There is one thing shared by everyone who says Carrie Fisher should be remembered for her brains, and that is that none of them will be remembered for their brains.  That she was beautiful is beyond dispute, and she will be remembered as long as Star Wars is still selling and Slave Leia is warping our sexuality.  What she will not be remembered for is her activism or her attitude.  We could have hired any woman to scold Harrison Ford across a decade; that is the thing known as marriage.  But the glory of doing it and still having us want her belongs to her face.  And secondly, it belongs to her wearing a metal bikini.

There are of course several reasons why people want us to love her for what we don't, and the first of them is that they believe they are being substantial.  Tossing aside a series of "lesser" desires, they want us to focus on the "greater," and like the patriot who wants us to pay soldiers better than we pay football players or the pastor who wants us to go wild over church more than we go wild over baseball, the feminist believes there is something better to love about people than looks.  In this case, she is wrong.  Carrie Fisher won our attention by playing Princess Leia, and Princess Leia won men's affections by being attractive.

That few of us love her for her activism is true, and whether or not she helped the bipolar or encouraged some women to be feisty, most of us were left by her philanthropy untouched.  Had she written a treatise on political economy, had she found a cure for cancer, had she distinguished herself on the field of battle or even been the wife of the president, she would have kept herself in front of our eyes not as Princess Leia, but as a genius, as a scholar, as a pioneering scientist or a savior of the nation.  What she was to us – to us, the people with feelings and wants and needs and interests and fantasies of our own – was Princess Leia, and we are happy to have had her play the role well.

We have heard this argument before about many people.  That Audrey Hepburn should have been known for her philanthropy, or that Marilyn Monroe should have been known for her library – in short, that we ought, like in Beauty and The Beast, ignore everything on the outside and look at the in-.  But how many philanthropists and preachers and teachers and warriors and owners of libraries are there already – and how many of them are overshadowed by the Bill Gateses, the Jim Sinegals, the Winston Churchills, the Bonos and Francis Chans and Mother Teresas?  Our virtues, however admirable they appear, are mostly destined for obscurity.  We simply have too many of them.  Our talents, on the other hand, are responsible for making us famous.  Carrie Fisher's talent was not actually a talent, and for that we are taking a beating.  Her beauty was an accident, and because it was an accident, we are told we're being immoral.

To be fair to the feminist, there is in every one of us an instinct to be tyrannical – to decide, entirely without considering the happiness of others, what is best for them in the smallest of things.  We can see it as early as Plato's Republic and Plutarch's Life of Pericles.  And many can look around us and agree that our fellow citizens are many of them foolish, many more ignorant, living in vain; wasting money on stupid things when we know that people are starving; watching sitcoms when we ought to be reading some Tocqueville; worshiping the popular girl when the good girl is dying for affection, and ignoring all the nice boys because the other boys are building their muscles.  And the whole of this thing we call life leads us to the conclusion that if we could just order our passions, if we could just for one moment itemize the things we love and schedule them in order of importance, that not only would we be living in a very different world, but we would avoid many of the things that currently make it terrible.  In short, people would be good if we would love them for their goodness.  But that is not we.  And in a sense, we should be happy that it never will be.

This idea that we could be better if we would only get rid of the "lesser" desires has mainly forgotten one thing: that the main purpose of the better desires is to create a world in which we can enjoy the lesser.  John Adams said it best: "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

The key to happiness is that there is no "little" thing.  The enjoyment of beauty in anything is not a frivolous pursuit.  It is what we all need and want and love, and the downplaying of Carrie Fisher's beauty because we want to enjoy her philanthropy is completely missing the point.  Star Wars is what we got because George Washington went to war.  We got The Return of the Jedi because enough of our ancestors read The Federalist.  I don't mean to argue that each of us should spend our time focusing on the little things and ignoring the big.  That would be aiming for too little.  No, we train and polish our virtues so we can have peace – and we want peace so we can spend our time looking at Carrie Fisher.

Jeremy Egerer is the author of the troublesome essays on Letters to Hannah, and he welcomes followers on Twitter and Facebook.