1
As it often happens moments of epiphany occur when the commonplace is suddenly shattered and the uncommon comes rushing forth to rearrange our perspectives and unveil our eyes to a different reality.
It was on a cool April evening in Montreal when one such moment awakened me to a buried world around me.
I was in one of those quiet states of meditation, some would call lethargy, sitting on my sofa, sipping on a glass of thirty-year-old Port and just about to engulf myself in the sweet vocalizations of Alison Kraus, singing ‘When you say nothing at all’, when my bliss was suddenly disrupted by a power outage.
I spent the first few seconds cursing in the dark and damning to hell the unknown mechanical demons and conniving circumstances that dared to disturb my inner peace, before I settled back down, in defeat, asking myself if I should even bother getting up to light a candle - if I could find one at all, that is.
In my languor I just sat there in the dark with my eyes closed when I started noticing the subtle sounds of everyday life that often go unnoticed or are drowned out by the immediate din of modernity, around me.
A distant dog barking, the hum of the surrounding city, the muffled sounds of talking and laughing from the apartment below, the wind whistling outside and the sound of my own heartbeat and breathing, were all suddenly thrown into my auditory focus when the buzzing of appliances and all other hi-tech distractions were removed and I was forced to sit there in the dark and simply listen.
My mind launched into a speculative journey into the forgotten worlds of a simpler existence and I wondered how many things I’ve ignored or failed to apprehend, over the years, within the cocoon of humming electromagnetism and attention demanding preoccupations.
We are all immersed in a pool of modernity that refracts reality and keeps us paddling in a perpetual state of liquid distraction, I thought to myself.
It is how we forget what is missing in our lives or, perhaps, it is a way of filling up the emptiness of it.
Here in the west we’ve structured our existence around appointments, agendas and temporally linear responsibilities that cuts up our daily routine into digestible morsels of structured repetition. An existence fragmented into time intervals, guided by digital precision and constructed around uncompromising schedules: ten minute coffee-breaks, minute rice, eight hour work days, one hour lunches, two hour specials, two minute commercials, and fifteen minutes of fame- as our life trickles past in between the clock-hands.
Anthropologist Edward T. Hall describes this very human state of being along contextual lines in this way:
“One of the functions of culture is to provide a highly selective screen between man and the outside world. In its many forms, culture therefore designates what we pay attention to and what we ignore…
…Closely related to the high-low-context continuum is the degree to which one is aware of the selective screen that one places between himself and the outside world. As one moves from the low to the high side of the scale, awareness of the selective process increases. Therefore, what one pays attention to, context, and information overload are all functionally related…
…The rules governing what one perceives and is blind to in the course of living are not simple; at least five sets of disparate categories of events must be taken into account. These are: the subject or activity, the situation, one’s status in a social system, past experience, and culture….
…The screens that one imposes between oneself and reality constitute one of the ways in which reality is structured.
Awareness of that structure is necessary if one is to control behaviour with any semblance of rationality. Such awareness is associated with the low-context end of the scale.†–Beyond Culture
Technology, one of these contextual screens Hall alludes to, has not really freed us from laborious tasks and trivial problems, it has merely substituted them. It has added its own layer of burdens on top of the old ones and now offers solutions to problems it creates all on its own.
In the process it makes itself a distracting novelty, at first, and then an indispensable necessity to those which have been seduced by its ability to isolate us from reality and save us from the effort of dealing with some discomforts directly.
All negative repercussions of technological innovation are, at first, tolerated as a price worth paying for all the possible and promised rewards, and then, as the detrimental consequences mount, newer innovation must be found to deal with them all; innovations with their own set of issues, which sweep the imperfections of the past ones away leaving us in awed appreciation of our progressive life styles and our human ingenuity.
Hall goes on:
“Yet there is a price that must be paid for awareness – instability, obsolescence, and change at a rate that may become impossible to handle and result in information overload.
Therefore as things become more complex, as they inevitably must with fast-evolving, low-context systems, it eventually becomes necessary to turn life and institutions around and move toward the greater stability of a high-context part of the scale as a way of dealing with information overload.†–Beyond Culture
Technology, after all, is an extension of humanity, a product of human inventiveness, sometimes enhancing experience and at other times containing it within manageable parameters. It creates a contextual and physical bubble around us, until the parts that are improved and then made obsolete eventually atrophy and are replaced- an extension of the evolutionary process, if you will.
What is lost is streamlined away or labelled a remnant of a dead, bygone, primitive era, apparently buried under strata of modernity, and creating the prejudiced assumption that what is past is inferior to what is present or to that which lies in an imagined future.
John Macionis says:
“Weber viewed both the Industrial Revolution and capitalism as evidence of a surge of rationality. He used the phrase rationalization of society to mean the historical change from tradition to rationality as the dominant mode of human thought. He went on to say that modern society has been ‘disenchanted’ as scientific thinking and technology have swept away sentimental ties to the past†- (Sociology 9th Edition)
Our world is now a seemingly ‘rational world’, a reality built on the Socratic assurance that the mysteries of existence will all be exposed to the prying eye of human curiosity and virtue lies there, awaiting the impregnation of understanding by knowledge, to be born.
Our hopes have been redirected away from the mysterious heart, away from myth and the mystical experience and onto the mind, the symbol and source of human reason.
Reason will save the day. Reason will define justice and construct paradise from hell. Reason will correct nature’s flaws and find power in the knowing.
Here is what Nietzsche, that incorrigible ‘happy pessimist’, said on this matter:
“It is an eternal phenomenon: by means of an illusion spread over things, the greedy Will always finds some way of detaining its creatures in life and forcing them to carry on living. One person is held fast by the Socratic pleasure in understanding and by the delusion that he can thereby heal the eternal wound of existence; another is ensnared by art’s seductive veil of beauty fluttering before his eyes; a third by the metaphysical solace that eternal life flows on indestructibly beneath the turmoil of appearances- to say nothing of the commoner and almost more powerful illusions which the Will constantly holds in readiness. Indeed, these three levels of illusion are only for those equipped with nobler natures, who generally feel the burden of heaviness of being with more profound aversions and who have to be tricked by exquisite stimulants into ignoring their aversions. Everything we call culture consists of such stimulants; depending on the proportions of the mixture, we have a culture which is predominantly Socratic or artistic or tragic; or, if historical illustrations are permitted, a culture is either Alexandrian or Hellenic or Budhistic.†– (Birth of Tragedy {18})
We are living, according to Nietzsche and using his terminology, in a distinctly un-Hellenic culture – we might even say an anti-Hellenic culture -, a culture devoid of any artistry and mysticism and in full opposition to any Dionysian wisdom; an “Alexandrian†culture completely devoted to the god Apollo and all that he represents.
Unaware, as we are, of the deeper tragedy and, as a by-product, the absurd comedy of existence, we exhibit the shallow optimism of those mesmerized by aesthetic pretence and of those who are totally enveloped by nature’s hedonistic guidance.
Our current western civilization is the ultimate projection of Socratic scepticism and offers nothing in return for its promise but the acknowledgment that it knows just one thing for sure….’That it knows nothing at all’ a statement of humility basking in the glibness of an insinuated promise that, if realized, will contradict itself.
Faith still focused on the unknown but now not worshiping the mysterious as the absolute unknowable which only hope and prayer can save us from but worshiping the potential knowability of the mysterious which only reason can save us from.
Contentment, in our time, is found in the mere act of searching for it. We place merit in this act alone and leave the mind dangling over the abyss of uncertainty.
A civilization built on not knowing but with the promise of it, built on the literal precision of language and its imprecise definitions – math being the most profound language of them all -, built on the insatiable search for things it is sure will save it from what it fears are inescapable universal truths and which ultimately can only anthropomorphise everything and call it knowledge.
We are certainly a culture that sprouted out of the decline and decadence of Hellenism, as it was exemplified by the appearance of Socrates himself, the eternal questioner, the relentless explorer of human frailty, the unapologetic defiler of artistry and mysticism, who now takes his vengeance upon us all for what the Athenians did to him and for what life condemned him to be.
In this rational culture, the bottom line is paramount and the efficiency and productivity of its parts comes to promise a brighter future within an Apollonian order and a soulless bureaucratic engine. Virtue, for many of us, rests somewhere in the near-future and understanding holds the key to human redemption.
The rational human mind has deconstructed the world of perceptions to the point where everything becomes a unity of digital information packets and numerical representation, until the underlying emptiness is suddenly glimpsed from in between theoretical quarks, mathematical formulas and vibrating superstrings; Apollo’s illusion spoiled by an uncompromising and mad Dionysus.
Nietzsche continues:
“If one person now proves convincingly that the goal in the Antipodes cannot be reached, who will want to carry on labouring down in the old depths, unless in the meantime he has also become content with finding precious stones or discovering the laws of nature? This is why Lessing, the most honest of theoretical men, dared to state openly that searching for the truth meant more to him than truth itself; thereby the fundamental secret of science is revealed, much to the astonishment, indeed annoyance, of the scientifically minded. Admittedly, alongside this isolated recognition (which represents an excess of honesty, if not arrogance), one also finds a profound delusion which first appeared in the person of Socrates, namely the imperturbable belief that thought, as it follows the thread of causality, reaches down into the deepest abysses of being, and that it is capable, not simply of understanding existence, but even of correcting it. This sublime metaphysical illusion is an instinct which belongs insuperably to science, and leads it to its limits time after time, at which point it must transform itself into art; which is actually, given this mechanism, what it has been aiming at all along.†- Birth of Tragedy {15}
And how many of us thinking men have not felt a dissatisfaction with empirical insight, and a longing for more than mere mechanics, for a connection to the eternal no matter how vicious?
How many of us have been left dissatisfied with the products of human understanding and harbour a secret yearning for ecstatic release from the constraints of pretence and illusionary control?
The demystification of existence has left the human psyche craving for more primitive nourishment and for a more basic life, for a return to an idealized past.
A past where predator and prey were joined in mutual respect and thanksgiving was the acknowledgment of interdependence and a metaphysical comprehension about our common ties and our underlying unity; a past where not only the limits and harmonious balance of self-knowledge was cherished but also the unbridled, unrelenting, uncompromising edges of chaotic release.
Instinct and intellect co-existing in harmony.
2
It’s not that our daily labours have been lessened by progress; it’s that they have been stretched out over longer time periods or diluted through multiple intermediary tasks making them inconspicuous and more tolerable to our conscious mind.
Doing the laundry, for instance, demanded hours of back breaking work in the past, whereas today thirty minutes is all we need - if that at all - to use the washing machine.
We forget, perhaps, that where the actual process has been made more efficient the necessary infrastructures still demands the same expenditure of energy, now paid through up-keeping our machinery or paying for the power needed or for maintaining the extra space required for installation and storage.
We might say that the essential effort required hasn’t been lessened at all. It has only been made inconspicuous through abstraction so that we cannot associate one action with the other, the cause with the consequence - money being one of the greatest abstractions of all as another form of mathematical transfiguration. Effort has been spread across multiple connected infrastructures, individuals and bureaucracies, giving us the false impression of ease.
One of the many symbolic representations of money is effort/energy frozen in time - the most important concept here being ‘time’.
We exchange our energies, but more significantly our time, for symbolic credits that can be swapped and substituted for objects or for the energies of others.
We then lose touch with the representations and as a consequence with our original intentions and our motivations concerning them.
This loss results in the thoughtless squandering of our efforts, in other words of our lives, as defined by beings in time, as Heidegger said, towards superfluous acquisitions that build up, over a period, into constraining prison cells we call our freedoms and comforts.
Modernity has given us longer lives and more time on Earth which we now mostly spend doing unsatisfying, superficial, mundane things or we attempt to distract ourselves from.
The entertainment industry and its growth is proof of our real contentment and our real engagement with life.
The system itself – at least in the west - is reliant upon the continuous flow of capital and the endless pursuit for the latest gadget and newest innovation marketing imposes upon us by ultimately making it essential to our productivity and social vitality; by making it essential to our psychological stability and its need to believe that it is living in the best of all possible worlds and in accordance with fundamental ‘truths’.
It facilitates this very flow through consumerism, as it is its very lifeblood.
This consumerism binds the individual to the system itself and through the inevitable habituation with these symbolic representations of self-worth it makes the mind dependant on the very things it once considered luxuries.
The automobile is a good example.
At first it appears as radical opulence, a representation of status and happiness, a toy signifying the joys of excess. Then it turns into an extension of self, a prosthesis of ego, and an emblem of our person. Finally it becomes indispensable, a practical accessory that is only noticed when absent, and then, eventually, it becomes another inconspicuous drain on our energies.
What was once forced upon us, through vanity or the prerequisites of modern living, becomes an essential element of our daily life and an unavoidable facilitator of our well-being. We then begin associating it with our happiness and use it as a metaphor for our affluence and liberties, an outward display of our internal contentment; bliss exhibited with steel and glass.
And gasoline? The essence of our projected selves, the nectar of our external manifestation, a magical element we speculate over and we kill and die for in foreign battlefields for righteous reasons.
“The theory and data support the view that the environment in terms of behaviour settings is much more than a source of random inputs to its inhabitants, or of inputs arranged in fixed array and flow patterns. They indicate, rather, that the environment provides inputs with controls that regulate the inputs in accordance with the systemic requirements of the environment, on the one hand, and in accordance with the behavioural attributes of its human components, on the other.†– Barker
We add luxury upon luxury to our existence and the apparent, immediate ease with which we accomplish tasks amazes us. The cost, at first, appears negligible and affordable. It can be paid in monthly installations; a few dollars a month here and a few more there until suddenly we are buried under a mountain of debt that demand constant interest payments and unwavering vigilance, creating stress.
The chains are locked and we purchased them with our own sacrifices and then bury away our selves underneath their promised pleasure and emblematic glee.
Lives lived beyond their means, competing with others on credit and sold for momentary fixes and the transient excitement of a new plaything before it is bypassed, forgotten and replaced.
Lives lived in pretence, associated with objects, projected in space, and acted out in accordance with cultural idealized direction and a social screenplay.
We give the most precious thing we possess as living beings, our moments, in exchange for credits, represented by paper notes or plastic cards or simply by numerical values and digital packets, and then we spend them on redundancy and triviality.
Then we sit next to each other in the subway or on a bus or in the movie-theatre and we rarely take any notice of one another, unless we are disturbed in some way.
Proxemics lost in distraction.
We drive in automotive boxes, listening to the radio completely oblivious to the essence of the world around us, lost in our thoughts and cocooned in our enclosed protective environments.
We wear walkmans, drowning out the existence of the surrounding humanity, and we sit there transfixed in our own, private reality with poker-faces plastered over our indifference.
“Is the ultimate example of what Jean-Pierre Dupuy, following Ivan Illich, isolates as the vicious cycle of capitalistic productivity, multiplying the very problems it pretends to solve, not Cyberspace? The more Cyberspace brings us together, enabling us to communicate in ‘real time’ with anyone on the globe, the more it isolates us, reducing us to individuals staring into computer screens.†- Zizek
Where is this extended global community technology was supposed to connect us with?
Where is this brotherhood of man? Where is this world of leisure this world of peace prosperity and progress was supposed to have given us already?
What we got is an electronic curtain, behind which we can now sit anonymously projecting ourselves outwardly wearing false personas- shadows on the fabric. We got digital inebriation and a world of feigned hypothetical potential, full of the possibility and promise that only a gullible inexperienced moron can dream of. We got disposable bottles and fast-food outlets to make our stresses more manageable and our indifference complete.
A multitude, we are, of the disillusioned, underprivileged chained to illusion with their adopted desires and sold on the myth of liberty.
This is how Nietzsche put it:
“It should be noted that Alexandrian culture needs a slave-class in order to exist in the long term; as it views existence optimistically, however, it denies the necessity of such a class and is therefore heading towards horrifying extinction when the effects of its fine words of seduction and pacification, such as ‘human dignity’ and ‘the dignity of labour’, are exhausted†– Birth of Tragedy {18}
A conclusion Marx, undoubtedly, reached himself –albeit from a completely different perspective - even if his cultured sensibilities could not let go of the folklore concerning ‘human dignity’ and ‘the dignity of labour’ which inevitably lead to the socialist debacle - which lead to the socialist, dignified, debacle.
The ‘dignity of labour’, especially, is one of those modern systemic legends that ensure some level of acquiescence and has mistakenly been associated with creativity and action and purpose.
There is nothing dignified about selling yourself and your time to another.
This is just another form of prostitution.
3
I remember walking in the snow once, during one of those wonderful Montreal snowstorms. The snow drifted peacefully in the mild air and I was enjoying the crunching sound my boots made on the fresh powder when I became aware of how utterly alone I was.
I looked up and down the street and there wasn’t a soul in sight.
Tall apartment buildings surrounded me, their walls denying me access and funnelling me down specific paths.
The only signs of life were the flashing reflections of T.V. screens upon multiple windowpanes; electronic pulsations against frosted glass; cubicles of contained humanity in an empty landscape.
Each window was but a few metres away from the other and yet a world apart.
It’s almost surprising how we can live right on top of one another, in such confined spaces and still manage to remain so distant and apathetic towards one another.
It’s a kind of counter-reaction to a forced cohabitation; a required indifference to defend against sensory overload.
Masses of people become mere objects to be navigated through; moving obstacles that mingle with the scenery.
The other becomes a bit-player in the movie of your life and the music becomes the soundtrack.
Then quality takes a back seat to quantity. It doesn’t matter what kind of relationships you have with others, just as long as they are plentiful and remain insincerely civil, just as long as there’s enough of them to participate in the events of your life and give off the illusion of fullness and intimacy, just as long as our consciousness is distracted from our solitude.
I once sat next to someone on a bus who was wearing a pair of headphones over his head. Completely lost in his own reality he was, cut off from me, unless I was willing to impose my presence upon him and face the consequences.
I was merely another complication for him, a part of the scenery, one more extra that filled out the backdrop, bopping to the rhythms in his ears.
Man hasn’t really left the wilderness behind, nor has he surpassed nature, he has only replaced hills with high-rises, rainforests with telephone-poles, savannahs and grasslands with concrete and metal and predator/prey interdependence with class struggle and cultural distinction.
Nature is now confined to exhibition centers or displayed in photographic splendour, reminding us of a past quaint existence forever lost to us. In its place the concepts of otherness, of the alien species that are both adversaries and sources of nourishment, have been taken over by our own kind, now distinguished through dress and posture; we auto-designate our presence and our self-prescribed value, through external representations of allegiances.
We simultaneously coexist within larger unities and smaller ones, fragmented from the main along preferential lines, through memetic fissures.
We associate with our own creed, our family, our friends, our peers and all others become the predator that threatens us or the prey we wish to harvest.
It isn’t genetic mutation that spots our hide but memetic mutation in an ultimate expression of autopoieisis.
It was that thought that snapped me back to an earlier time when I lived under more rustic environments.
I was but eight, when my parents sent me to live with an aunt of mine and her family in a small village of southern Greece named Geraki.
The harsh contrast to the life I had become accustomed to in North America made adaptation, at first, a painful affair that placed me in contact with an older more foreign and quickly vanishing way of life; a way of life I was afforded the unique perspective of an uninvolved outsider to, and which, in time, I came to consider charming.
Now that I think about it this perspective of ‘uninvolved outsider’ has been with me ever since.
I recalled how the neighbourhood women sat on the streets, in the evenings, gossiping and exchanging supportive gestures and advice as we kids ran about in play, during the twilight’s calming grace. The quiet breezes played with the treetops, as the sun reminded us of the days end with its decline. That is when I first felt the pangs of sexual attraction and I came to be accustomed to constant playmates.
There was a single telephone and television available in the neighbourhood. Both owned, remarkably, by a kindly old widow upon which we imposed ourselves from time to time, so as to enjoy the wonders of these budding technologies.
Sunday was our television day, when all the children gathered to watch the weekly favourite series, with the gaped-mouthed excitement of a rare candy treat.
Except for that technological treat most of the week was spent exploring the environment directly and using it to spark our imaginations into fantastic realms. We needed no artificial tools and electronic surrogates but only as sources of inspiration upon which we then embellished and exaggerated life into extraordinary proportions using sharpened sticks and metal wire.
The days were spent running underneath pine trees, breathing mountain air and learning how to mingle with nature.
At night, in the summer time, I lay on mattresses placed outside on concrete verandas looking straight up at a clear star-studded sky, drifting through its infinity before sleep took me into a different mystery.
