Future Shock!
Every once in a while, I get trapped in a maze of twisty ideas, all alike. No matter how many times I try to change the subject, or pursue other ideas, they all point back to the beginning. This is one of those times, and my only hope of escape is to distill what may seem to be unrelated ideas into a coherent whole and reply to it. In general, this post considers the popular reaction to and interpretation of science and rationality vs. art and intuition, and the perception of a bifurcation between the two. It also ties in with our culture of narcissism, Cartesian dualism and post-industrial technophobia.
I was about 10 years old when I first encountered Halloween. A ex-pat social group affiliated with the American embassy had organized it, and I dressed up as a bull fighter and went. As I soon learned, one Halloween tradition involves having one’s fortune told by a psychic. The gypsy woman gazed into her crystal ball and, perhaps sensing that she was in the presence of a sober and completely inappropriately serious-minded 10 year old, pronounced my future career to be “Scientist”. This psychic was no doubt making use of a common sense cultural bifurcation that sets art and science in opposition. It is said (by people untroubled by an understanding of neurology) that our brains are divided into right and left hemispheres, the former controlling creativity and latter in charge of logic. Just as one is either left- or right-handed, one is either left- or right-brained, which determines either your affinity for science and mathematics, or artistic talent and creativity. A left-handed person has difficulty writing with their right hand, so it follows that a left-brained, “science person” has difficulty understanding the mysteries of art. Or so it goes. Incidentally, only self-described right-brained people make this distinction, since such simplistic dichotomies are misleading and unscientific, but the intention is to encourage us to view Art and Science as having separate, but equal spheres of influence, one no more important than the other.
In the Post-Enlightenment Age, our culture returned to Ancient Greek philosophy to elevate Reason and Logic as the definitively human characteristic. After all, what else so clearly distinguishes us from other animals? It is clear, then, that the modern tendency to set Reason and Intuition in equal opposition is a reaction designed to give back to Intuition the respect it had once lost. Its not my intention to argue against this. A truly rational person must understand that logic has been proven (logically) to be incomplete via Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, and therefore its irrational to claim that there is no room for intuition. It would be foolish to argue against this, especially when you consider the important role that creativity and intuition played for the world’s most famous scientists and mathematicians.
I doubt that any scientist would deny that creativity plays a vital role in their work and would be open to enhancing it, but what a different reaction you would get if you asked the opposite question of an artist. Most artists, or at least those who consider themselves artistic believe that art proceeds wholly from their intuitive ‘left-brain’ and no amount of logic or reason could enhance their work. As I said, it is the self-described artistic type who disdains logic, not the logician that disdains creativity and intuition. Why is this so, why is there so much antipathy toward logic and products of logic?
I believe the answer is that, in part, technology is dehumanizing to some people, even humiliating. It makes them feel small and useless, and their efforts insignificant. It is natural for them to find a way to preserve some part of humanity from the ravages of the perfect, logical machine, and usually this is in the form of emotion, art, spirituality, hearth and home. These areas are out of the reach of the soulless robot, the automaton, the mindless cranking of machinery. We, no I, I am so much more than that, I am unique, and that is where the connection to narcissism is made. Intuition belongs to me, that intangible connection to something that no-one else has, it makes me special and important. Food is said to be better when it is made with love, which is something a machine could never offer. When learning to cook, we are encouraged to free ourselves of the mindless, machine-like obedience to a recipe, to follow some inner culinary muse that overflows with secret delights. Anyone could use facts to prove anything even remotely true, and being able to do that doesn’t distinguish you from anyone, since logic is available to everyone, even computers.
This defense of intuition stems from a profound fear of being replaced, whether by a machine or another person, so we try to reserve areas of human experience that are cut off from this onslaught. We are trying to protect that unique little place of specialness for ourselves. In colleges, its clear that certain people strongly dislike mathematics, science and engineering. It’s as if they ask themselves, “Will this set me apart and make people notice me and pay attention to me?” Mathematics and Logic transcend the individual person, which is disconcerting to some, so other roles are chosen specifically for those qualities that provide a feeling of specialness, even relationships. What could be more flattering than to have someone completely devoted to you and only you, husband, wife or child?
Or does this sound too egocentric and needy? This attitude also seems to imply that life is inherently meaningless. If you find it necessary to seek out affirmation and reassurance to confirm that you are valuable, it suggests that you are terrified that you are not, but having received it from family and friends, you soon lose touch with that sense of well-being and fall back into doubt and malaise. So you return again to seek out that soothing and comforting embrace that tells you everything will be ok, but in doing so, you have taught yourself that things are only OK so long as there’s someone there to tell you so.
Remix
Proton Radio just held a remix contest for Digital Witchcraft’s new single, Fingerpaint. Here is my entry, one day late — that’s called smart!
I’m pretty happy with how this turned out, probably because I didn’t spend too much time over-thinking, and therefore ruining the track.
Commentary
I moved Altovideo.org over to Wordpress, mainly because my host, while awesome, permanently banned comments on Movable Type blogs due to concerns over spam. Also, Movable Type is not open source, which is sort of an ideological and practical barrier for me. Gotta support the team, after all.
The happy consequence is that comments are now open.
Choose Life
Maybe I’m weird, but I’ve always been very uncomfortable about defining myself by my pop culture choices. The moment you say, “I’m the kind of person who watches these kinds of movies! Isn’t that great?” you run into a complete idiot with the exact same taste. Literature suffers from this slightly less, possibly because movies are easily accessible to those looking for a lifestyle to imitate. On the other hand, I’ve been in wretched conversations with people about books where the other party will simply rattle off a list of titles and authors, which is incredibly annoying. Maybe my standards are too high, but I expect to hear something about someone’s response to a book’s ideas rather than library trivia. Maybe this is mostly a good thing. There are six billion people on the earth, and who has time to get to know every individual who crosses one’s path? Media icons provide useful if crude shortcuts to understanding where someone is coming from. You can make a rapid judgement about someone depending on if their favorite book is the Gospel of John or The Fountainhead.
With that disclaimer, Trainspotting was an important movie for me. It confirmed for me the importance of marching to the beat of your own drummer and opened my ears to how good electronic music could be. While trying to teach myself Ruby on Rails, I came upon this post at comp.lang.ruby.rails about the guiding philosophy behind the language:
> As with many other things, choice is good:
>
> “Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a starter home. Choose dental
> insurance, leisure wear and matching luggage.”Too many choices, and people end up choosing nothing:
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail252.htmlSometimes it’s braver to say: choose this! Then to let
people freak out with so many choices.
But this seems to be a misunderstanding of Renton. He is complaining about the absence of choice masquerading as the abundance of choice. Despite the many different kinds of washing machines that one can choose, one cannot choose to live a life where washing machines are not required, but perhaps this is really a cry for still more optionality, which is essentially the cry of the Romantic Individual. In the process of realizing this dream, problems are created. What about the hordes of 20-somethings (30-somethings, now) who refuse to make those “important” life choices for fear that something better will come along, which is by itself a choice. You are constrained to never stick with anything long enough to “become” it. You can wade in the shallows of the ocean in that intersection between Land and Sea, but never dive in, because that would make you an ocean creature. This is called Keeping Your Options Open, and it is hoped that eventually you will discover Who You Are, but this rarely happens. Either you continue to keep your options open indefinitely, or you go back to relying on an authority (parents, society, church) to tell you who you are.
The problem is one of identity. Historically, a career was a person’s role in society and you didn’t have much choice about it. You either inherited your father’s career, or he told you what to be, and therefore what your identity was. You were a Smith, both as a name and an occupation, and in turn, society expected you to behave as a Smith, which means upholding your responsibilities and not taking on airs above one’s station, and these ideas continue to persist in society, as Renton from Trainspotting makes clear. The argument against too many options is that it is correlated with an inability to make permanent choices, but causation has not been demonstrated! The real problem is that, even today, if someone chose to become a blacksmith (or the modern equivalent, mechanic), they would be forced to give up opera or an interest in ancient languages. Despite the abundance of choices, a career as a mechanic comes with an array of cultural attachments and signifiers that one inclined toward vehicular maintenance may not necessarily be willing to accept. Some people may be magnanimous, especially when dealing with children, and say that a mechanic could certainly attend the opera, which is technically true, but ignores the social cost of such deviation. Imagine the conversation during intermission, or the next day, among our opera-loving mechanic’s colleagues. One sees this problem acutely among new parents. They feel compelled to take on the traditional dictates of parenthood, but is it because they believe its the best way to raise children? Not at all – they are simply terrified that people will think they are bad parents.
That’s the one advantage of the media-saturated life. Identity is so watered-down and shallow, that it is meaningless, decoupled from real choice. The more manufactured people’s identities become, the less personal they are. As you play the role you have chosen, you become aware of the artificiality of the exercise. The opera-loving mechanic tells his colleagues that he watched Monday Night Football and lies about his occupation to the swells at the opera-house to avoid the social awkwardness, but he knows he would never be completely accepted by either group. This is what is called the Underground – the murky underbelly of society where there are no roles, no expectations and no identities. People often fall into the Underground because they insist on violating some social taboo, and many simply wish to destroy themselves or some part of themselves, which is a very private enterprise.
No solution presents itself to me at this time. The Underground is comprised of a million isolated individuals, each living in his or her own private reality, having rid themselves of faith, trust, hope and love, the bonds of humanity that create interdependence, but mainstream society discards every quirk and eccentricity in its desperate pursual for the same. And I’m somewhere in between.