we seek. However, the looks have the tendency to sneak into our decision making in an inconclusive way. Suppose we have two candidates for the job of a receptionist. One is competent and emotionally stable, but does not come across as your long-lost uncle. Another is less competent and panics rather easily, but has the looks of a Mr. Triangulum Galaxy. Which candidate would you choose?

Would Mr. Triangulum Galaxy have three eyes or two?

Let's say he comes with the features of normal homo sapiens, and they are of a high grade according to our criteria.

I think it greatly depends on the culture, because the case we are discussing could be cast as a question of long-term versus short-term interest. I bet that the societies with longer-term views would choose the former, and the shorter-term ones the latter.

We eventually get used to nice looks, so I'd imagine that the companies which put more weight on the looks wouldn't mind getting another receptionist when the current one quits after a short period. ... Hey, I think I figured out why we get bored with pretty faces easily.

Some of us burn ourselves out with jealousy, before getting used to having nice-looking people around.

Jealousy from not being as beautiful ourselves, jealousy from their attracting so much more attention than we do... But why do you think we get bored with beautiful people?

Are you sure we get bored with someone if s/he has the personality of our dreams and happens to have the looks of Ms. or Mr. Milky Way?

I told you, we get used to their looks! The problem is that they have one handsome face and no more. Suppose your lover is a nice-looking being, whose feature changes from day to day. You wouldn't get bored so easily.

It will be confusing if James Dean goes to bed and wakes up in the morning to find a John Wayne in the mirror instead of James.
 
Aren't you grateful that we are spared of such confusion? But it also means that we can get awfully used to good-looking persons.

I think we get used to any good quality, unfortunately.

True, but personality differs from looks in that it manifests in many different ways, depending on the circumstances.

Whereas an attractive smile is just that, you mean? Doesn't it imply that we get less bored with people if they are more expressive of their emotions?

We know that many occasions call for moderation in that department if we are to act as mature members of the society.

... We'd better get back to the discussion of whether appearance matters at all.

As the receptionist case shows, we may well take the appearance of a person into account, although the job description would not stipulate so.

I don't think any modern society would allow us to write: Good looks may be substituted for lack of competence and/or experience.

Exactly, but it does not mean that we avoid such decisions. "Oh, Candidate No. 1 may be able to field a wider range of questions, but Candidate No. 2 has such a happy smile that we would get more visitors to the company if he sits at the entrance."

The conclusions is...
 
While we are taught not to be fooled by the looks, our emotional states are affected by them. We do make decisions in which the looks play a much bigger role than we are willing to acknowledge.

That's one. What about your original proposition that the proof is in the packaging?

Have you ever tried to give a rather inexpensive gift to someone because you don't want to spend too much money?

You shouldn't talk about your experience as if it were mine!

You agonize over it, because you don't want to look too cheap...

That's you, not me!

Have you ever succeeded in making the recipient happy with a sub-optimal gift by putting it in a pretty box and wrapping it nicely?

It sounds like your friends are extremely lenient with you.

Don't you have the experience at the receiving end yourself? When you think about it carefully, the content is not great, but it gave you good feelings because it was presented artfully?

Is that what you were trying to do with a box of apples in gaudy paper that you gave to me the other day?

My principle in gift-giving is to aim for either practicality or pure entertainment. Somewhere in the middle is awfully troublesome. Suppose you want to give a present to an art loving friend. You want to give her/him something artsy, but preferably something unknown to her/him and yet to her/his taste.

We know how odiously difficult that is. Is that your excuse for your choice of apples?

By the way, art is all about packaging.

Are you trying to tell me that even C grade photographs could become B grade by presenting them in A grade frames?

What I meant is: art itself is nothing but repackaging of reality. Think about the Impressionist paintings. The objects and the sceneries that they chose to paint were not very different from their predecessors', but their innovative manner of painting has allowed us to see them differently from the previous schools and also from what we see with our own eyes.

The Monastery of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole is pretty in itself, but it has much less impact to me than Vincent Van Gogh's paintings of it. The same with Claude Monet's garden in Giverny and its paintings by him.

Similarly, we can say that the photographs capture the images that we may have seen, but never stopped to observe and admire. They tend to alter the reality much less compared to paintings, but still the photographers have the freedom in choosing the object, the angle, and the lighting, etc.

What about narratives?

Some time ago, I read a non-fictional account of a Resistance fighter during the Second World War. The story was not trivial; many people disappeared or got killed, and uncertainty and fear were always there. I was not familiar with the events described, and the writing was not bad either. But I felt so bored, and couldn't wait to get to the end so that I could start reading another book.

You take it as a piece of evidence that the presentation of events matters.

I do, although I still can't tell what was exactly wrong with that book. I even felt guilty for being bored with it.

What about performance arts? They provide us with something we do not see or hear on a daily basis.

Those could be called extensions of reality, perhaps. We do see and make bodily movements as well as hear and create tunes in our everyday life. The extraction of their finest elements and the extrapolations of them are what we know as dance, theater and music.

Can we say that they show us the distilled versions of reality?

"Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth./L'art est un mensonge qui nous permet de dévoiler la vérité."

Pablo, again...

Most communication, too, depends on how you say it. Politeness may be something on the surface, but it counts.

We can turn hypocritical, though.

Yes, but genuine attempts for politeness have the ability to change our thoughts accordingly.

... Hurray, it's the surface, the packaging, the wrapping, the ribbons, the bubbles in your crème caramel, the...

You know that not-so-nice looking people can be awfully attractive by properly packaging her/himself. I don't only mean clothes---and those do not need to be expensive---but the attitude, the outlook, the mind...

Wait, wait, you are now talking about the contents of a person.

The attitude, the outlook and so on are how we see and present the whole world to others. Our views are the results of our filtering and rearranging of what we see and hear; we repackage the reality.

... Hurray... it's... it's... the end of the year!

And we are so different, because we are so alike

We harbor about the same amount of nastiness inside us, but it is subject to modification by training on how to express it.

That is more or less where we left off last time, but I can't quite agree with the first part of that statement. Some babies are go-getters while some others are slackers, and that without any urging from the grown-ups.

True. But compared to the differences that we see later in their lives, aren't they more alike than ever?

Come to think of it, personal variations tend to increase as we age. Then, they start diminishing as we reach our old age, particularly if we become senile.

Is that meant to scare me---it implies that we revert to what we had been. Now I remember my grandparents wanting to eat more and more of what they used to eat in their childhood as they grew older.

If your strengths lie in physical activities, your prime time will pass early. As an athlete or a dancer, you can stay involved in the capacity of a coach or a choreographer, but there is no denying that you will be delegated to the backstage.

You can't blame me that I am an ageist, can you... Back to the topic of personal variations, our environment cannot plant in us what we are not born with, but they have tremendous influence in attenuating and accentuating what we do possess. Not everybody can be a professional tennis player, but respect for others, for example, can be inculcated.

Well, we need some people to organize tournaments, manufacture rackets, and so on.

Personal events have great power to shape who we are, while that power wanes as we age. In other words, there are two sides to maturity. You may be mature enough not to be disturbed by certain happenings, but it may also mean that you are too rigid to be corrected by them.

Is that meant to scare me---you are saying that there is a very fine line between maturity and inflexibility.

Genuine maturity should come with the ability to sort out meaningful events from others, but again, we have the tendency to become too selective in this regard over time. Let's turn to another factor that constitutes our environment: culture. Various cultures have their own ways to cope with our ugly side. Some condone it more than others.

Are you ranking cultures here?

I wish I could, because then, life would be easier.

Isn't it better to condone what we are born with rather than suppress it?

I didn't know that you are one of the people who consider anything natural is good. Well, it's not so unnatural of you to think so, because we are in that phase in history. After a flurry of activities to go in one direction always comes another in the opposite direction.

The technological progress in the past two centuries had the aim to subdue nature so that they would be of greater use to us. Lately in the developing world, we are seeing movements to live more along with nature. Recycling and composting, organic farming, local procurement of foodstuff, electronic cars, solar heating, power generation from wind and geothermal sources, search for wonder drugs in exotic plants...

Anger and hate come to us naturally without any instruction. Do you think it is better not to do anything about them?

I'd say that it is necessary to be angry against and hateful of certain things, for instance, discrimination based on attributes which are secondary to the question at hand.

That reminds me of a classmate who said that women should not major in chemical engineering.

Huh?

That was my reaction, too. When I asked him why, he said that it was because women could not haul by themselves the gas tanks required for experiments, and thus, were burden to male students.

Doesn't that imply that all disabled people should be killed because they are burden to the society?

I shall not disclose where he received his prior education... In any case, being angry about injustice can be destructive, too. Our anger shocks the other party and directs their attention to us, but it also tends to invoke anger on their side. If we are to make good use of anger, we should have control over it.

It should be measured and to the point, you mean... What about hatred?

I'm afraid that there is not much use for it.

Can't we show our commitment to justice by hating injustice?

Perhaps, but I think it only alienates people who engage in injustice.

I agree that we need to be under control in order to take advantage of our negative emotions inherent in us. But doesn't it deprive us of spontaneity in the good sense as well?

Bravo, comrade. If we are in control all the time, it makes us boring or unattractive.

Good news for a change! We should let ourselves go once in a while. We don't have to watch over ourselves every second.

One problem is how to select such moments.

But that itself takes away the casualness!

Another problem is how to remain spontaneous after choosing the moments to be so.

Comrade...

Did you expect life to be easy?

Not for you, obviously.

Isn't it amazing how much our cultural and personal environments can shape us to be so different, starting from the same basic material? The situation is further complicated by the fact that we greatly differ in how susceptible we are to such modifications.

Comrade...

I know a set of siblings who are close in age and grew up together in several continents because of their father's occupation. Some have become a true motley of cultures that they have been exposed to, while others are as if they had never left their home country.

... They must be looking forward to their old age when they become more alike.

Did you know that susceptibility to change by environment can be strengthened or weakened, depending on the environment itself?

...

Have you noticed that the more alike we are, the more we try to differentiate ourselves?

I know that one. Each country is often subject to its own fads, but within those fads, people try so hard to stand out.

If showing your tail is considered cool, almost everyone would be doing so, but some would show only the tip of it, some would tie a ribbon around it, some would tattoo it...

Tails...? A tattoo on a tail...? Are you talking about your friends from the Triangulum Galaxy?

We don't have to go that far. The Jews and the Arabs, the Hausa and the Yoruba, the Hutus and the Tutsis, the Welsh and the English, the Croats and the Serbs, the Georgians and the Russians, the Indians and the Pakistanis, the Japanese and the Koreans, the Americans and the Canadians, they are more alike than they care to admit, but if we mistake one for the other...

Unless they find it beneficial to form a united front.

As is the case with the Orthodox Jews and the conservative Muslims in the East End of London. Facing the outside world, they realized how much they share in terms of way of life.

After all, one can be Lev, Essad and Kurban, all at the same time.