You are currently browsing the daily archive for October 20th, 2008.
At their most serious.
The great irony is that I’m blogging about this.
Kevin did a great job breaking up four straight days without a single new post by me with a great video. I simply haven’t had much on my mind worth writing about; these were unintellectual, thoughtless days. Well, not thoughtless, but I didn’t think about culture as much as I like to. Sometimes I realize I haven’t had a really solid, intelligent conversation about the confluence of God and culture in ages; I used to have them all the time.
Anyway, Kevin gave us a great video of Louis CK on Conan who discussed Our Modern World’s lack of appreciation for the amazing things we can do. He uses the example of the airplane; I’ve been pointing out for years that, every time I see a plane in the sky, I have to stop and look at it and think to myself that we live in a crazy future world. We’re quite frankly capable of astonishing things; we’ve managed not only to tame the goddamn atom, but we’ve created an informational network that floats through the air and is pretty much powered by magic.
And for all that, everything’s amazing, and nobody’s happy. We’re miserable. We’re short-tempered, whiny, pudgy, fidgety, and uncomfortable. We can barely feed ourselves; if we had to farm, we would all die. We flip out if the power goes off for more than a couple of hours, and we barely understand how the seasons work. We’ve lost knowledge we no longer need. We carry around music in our heads and in our pockets, watch TV at our computers, and type into the void. I haven’t met my neighbors, and they live eight feet from me. We are very much lonely people.
Sometimes I’m a luddite. Sometimes, I’m a primitivist who wants to rip apart the modern technological society and go back to living in yurts on the Mongolian steppe or in cities dug into mountains and walled off as a defense against brigands. Sometimes I wish the world was still wild, less cultivated, still teeming with migration routes and makeshift altars. When we had to fight for our lives, our lives meant something.
I watched Harold and Maude the other day. A strange, quixotic movie, at its core is the idea that the generation that lived after the chaos of the first part of the twentiety century was adrift in its riches. We’d become a generation of useless, purposeless people, enslaved to whims and wishes but, in the great scheme, pretty much unnecessary. Not needed. So the Useless Man is an existentialist in pain, unable to comprehend the meaning of his own existence and forced either to acknowledge his lack thereof and just do whatever he wanted, or to find some way to struggle after that meaning.
It’s a problem that, in living memory, manifested in the postwar world, but it hasn’t gone away, and all we’ve done since then is filled up our lives with entertainment. I read and I write and I watch the news and I watch movies and I listen to music but I can’t really do anything that isn’t intrisically about pleasing myself. I can’t build anything. I can’t wire a house or make paper or wine. I can’t even dance, what was for centuries the most basic way people congregated. I have my big empty room with my computer and my books and my TV. I have access to the entire night sky, there on my computer, labeled and organized for me, but I can’t identify the stars, nor could I navigate by them. I haven’t gone fishing since I was eight, I’ve never planted a carrot, and I can’t swing a hammer.
What I am is a fountain of knowledge, useful and trivial, about all matter of things. What I am is theological and historical, a watcher of human behavior over time, a family historian, a catechist and preacher. But I haven’t found a place for any of that. I can’t in any of that find a vocation that doesn’t immediately strike me as silly or self-indulgent. I can think of jobs, but not so much vocations.
Everything’s amazing, and nobody’s happy.
So I’m something of a luddite, wishing the world wasn’t so much simpler as harder, when someone couldn’t make their way through life without having some clear reason or function.
Have longer lives made us any happier? Has automation made us happier? Are we better people for how much free time we have? Or are we existential monsters?
