What Are We Experiencing
I believe the modernity “dilemma,” begins with what is more “real” to us as human beings. Like the nature of things, experience has to begin somewhere — in the implicit or the explicit.
For humans, perception pours in most saliently through the senses, and all of these components are first put into context within the right hemisphere of the brain where we feel whatever it is like to be conscious. This experience is then telegraphed over to the left hemisphere to be understood logically and then sent back again to the right to make a decision.
Of course, we are omitting the untold number of interactions that occur in the central nervous system, the micro bacteria of the gut, the hormones available and neurotransmitters that fire or are blocked at any given moment in this very general description.
To arrive at what it feels like to be human requires all of these explicit truths that we never think of. However, we wouldn’t attempt to describe what it feels like to hear a loved one laugh, what it feels like to drink a warm latte on a fall morning, what it feels like viewing the Golden Gate Bridge shrouded in fog, or what it feels like to hear a song by Tony Bennet in these explicit terms.
Yet, science aside, in modernity the explicit strives itself to become a priori to the experience of what it is like simply to feel, implicitly, via the phenomena that presents itself through our base sensory experience. In the modern world, experience, as a set of rational choices, is paramount to the underlying of why the event is occurring to begin with.
Modernity has taught us that experience should not simply arise on its own; there must be a purpose behind experience. It isn’t enough to simply spend a splendid fall morning enjoying the laughter of loved ones while drinking a warm latte overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, listening to Tony Bennet’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
In the media era, where a thing must be remembered preemptively to its happening, these moments must not only be necessarily contrived, but also documented and witnessed in order to be vindicated.
Modernity has taught us that these moments cannot be experienced for their own sake. If there isn’t some underlying purpose or logical explanation — if others aren’t experiencing it vicariously, and we are not experiencing their vicarious experience vicariously, is it an experience worth happening?
How many layers of vicarious recursion does it take to validate an experience explicitly before we recognize that our experience has become mere formulaic simulation? Not in the sense this reality isn’t material, but that its materialism is superficially constructed, enforced, reinforced, reinforced…By this notion, it is increasingly understandable why so many pursue vicarious, or alternatives to reality altogether, and abandon this reality that is decreasingly experienced for the value that it presents.
Modernity then not only ignores what it’s like to be in the moments, but because we are beings that are hopelessly entangled through our biology to behave as experiential and emotionally perceptive beings first, and logicians second, we double down on our logic by gaming ourselves into feeling that whatever we are doing is the logical thing to do; when in fact, its only purpose is to achieve arbitrary goals because that is simply “what we do.”
Meanwhile, the meaning of it all is omitted completely, or has, at best, become verisimilitude, the appearance of what we think true or real; a forced emotional experience born out of logic rather than vice versa. Even meditation, our way of becoming conscious of our consciousness, has become an object of modernity; something that has become monetized, incorporated as part of our rigid daily routine (an unopened app on our phone), after our morning cycle indoors, and our all-in-one nutrient drink.
What We Have Lost
So what does modernity omit? What traditions have we abandoned? Where are we at a deficit where we were once supposedly fulfilled beings, primitively content on foraging for readily available delights that satiate our need for implicit desire?
For myself, the most interesting thing about this answer is that I am in many ways only beginning to understand what we are not compared to what we could be. By peering into the early and pre-history, I feel as if I am genuinely seeking true spirituality for the first time in my life. My, and would argue our, knowledge of what we are not is thus very rudimentary.
In his book Master and His Emissary, Ian McGilchrist makes the case that a lot of this “abandonment” has occurred relatively recently and was first a psychological change. The book makes the argument that when the first Greek philosophers embraced reason they also began abandoning intuition. Before any dramatic modern cultural changes, our way of thinking of the world became a priori for the first time, at the cultural level, thanks to the introduction of reason.
Rather than culture arising “organically,” emerging from the collective psyche , it instead began to be decided, thrust upon its populace in ways that, at its best, seeks to unite the collective psyche, through mediums like architecture and art, by creating a sense of identity, understanding, and belonging. As this idea has progressed into the modern era it has been commandeered and institutionalized.
The (very generalized) trajectory this has taken is something like this: humans rely on emotion first and foremost in order to react. Culture therefore is traditionally structured towards the implicit, empathic understanding of one another — the truths of sensory Being. But as logic became paramount, our values for the explicit took precedence over our natural proclivities for sensory experience.
A Breakdown in Communication
Let’s back up a bit, perhaps very far back. To our best understanding, throughout the history of communication, emotiveness was conveyed prior to patterns of dialect. Indeed, this is a part of our personal evolution.
Infants first learn their mothers voice through sound, as a sort of music; we respond then more to how something is being said rather than what is being said. Language fitted consonants to shape the vowel sounds to become a “sophisticated” means of communication, one that is grounded in utility, but how much can it do to convey how we actually feel?
Sophisticated language, while an incredibly beneficial tool, could nevertheless be seen as something of a precursor to abandonment of what it really “feels like” to be human on the path to understanding reality logically. Even in speech we often do not know how to convey what we mean implicitly and we often use speech to mask how we truly feel at that.
Often, words themselves are not enough as we use gesturing to convey what words cannot in extremis. We also use devices such as metaphor, analogy, and myth to express what cannot be understood by logical dialectic based on empiricism.
Money is another large tool of communication that shaped the psyche into a more logical model. Currency is very relatively modern. From McGilcrist, “Before the development of currency, there is an emphasis on reciprocity. Gifts were not precise, not calculated, not required; the gifts are not themselves substitutable, but unique; and with an emphasis on the value of creating or maintaining a relationship. With trade all of this changes. The emphasis is competitive, the exchange is instantaneous, based on equivalence, not on relationship, but on utility and profit. Money homogenizes its objects and weakens the need for bonds, or trust based on a knowledge of those with whom one is exchanging. It becomes a universal aim, corrupting even the death ritual, and threatening other values as it transcends and substitutes for them. It becomes a universal means, including to divine good will or to political power. It breeds unlimited greed.”
Communication, as a means of expressing reality logically, reasonably and rationally first came under scrutiny with early Greek philosophy, the bedrock of the enlightenment.
The idea of dialectic through logic (logos) introduced the idea that explicit utility was a superior means of communication with the world; superseding the use of the sensory phenomenon, intuition, the need to feel about something. Logic maps the world objectively in ways in which we do not need to search for answers intersubjectively in order to find the truth of a matter. It teaches that we do not need to trust one another, or ourselves, in order to trust the games we play, so long as they are more based on rational models.
This presents a dilemma in that this is indeed a very successful means of mapping the world and bringing about dramatic progression on a global scale.
The Roman Empire was built on this philosophical groundwork as laid out by the Greeks. Christianity, yielding itself to the one true God, a singular model of truth, concerted the goals of this entire area of the globe via Empire. The idea of Empire, like the idea of God, rallied the idea of allegiance around one common goal, one king, one state, one God. This idea accumulated philosophies of not only religion, but science, and economies that eventually bore the Enlightenment. Western Civilization shot itself out its own canon, and its progress has not halted since, nor paused, to question its dominion.
In the Land of the Blind (One-Eyed Men)
It is true that our world has seen unprecedented and beneficial progress since the logos sent out by the Greeks, who began to listen to the voice of the objective, the voice of “God,” rather than their own. Websites like ourworldindata.org and humanprogress.org take pride in collecting and measuring the effects of these modern advancements.
But how true is it on the local level — where are the human scaled models that accurately measure human “progress”?
Elementary studies of neuroscience tell us that humans react, neurologically, to winning one million dollars in the same way that we do winning ten million dollars. This makes no logical sense. Wouldn’t we be ten million times happier with all these modern niceties?
Surely, we cannot overlook the advent of things that have become important to us in the modern era, such as some modern medicine or literacy rates (arguably not a great thing — only really needed to avoid bureaucratic quicksand); in other words, things that bring people out of relative poverty. The data on this is irrefutable when sized up to its importance within the modern lifestyle. But how do we measure its value within the context of its meaning — how has it aided our general well being?
Academia, and its intellectuals, are the examples par excellence to the logical deductions that this science of data collection has become a paradoxical dogma — the very sort of thought enlightenment imagined it was abandoning. Indeed, next to organized religion, there is no field that produces more unwitting charlatans the likes of say, someone like Steven Pinker, chief charismatic evangelist of the idea that things are “better” than they ever have been.
Again, it is here we cannot pretend that literal and material hardships are not at an all time low. We are indeed living in a time of enormous abundance, but at the apex of our species we are still in want, no?
Carl Jung once said something to the effect that the modern man has traded a difficult but simple life for an easy but complex one. With all of our advancements, our superiority over nature, our devilish perfection, what sort of Faustian bargains have we made that will, in time, reveal our suicidal hubris?
Pinker, an expert, a scientism elitist, loves to explain reality through a set of rules, and score the well being of reality with the help of precious analytics that are treasured like a teenage girl who has taken up astrology to spite her Protestant parents.
Perhaps it will be easy to understand this dilemma by using the logic of military industrialists, who use moral rationality to sleep at night, as example.
Truman, surely advised by an army of academics, claimed that he did not hesitate to use the atomic bomb, because the “experts” calculated that the two bombs, that decimated two cities and the majority of its citizens, under unspeakable terror, “saved the lives of 32 million people.” Why not 31 or 33? Turns out you can make this kind of stuff up.
Kissinger and McNamara counted bullets in Vietnam to calculate our win percentage; turns out we were winning up until just about the time we lost. Reagan funded terrorists to overthrow its governments and “enforce democracy” in central America. The Bush administration in kind spread its form of democracy by bombing the idea into people, creating a whole new generation of terrorists, and Obama followed up with his collateral-damage-reducing drones to clean up, and create, new messes yet again.
When will the Ken Burns documentary come out on this one?
These people rely on logical analysis to understand reality, and in so doing, are blinded by rationality to make “informed” decisions. When their calculations, unsurprisingly, go horribly wrong, or at the very least, very often, never go the way they were supposed to, they further rationalize their decision-making in retrospect, like Rumsfeld did when he explained, nay, admitted, “There are unknown unknowns.”
Of course, my point kind of breaks down when you realize these people know exactly what they’re doing to make these logical fallacies work. But even the the logical reasoning of the Rumsfeld’s and Cheney’s of the world, unbeknownst to them, becomes an unknown unknown at some point.
However, this only serves the greater point. These lot are able to retroactively explain their actions through logic and people will buy it, or not it won’t matter so long as the model works, and they will continue to legally rationalize it. In any event we will find a rational (and legal) reason to let it all keep happening.
All the rationality and logic in the world, while important to make well informed decisions, does not account for what we don’t know. And what we don’t know is far more than what we do, but we can never admit this, as it is a threat to the model of logic.
Blinded by the Light
Of course, this would be deeply disturbing if it were only our governmental institutions that were infected with this blindness. But this model replicates itself across society, it permeates the fabric of our reality.
The rigorously confident amaurotic are the people who run the world, they make the decisions that you think you are making for yourself, and they are a corruptible force against humanity.
Wiggenstein talked about science “reducing the human experience by bringing deceptive clarity.” Despite all of our modern advancements, or perhaps because of them, we have come to believe things are as good as they get because the data clearly says so.
But it is irrefutable, and no more self-evident as of the past couple of years, that our world has never been more fragile and faces more existential risks in the past century than it ever has in its history. We have certainly progressed; this is irrefutably true, but towards what? What have we abandoned on this path towards the light?
When I search for what modernism has abandoned, I find that our primeval ancestors of course knew all of this, though surely unaware of its ramifications. But their sense of awe, their phenomenological understanding of reality was not enough for us to believe it, we had to act it out first before we could fully understand their seemingly irrational beliefs.
It would be perhaps disingenuous to say that religion, story, myth have prophesied when most of the conclusions, these models of logic have produced, have been points of inevitability. It could perhaps be more accurately described that their source of intuition was more deeply felt, more immediately tangible, because they weren’t subject to what I am beginning to call (surely not the first), “Enlightenment Blindness.”
In fact, this being blinded by the light itself is a topic covered in myth. In Genesis, and more extensively, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, we see Lucifer, the bringer of light, cast out of heaven and giving this forbidden consciousness to man and woman as they were exposed to truths hidden from them. In the words of Lucifer, “Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.” The Archangel Michael then takes Adam on a hill to watch a whole hemisphere of the world unfold. Adam sees two men making sacrifices to God, and one of them killing the other, followed by all the sin, wars, disease and suffering of men to come.
Prometheus is another such figure who stole the fire from the gods to give to humans. Zeus then sentenced Prometheus to eternal torment for his transgression. Prometheus was bound to a rock, and an eagle was sent to eat his liver (in ancient Greece, the liver was thought to be the seat of human emotions). His liver would then grow back overnight, only to be eaten again the next day, ad infinitum.
Odin sacrificed his eye to drink from Mimir’s well, Urðr, named after one of the Norn deities who determine the fates of men, to gain this guarded knowledge. He also threw himself on his spear Gungnir, in a symbolic, ritual suicide and hanged himself from Yggdrasil, the tree of life, for nine days and nine nights in order to know other worlds and to understand the runes. We see Odin in the Tarot card of The Hanged Man, a being suspended in time, self-sacrificing, in order to gain new perspectives.
Nietzsche, the king clairvoyant of this notion that the enlightenment would take as much, or more, than it gave, was not only accurate in his prediction of the “death of God,” but through his fascination with Greek myth. From the Master and His Emissary (Nietzsche’s words — then McGilchrist) talking about the origins of rationality amongst the Greeks beginning with Socrates/Plato:
“‘the ambiguous god of wine and death (Dionysus, force of chaos, the god of intuition, feeling, loss of inhibitions) yielded the stage to Apollo (force of order, logic, reason) and the triumph of rationality, to theoretical and practical utilitarianism as well as democracy, which was a contemporary phenomenon,’ symptoms of the aging Greek civilization, and foreshadowing the depressing spectacle, as he saw it, of the modern Western World.”
In other words, the abandonment of intuition, of feeling, of empathy, of spirituality, ritual — the stuff of Being — begins when we decide to accept the explicit as the ultimate truth of reality, rather than sensory being. This was not lost on our ancestors, who could clearly see this rising dilemma, but it is tragically lost on us.
Again from the book, “This separation of the absolute and eternal from the purely phenomenological (stuff of being), which was now seen as inferior, leaves an indelible stamp on the history of Western philosophy for the subsequent 2000 years. The reliance on reason downgrades not just the testimony of the senses (what comprises Being) but all of our implicit knowledge. This was the grounds of Nietzsche’s view that Socrates, far from being the hero of our culture, was its first degenerate, because Socrates had lost the ability to trust intuition.” Nietzsche: “What must be proved first is worth little. One chooses dialectic only when one has no other means.”
Obviously, this isn’t absolutely true. As we know from my arguments above, even logical institutions are, by virtue of being emotional beings first, subject to perverse and dogmatic ideology, and it often takes great thinkers, speakers, and writers to back out of this trap, but as Jaak Panksepp puts it, “Although language is the only way we can scientifically bridge the chasm between mind and brain, we should always remember that we humans are creatures that can be deceived as easily by logical rigour as by blind faith.”
The Battle of Blind Faiths — How to Build and Rebuild
I personally believe we are at the apex of both of these notions. Where we were once “in the dark,” unconscious to, and led by feeling alone, we flung our humanity head first into the attempt, almost out of shame (clothing ourselves like Adam and Eve; hiding before Logos/God) into logic, hoping that it would tame us and cure us of our “bestial” and “irrational” nature.
But because we cannot abandon our nature, try as we might, we are still hopelessly tethered to emotions, first and last. What this means is we have merely adopted a new blind faith, with absolute logical rigour, in place of our “irrational” faiths and belief systems that are simply too outdated for our new models.
We feel as if everything we must believe implicitly must be first understood through the explicit first; collectively either amnesic, unaware, or ignorant that this is simply not how it works for us.
We have convinced ourselves of the need to understand explicitly, before we can feel implicitly, in order to make decisions. We skip the first step where we are impressed upon, and go straight into logical evaluation, and then forgo whether or not things have to be worthwhile in the end.
“Facts don’t care about your feelings.” This is the refrain of the moron who has erected idols of his own intellect in place of his intuitions. Clearly, we must abide by explicit truths, and the invaluable process of falsification, but it must be guided a priori by our implicit values in order for them to serve us in the end, and not us them.
Falsification itself is the notion that truths are revealed rather than discovered, and this requires an implicit understanding that the explicit is perhaps not so concrete as we may logically perceive.
To maintain a healthy environment, the forest must be cleansed by explicit forces, such as fire and flood, but its implicit qualities must be preserved in order for it to remain a forest. A forest completely cleared, though benefits may arise from its removal, is still deforestation; it completely devastates the former environment.
It makes logical sense to fell a seemingly useless forest for industrial farming. This of course is a fact that it will work, and it’s utility immediately understood via the benefits of the farm, but something in our intuitions feels it is not right to dismantle an entire ecosystem, and lo and behold, this empathic response has been proven correct.
Of course, we can always go back and plant the trees again, but will we?
From the book: “Human communication is built upon empathy: seeing yourself in the other. Cooperation is built upon mutuality, not reciprocity, fellow-feeling, not calculation.”
The modern world is built upon calculations. Its effects, I would argue, are pervasive in every bit of society. However, I don’t think we’ve entirely abandoned traditions as much as we have replaced them, thinking we have grown out of them, and thus don’t see the need to return to, drop the current, or adopt a better model.
Culturally, Modernism could be described as a Ponzi scheme that seeks to co-opt traditions with simulacrum, and then sell it back to its rightful owners. Again, verisimilitude.
One of the darker thoughts I’ve had recently is that because humans no longer care about the past — about who we are and where we come from — an outsider, say an A.I. (given its current trajectory) will in our place, albeit it unconsciously (it will never achieve humanness), could be more in touch with our humanity than we are.
We currently view the past logically, ironically, and our nostalgia for the past is being utilized to market things like fashion and art.
Industrial-scaled society, and now the Digital media, has metastasized into every aspect of the local community from food, neighborhoods, socializing spaces, our political halls and houses of worship. There is a distance and fragmentation of the bedrock of every sector of society in America that is echoed culturally across the Western world.
Reintroducing Imagination — Careful What You Imitate
Wiggenstein also said, “Man has to awaken to wonder. And science is a way of sending him to sleep again.”
To wonder is to avoid decay. Science is an observation of the process of evolution. But if this scientific advancement is used as a tool to avoid entropy rather than to align with nature, if man ceases to wonder, his exploits begin to create positive feedback models that corrode.
Because of this, it is important to choose models that are built upon a tradition; models that are timeless, but that can be renewed. If it is true that nothing is new under the sun, then we are not discovering “new” models in the way that science, as an institution, has led us to believe, but rather uncovering a sacred code, a model of the universe that has always been true and that is revealing itself to us if we are not blinded by its light.
To adapt a model we adapt a behavior. Behavior is rooted in mimesis — imitation. Imitation is rooted in empathy, by seeing yourself in the other. (This is why I do not think A.I. cannot, and in my opinion will not, ever be able to achieve total humanness — sensory experience aside — which makes it so tragic that humans cannot remember who we are, but A.I. could, again only computationally; which is why the call it “computer logic”).
From McGilchrist, “The overwhelming importance of mimesis points to the conclusion that we had better select good models to imitate, because as a species, not only as individuals, we will become what we imitate.”
I believe we have been imitating a scientific, reasoning, and rationally driven model for a few thousand years now. It helped bring us out of a dark age, sure. But it has led us into in a new one, the era of Enlightenment Blindness.
The mistake that the modernist makes, that of conservationists, people who want to end world hunger, who want to use centralized politics to fix localized problems, who want technology to fix culture, is that it can be done by replacement and interventionism. This is not how nature works. Nature fixes via negativa. It can only be done by learning and removing what is not necessary, what is not useful, what is harmful.
This is ignored at every possible opportunity by the modernist — except perhaps in the world of artistic abstraction. A world dominated by dreamers who no longer dream, and call their laziness “Impressionistic” or “minimalism.” Where artists are not focused on minimalism, they are focused on the explicit, on theory, on what works and what sells, thereby abandoning the locus of where our spirituality as humans lies most tangibly (feeling), and its sacred element is all but completely lost on this process of perverting the sacred with the profane.
Uncovering vs. Discovering
This of course all requires humility: admitting we are not creating anything, but rather uncovering, unveiling something true where we were once ignorant. This, I believe, could be the remedy to the question of free will.
From the book “All we can do is permit, or not permit life, which already exists…The word invention used to mean discovery (Latin invenire, to find). It is only since the 17th century that the word has come to take on the grandiose sense of something we make, rather than something we uncover. Un-covering, has built into the very word of the act of negation, of saying “no” to something than conceals. It was Spinoza who first made the point that omnis determinatio est negatio — “all determination (in the sense of bringing into sharper focus of anything) is negation.” And Hegel, who here, as so often, in the forefront of modern philosophy, emphasised the creative importance of negation. But the idea is familiar to mainstream science. The Popperian (falsification) criteria for truth incorporate the notion that we can never prove something to be true; all we can do is prove the alternatives are untrue.”
This is so patently trite and obvious to say, but it is true that our society functions and works — but does it function and work in the favor of humans or have we become subservient to the models we ignorantly claim as “ours”? The answer for me is unequivocally: no, it doesn’t function for us and yes we are becoming embedded as unwitting servants, blinded, to our masterful models.
We don’t need to begin again or return to some original form — though it may be better for our health, it is both impractical and impossible (without global catastrophe).
Hearing the voice of Logos is a monumental step in the evolution of our Being. But we need to remember it is not our voice, and the forces that we meet are not ones that we can dominate, but are forces to yield to. Likewise, we need to remember who we are, not what we are, and listen to the millions of years of hard won evolution and cultural values, passed on to us through our ancestors.
We need to know what and when to say “No” rather than take pride in all of the “yes’s” that deliver us into brave new worlds that we are ignorantly proud of. We need to defy our rules and laws of logic where they defy our intuitions. There are many better and different ways to do what we do if we are open to the process uncovering rather than claiming ownership over discovery.
Perhaps we are too comfortable with the way things are working to acknowledge our deep fear that they one day may not. Or perhaps the most terrifying thing is that we are no longer fearful of our ignorance and take pride in deceiving ourselves into believing that the choice is ours.
Everything is the Same, Nothing is the Same
Modern culture has created a homogenous currency. There is no intrinsic value to that which is not implicit. I would argue most of modern culture is cold and calculated; barely resembling the humane.
Everything about modern culture is by its very standards and definition, always replaceable, always new, but never unique enough to ground itself in the implicit. Everything is competitive, hardly anything is relational, mutual, reciprocal.
Modernism, and it’s globalist conceits, is a universal aim, ignorant of humanity, destroying true multiculturalism, indoctrinating our young. When we are born, we are immediately subjected to rules and regulations.
We establish the circadian rhythms of our infants in the dark isolation of secluded bedrooms because we read it in a book written by (childless) parenting experts, inside our A/C controlled suburban home, located in some far corner of the cul de sac, away from the sounds of humans going about whatever remains of the semblance of community.
Our early years of learning are done between time constrained blocks under phosphorescent lighting, modeled after prison schedules, with Pavlovian bells telling us when to start and stop thinking. The curriculum is all memorization and repetition, not allowing playful room for those who are functionally smarter than those who test well at intelligence quotients.
Our first interactions of intimacy are now done on free pornographic websites, biasing our view of one another as objects, and if we do engage in social interaction during this age, it is via our edited interpretation of who we are presenting ourselves to be on online media profiles.
This all simultaneously reinforces a sense of solipsism, while also forcing us to continue to seek comfort in digital relationships, where positive reinforcement is quantified through false meritocratic models of likes and shares.
Christianity, the West’s parent religion and bedrock of the Enlightenment, under the influence of its own objectivism, has sought to remove every bit of itself that explicitly signals “human.” It is, of course, still helplessly human, but is no longer outwardly and intersubjectively beautiful.
Where we once used the finest masons to instill a sense of awe right within the community, we now place “campuses” on grounds that resemble corporate offices. Oftentimes the churches are literally placed in industrial parks or strip malls, where churches compete with one another with advertisements, marketing what kind of experience you’ll be getting. “Thrive church,” “Faith Church.” Within walking distance of this divine impartation is a ten-minute tan. Buildings that used to be the focal or high point of the community are now indistinguishable from Target.
Divine impartation has itself become blurred with the world outside as models of capitalism, marketing, and influencing have replaced the dire and desperate sanctuary for souls in need of grace. It now uses LED lights instead of stained glass and contemporary songs (under time constraints) instead of hymns. It kept the stage for performance, but stripped it bare of anything that resembles the liturgical, i.e. the outward expression of inward feeling. Electric instruments lay strewn about where candles and pulpit once were, it kept communion, but, please, please, call it anything but religion; lest it resemble anything ritualistic, anything human, anything beautiful. (We are created in the image of our maker after all, aren’t we? Then why do we seek to hide his thumbprint?)
Back to carnal relationships. Modern mating rituals are increasingly done without the senses as well. Pheromones, vocal timbre, body temperature are no longer exchanged at first sight, but often through electromagnetic pulses and blue light. These platforms strive at all costs to bring us together by keeping us as far away from each other as possible. Love and longing therefore is corrupted before it can even begin and substituted for (important but misdirected) games of desire and lust. It is hard enough to get to know someone with the filter of the ego, but now ego is given the full platform. When (given that you are looking for “love”) you are looking for a partner online — are you attracted to who they “really” are? Or who they are presenting/want you to know? Or who you think they want you to know? Or who they think you think they want you to know? Or…
We’ve replaced our downtowns and village squares with, again, social media. Our healthcare and systems chronically create more problems than they solve by palliating rather than curing, violating their hippocratic oath of primum non nocere, “First, do no harm.”
Our cities are lined with miles of tar roadways that have replaced beautiful human scaled stone streets with transportation that mangles and kills tens of thousands of people a year. Our elderly (who cannot operate these vehicles) spend the last years of their life afraid to go beyond their homes and, because of this immobilization, become an inconvenience to their closest loved ones. Turns out relational proximity is as literal as it is figurative. They are then sent not to the care of their immediate or extended families in old age (familial intimacy very discouraged in modernity), but in the hands of immigrants, who perform the jobs we won’t, in nursing homes. When death finally arrives, it is not the glorious ritual of worship and awe, but an ordeal that resembles scenes from Kafka, becoming a matter of forms, fees, and bureaucratic regulations; one final attempt by our unseen one eyed king to steal from the blind.
Modernism: The Most Successful Con
Modernism threatens all of our values as it substitutes and renders them subservient to its cause. Much like Rumsfeld and his tangled web of unknowns, instead of accepting the existence of the unknown, we place our beliefs in the goodwill of markets in place of community, corporations in place of faith, political parties over local counsel, while our jobs take priority over our health and family.
Modernism has become a universal means, including to divine goodwill or to political power. It breeds unlimited greed while abandoning those who rely on it. It is at all times somewhere else. Tirelessly seeking to abandon what Heidegger termed “Dasein” — being there or presence. For Heidegger, Dasein is the primal nature of being. Not quite subjective, or implicit, nor fully immersed in the objective, or explicit, but relying on both to comprise a sense of wholeness.
I began this essay by speaking about our perceptual awareness as it being a form of unawareness — we perform roles for their explicit value rather than their implicit meaning. This role playing, the act of simulating an experience, in and of itself, is not something detrimental to our experience. In fact quite the opposite and it actually reveals our true nature.
As we saw with Wittgenstein, we crave this sense of wonder. There is a reason why families and adults alike, seeking to shirk off the endless daily mundane of modern living, seek out fantastical experiences in domains such as Disneyland. They think this is a world that we can enter but are required to return from. But they are indeed seeking out something horribly amiss, something they long for when they return home; a sort of role playing in a city that is built on the human scale; a sense of Dasein, a sense of wholeness.
There is a sense that with everything we do, in the modern era, is superficially imitated; which makes it all the more tragic that what we choose to imitate is a reality that is as dull as humanly possible, simply because it logically makes the most sense. This leads to cities that we despise and don’t feel a belonging to or ownership over. They are repetitive, isolating, alienating, and impossible to maneuver. You are not connected to your neighbors, your grocers — any goods and services you are seeking are miles away and are run by people states away and worked by people that would rather you not be there, much less form a working relationship with you.
Perpetual complacency forces our youths to become either submissive, suppress their instincts, or become constantly punished for rebelling against this reality. Most peers talk about how they cannot wait to leave the place they are only to find an equally inhabitable city elsewhere, where the seek hazing rituals in college towns where boys abuse other boys, that have replaced the coming of age rituals in which real trials test the will of a man.
In the time between coming of age and leaving the house, they seek to defy, deface, and destruct; to make a mockery of what they are forced to accept and respect. Who would not want to make a mockery of the pathetic attempts of any municipality that seeks to do their bare minimum for its culture. These small town bureaucrats whose job it is to suck up to the county, who appeals to the state, whose appeal to the federal government ends in appeals back into the community, whose own function to convince us that this perpetual positive feedback loop, that ignores our best interest, is in our best interest.
Whatever money does go back into the local community usually goes towards corporate shopping centers that maintain the status quo by quelling any local culture, and by inviting tourists to stop at its cheap attractions and consumerist malls, rather than investing back into the interests of those who inhabit the place that rejects them; the place we’re supposed to call home.
If You Made It This Far
In part. 2 of this series we will dive deeper into Being. Exploring further how modern culture is in need of a greater understanding of our nature in the way presented by Heidegger’s Dasein. We must understand that we are beings helplessly entangled with sensory phenomenon, constantly striving to make logical sense of it all, yielding to the objective, to Logos, and then taking into account the array of possibilities in which we could arrive at a decision and saying, “No” to the ones that rob of us of our humanity.
Modernism seeks to rob us of our humanity by side-stepping our emotions, forcing logical decisions without taking into account how it will affect us, and then forcibly claiming that this is the only way, simply because it is the only way we have come to know, as all our our traditions, everything beautiful about culture, has been consigned to oblivion; everything all but forgotten.
How long will it take before we have forgotten everything?
