Was It Worth It?

I'm reading Alan Watts' book The Supreme Identity again. It's one of his older works, and one of the best books I've read on metaphysics, because it is a very reasoned argument he makes, building up on some pretty solid premises. It's a pretty hard read, therefore, for both that reason, and the fact that he takes a lot of time explaining things, to try to make clear a subject that is inherently hard to talk about. I will also note that he wrote this while still an Anglican priest, and he admits in the intro that, because he was still "in the system" as it were, trying to match Vedanta and Christian theology, it is, perhaps, "somewhat torturous." Still I find it illuminating. Not a good intro to his writing, though. 

I'm on the part where he's discussing the Problem of Evil. I won't get into the arguments here, I haven't the time and it'd be better if you just read it (the whole book, that is), for I'm sure to ruin the argument in trying to simplify it here. But briefly, he argues for a God that, rather than being absolutely good, is the source of both good and evil (in the finite, relative realm), while Himself transcending both. Towards the end of the chapter he says something like how, from our limited perspective, evil seems absolutely terrible, yet, from the standpoint of the infinite, it is an integral part of the finite duality, and even the most atrocious acts are worth it, for the overall beauty of the whole Creation. He likens it to standing with your face pressed to a painting; stepping back, you suddenly see that those ugly shadows are what give shape, form, balance, and identity to the light and color.

Now, I talk a good deal on here about civilization and it's pitfalls. I've long sympathized with the Daniel Quinn/Ishmael position that civilization has been the cause of many of the negatives we see in the world today: war, poverty, starvation, disease, environmental degradation. These may exist at a basic level in all humanity, true, but civilization grows them to a scale unimaginable at that level.

So, has it been worth it? Much as we hate war and genocide, crushing poverty and tyrannical rulers, plagues and pollution and extinction...do things like high art, advanced medicine, the internet and global communications, justify it? I have a hard time here. Human history has been a bumpy road, full of inhumanity and horrors that we in the West can hardly imagine, given our plush lifestyles. No living American has had a war happen in their own backyard, we really have no idea. Though there are systemic problems, the vast majority of us don't know true poverty, true starvation. These things are everywhere in poorer places, a vast suffering of masses of people. They would still be living at peace if it weren't for civilization, close to the Earth, in communities where no one is left behind. If it weren't for agricultural surplus, expanding populations, and urbanization, there could never be slums and shantytowns.

But I must admit it hurts my very heart to imagine a world without Ode To Joy. Whenever it plays, I feel like I want to burst with happiness, and tears often come to my eyes. Or Starry Night, by Van Gogh; my favorite painting. A perfect case in point, actually; the man, like civilization, was tortured and half-insane, yet look what came of it! Or, appropriate to today's topic, Edvard Munch's The Scream; a creepy painting, yet it stirs the soul. What about all the poetry, the great novels and plays, the elegance of higher mathematics? What about telescopes revealing the heavens, microscopes showing us worlds within? What about the rush of foreign money and help when a disaster strikes a place like Haiti? Before such a thing would be impossible, if ever we learned about the disaster in the first place.

One can narrow it down to religion, as they did in one of the Intelligence Squared debates. We all know of the bigotry, the crusades and jihads, the suicide bombers on buses, the gay-bashing and abortion clinic bombings, the strife in South Asia, the Troubles in Ireland. They are terrible. But religion has also brought us the stained glass at St Denis Cathedral, in fact all of the great cathedrals, mosques, temples, and shrines. Most of the art down the long centuries has been religiously inspired, if not overt iconography. And what about the joy and giving at Christmas, the pillar of Islam that requires charity, the ideals of love and brotherhood, compassion and kindness? It hasn't been all bad, you know?

Tribal equality is a wonderful thing, and clearly mankind evolved to fit that lifestyle. We certainly have problems squaring a tribal mind to a globalized world. Yet, we have grown, stumbling, into something more. Tribes are isolated, closed within themselves, extremely conservative and narrow. Today, we have ideals of universal brotherly love, individual freedom and innovation. Such things would never occur to a hunter-gatherer, because it is born out of the long march of history, which has slowly built upon our awareness.

Is this all we've become?

I'm also reading Lord of the Rings (I usually have several books going at once), and think of the elves in this case. Immortal, they watched as evil first came down into the world, and watched as many great and lovely things died or faded. At one point, Merry, a hobbit, states that he has never until this quest been outside his country, and, had he known the perils that awaited, he should not have had the courage to do so. Haldir, an elf, says in his reply, "The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places. But still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater."

It grows perhaps the greater. The play of duality in the world is inevitable, and is what gives us joy and love, even if it also requires we know sorrow and hate. And of course, civilization is, and all this discussion is rendered moot by that fact. We are here, and there's no going back. Even if we had the deepest, darkest collapse from modern society, we would have the memory of civilization, would still almost surely continue agriculture, metallurgy, the use of animal labor, and other such advanced things. I doubt we could ever slide all the way back to the sort of natural tribal state that the Cro Magnon lived within.

I'm not sure we should want to, either. I've never been too sure about "spiritual evolution" but in some sense, we have in fact matured as a species. Many things have been discovered within ourselves that likely would not have been under the simple tribal conditions. We needed a more complex substrate, that of civilization, to bring it out of us. Emergent properties. We often do a lousy job exhibiting these higher things, of course. But they are there, waiting for each one of us.

To those of you who have read this far, I beg you to reply. This is one post I'd be very interested to have a discussion on, to hear your opinions and thoughts on the topic: Has it been worth the pain, to walk this road of civilization? Would we have been better off remaining stone age adepts, wise in a simple way, in tune with Nature? Or is it a good thing, in spite of all the hurt and horror, to have come this way, and to have found the more refined aspects of heart and mind?

Blown Away By Art

Sometimes I think its wrong, the way we go about consuming media. Mainly in the sense that it is even possible to say that we consume it. The sheer quantity of art, literature, and theater is ridiculous, like the world has never seen.

And this is alright, I'm not against art or the making of it; indeed, I think there should be more, that everyone should be creating art of some kind. But if I think about it, I can't name a single painting that has ever moved me to a state of rapture, nor a poem that has given me more than a moment of total sublimity. Oh, don't be mislead, I'm not totally insensitive; there are countless paintings that have held my eye for a good while, and many more poems that I have loved. And of course, songs that truly take me away; Ode To Joy always works for me, but music is a little unique in this, somehow it has more power even given the musical over-saturation we live in, so there are innumerable others I could list.

I wonder sometimes what it would have been like to have lived in the middle ages, when people very rarely saw any art at all. I mean, when they did encounter a fresco or mural or something like that, probably at a church or cathedral, they were shocked. Scared senseless by an image depicting the torments of hell, or carried away by a work showing the celestial bliss of heaven. Speechless and in awe.

I can't imagine getting anything even like that from a painting. We moderns are so saturated by the various media around us, that such an experience is hard to even understand. We're almost numb to it. We have hundreds of channels for today's "theater," libraries and bookstores overflowing with books, museums for art of many kinds... How perfectly ordinary it is for us to pick up a book, or jump online to explore, among other things, the creative works of the world.

Typically, as soon as I finish a book, I pick up another (actually, I usually have 2 or 3 books going at once). I don't give myself any time to digest on it and truly reflect upon it, I just jump to another. It's not to say I don't think about what I read. I do, usually while reading it, pausing to ponder this or that; but as a whole, I don't finish a book in its entirity and then think about it for a while. Part of this serial reading is the need for escape, for entertainment and distraction, but also because there are more books that I want to read than I ever probably will. There's always more.

And even most people, who aren't weirdo serial book readers, are serial TV watchers, or movie watchers, or internet users, or likely all of the above in some mix. So there's never any real break (add to this the way texting, smartphones, and the like fill in every "blank" moment, completely obliterating any chance for personal reflection... but that's a whole other post). But what would our lives be like if we did pause to let a book or painting or whatever-it-is sink in. I think again of the middle ages, really all times before the printing press (and for most people, a good while after). I don't envy that life, which was one of labor and drudgery, with long days and little time off to make or enjoy artistic things. But consider the case of religious belief itself.

In my example of medival Europe, there was the Church, or the stake. Few people could read and books were rare; by and large there was little option other than the Bible. The monestary libraries had other books, even pagan works, that they copied and preserved, but clearly the Catholic religion was monumental. People were given the one teaching, and most people knew nothing else. Maybe they knew of Islam as some distant, shadowy evil to be crusaded against (that is, they had a concept of Islam only a little less vague than we Westerners do today).

So imagine the shock of someone back then coming across an alternative view! Assuming he was open-minded enough to really appreciate it. Well, he wouldn't be racing on to the next book, because there wasn't any next book. He just had to sit with these powerful new ideas, would have to be floored by them, and live with that flooring for a while. His largely virgin mind would not only be more sensitive to the power of an idea, he would have no further distraction (aside from daily life) to drown out the message.

See, ideas today hold exactly as much power as they did back then, only, now there are just far more of them vying in the mental space, so we grow accoustomed to them, treat them as trivial. In fact, we come to crave it, consuming art like a drug; it's almost monstrous. I picture in my mind some horrible demonic skeleton swallowing books and paintings, never satiated, because they just fall out the bottom. We chase sensation, blind to the power of even one of those sensations.

So it's not that I wish for a dearth of art or ideas. What I want is that level of sensitivity. I wish I could know what it was like to look at a painting of some demons, which looks slightly silly to me, a modern, and see naked terror laid out before me. I wish hearing a poem could change my life.