Jam 2: Art as a function of Social Dysfunction
This one’s going to be way longer than 100 words. Why is it still a part of 100 Word Jams? I’d let you arrive at the answer if you happen to follow through the rest of the content that’ll be pushed out as time moves forward.
Art could be a function of Social Dysfunction. What does social dysfunction really mean? To an uninitiated mind like mine, it’s simply an abnormality or impairment, or a deviation from accepted social behavior. The focus point being deviation from ‘accepted social behavior’.
To give you a deeper insight into the background of this article, let’s take you through an excerpt from Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind:
Every animal has some kind of language. Even insects, such as bees and ants, know how to communicate in sophisticated ways, informing one another of the whereabouts of food. Neither was it the first vocal language. Many animals, including all ape and monkey species, have vocal languages. For example, green monkeys use calls of various kinds to communicate. Zoologists have identified one call that means, ‘Careful! An eagle!’ A slightly different call warns, ‘Careful! A lion!’ When researchers played a recording of the first call to a group of monkeys, the monkeys stopped what they were doing and looked upwards in fear. When the same group heard a recording of the second call, the lion warning, they quickly scrambled up a tree. Sapiens can produce many more distinct sounds than green monkeys, but whales and elephants have equally impressive abilities. A parrot can say anything Albert Einstein could say, as well as mimicking the sounds of phones ringing, doors slamming and sirens wailing. Whatever advantage Einstein had over a parrot, it wasn’t vocal. What, then, is so special about our language?
The most common answer is that our language is amazingly supple. We can connect a limited number of sounds and signs to produce an infinite number of sentences, each with a distinct meaning. We can thereby ingest, store and communicate a prodigious amount of information about the surrounding world. A green monkey can yell to its comrades, ‘Careful! A lion!’ But a modern human can tell her friends that this morning, near the bend in the river, she saw a lion tracking a herd of bison. She can then describe the exact location, including the different paths leading to the area. With this information, the members of her band can put their heads together and discuss whether they ought to approach the river in order to chase away the lion and hunt the bison.
Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. According to this theory Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat.
Harari puts across his argument that humans engage in conversations/gossip beyond the realms of the basic needs of animal survival. He further writes that ‘There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.’
Hence, it would not be wrong to presume here that for us the Sapiens, communication and gossip is an integral part of our day-to-day lives. And it majorly dictates how and what we see of the (fictional) society and how the society assumes and presumes us to be.
With this background, let me introduce another genius to this discussion. (Why do I call it a discussion when blogs are prima facie one-sided communication? Well, I like to hope that the content would raise questions in the reader’s mind and hence, would trigger internal discussions/questions & answers/conclusions at the reader’s end.)
Quoting David Bowie, the crazy-beautiful-genius English songwriter from one of his interview,
Being an artist, in any way, is a kind of a sign of social dysfunctional-ism anyway. It’s an extra-ordinary thing to want to do — to express yourself in such rarefied terms. I think it’s a loony kind of thing to want to do.
If you deal with my problem then I might not be able to do these things again, you see. I’m wary of analysis.
This one line from Bowie summed up my thoughts from over the years in the most intriguing manner possible. I’ve had friends confess to me that they find it easiest to express themselves via dance and painting. I’ve had similar experiences personally when I found music to be the easiest way to express myself and then here we have Bowie talking about this as if it’s been a no-brainer throughout.
- Are artists — independent of the form that they worship — simply Sapiens who find it difficult to express the depths of their thoughts in just words?
- Is art, for these wonderful beings, a tool and a channel to put across their musings out for the world to see and understand?
- Does art truly finds its ground as a function of social dysfunction in the evolutionary development of human communication?
With these open ended questions and the Sapiens’ ability to imagine fiction, I leave you to draw your own conclusions while I move ahead on my journey to find my own answers.
Though I’m past one hundred thousand miles
I’m feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell my wife I love her very much, she knows
