Maps, Money, and Culture

While browsing the news on the Web tonight, I stumbled across something which, the more I ponder it, the more puzzled I am. A story by Brett Zongker of the Associated Press gives details about a map of the world drawn in 1602 at the request of Emperor Wanli of China. The creator of the map was a Jesuit missionary from Italy by the name of Matteo Ricci, whom Mr. Zongker describes as "among the first Westerners to live in what is now Beijing in the early 1600s."

In October (presumably of 2009), the Ricci map was purchased from a private collector in Japan for $1 million by the James Ford Bell Trust, a fund started by the founder of General Mills. Eventually, the map will be housed in the Bell Library at the University of Minnesota.

Ford W. Bell, the magnate's grandson and co-trustee of the fund, explained that custodians at the Bell Library focus "on the development of trade and how that drove civilization — how that constant desire to find new markets to sell new products led to exchanges of knowledge, science, technology and really drove civilization" and so the map "fits in beautifully."

What strikes me as odd is that credit for the impetus for science and technology, even for civilization itself, is lavished on trade and the "constant desire to find new markets to sell new products". I suppose since mathematics and writing sprang up as a way to keep track of how many bushels of wheat the peasants had grown in order for the king to get his fair share of taxes, the case could be made that civilization accreted from bookkeeping. However, do we really want to credit greed and lust as the basis of art and beauty? Do we really want to say that poetry and story-telling, portraiture and music are all grounded in avarice? Are the things that make us human the same things that make us accountants?

In some sense, yes, human activity is economic activity. Having said that, though, how do we account for beauty? Why are we so impelled by it? Do we love things because they're beautiful, or because their beauty will bring a good price? Do we prize beauty for what we can get for it, or for its own sake? Is there some tiny bubble of our lives that resists reduction to commerce? What compels so avid a businessman as the elder Bell to establish a trust? What benefit would he derive from something that would outlast him by at least a couple of generations? The love of beauty can certainly be exploited by businessmen, but what about beauty itself? Is there some pure, ethereal, Platonic ideal of beauty we can't grasp? Put another way, is there some value that transcends valuation?