Rating systems

May I stick with the ratings theme for a moment longer? Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of responses to the solicitation in my last entry (two offline comments! one of which is now posted, and one of which was quite kind, but nonetheless steadfastly refused to answer the question), I've taken your message to heart: you clearly want to hear more about numerical evaluations, the arts, and parenthood. I listen, dear readers, I really do.

So: who's heard of Roger de Piles? Glazed eyes; tired stares out the window. One student scribbles something with irrelevant vigor in a notebook. Well, de Piles was the 17th-century painter and writer who wrote the so-called Balances, an early work of art criticism in which he divides the art of painting into four areas, and then assigns important painters scores in each of those areas. Whether you agree or disagree with those scores - and part of the joy of his work is that you will disagree at times - the list is a fascinating project, and a window into late Baroque taste. Raphael and the Carracci fare very well, for instance. But Caravaggio, who receives only 6 out of 20 possible points in composition, does not. De Piles mocks Michelangelo's color by giving him a 4, where the great Florentine's use of line merits a 17. And so on.

One could do something similar, of course, for composers, or for musicians. We might try, for example, to assign points based on a composer's originality (Bartok or the serialists might fare well here), general depth of feeling (Beethoven would be the gold standard), or structure (I'll give Mozart an 18 out of 20; as de Piles wrote, no one is perfect). Or take singers: Sinatra, the consensus master of phrasing, gets a 19; Billie Holiday receives high marks for tone of voice. But don't take my word for it; after all, the fun is in devising your own system.

Which is what, in fact, a lot of us did as 13-year-old boys. Dungeons and Dragons and a hundred related knock-offs are, at their core, comparable exercises. Imagine a small group (small, since nerds are always a slightly endangered species) of teen boys, Doritos at the ready, choosing their characters: an elf; a warlock; a U.S. Marine. And then each boy starts with a certain number of points, and creates his character's profile, allotting, say, 10 to intelligence, and 4 to strength, and 19 to charisma (which is how, you can see, we lived vicariously through such games. The girlies would flock to our orc, if not to us).

So the other evening, with points and parenting on the mind, I thought I'd frame a question for L in a similar vein. I wrote down six basic personal characteristics (kindness; athleticism; beauty; self-confidence; so on...), gave her 36 points, and asked her to distribute them, up to a maximum of 10 in each category, based on her hopes for Cleo. And then I did the same.

I won't go into the results in detail, although it's true that L's Cleo would beat mine at soccer, and that mine would kindly congratulate her opponent. But it did lead to an interesting conversation. And that, really, is the point of such ratings. It doesn't necessarily matter, in the big picture, if your elf can outthink my valkyrie. And it doesn't really matter if I rank Bach's use of tone color more highly than Vivaldi's. What matters is what such rankings reveal about the rankers. When we rate people, we're really only making concrete our own values and priorities.