Moving Towards Utopia
Having been granted this body and this life of mine, it sometimes feels as if I should do something special with it.
Now, that seems like a bizarre kind of understatement, but here is what I mean:
I have come to certain conclusions about existence, none of which I hold dogmatically.
The first, most fundamental, is what I believe about where we humans came from, the knowledge of which we have a wonderful cadre of scientists to thank for. What evolution shows us is that we are contingent (perhaps frighteningly contingent) beings. Our existence is essentially an accident of the natural world.
From this, it makes sense to say that every world religion arises from poetry. Creative minds have encountered the natural world and given it life, colouring, and significance. They have seen something behind the fabric of the every day sensible world and have attempted to give body to it. They made dances that imitated the movements of the gods; they made paintings of the way the world looked before it was shaped into habitation; they sang songs of the battles that took place between divine ancestors. All this was done, not as a conscious attempt to "give meaning to life", but rather because the world simply did not make sense otherwise. How could one look up at a starry night and see that the positions of what we now call planets had shifted... how could a culture encounter the miracles of birth and death, without trying to understand these things in relation to the human lives that are inextricably tied to them? Poetry (in a very broad sense) is necessary to give shape and form to life.
Most poetic myths include the idea of a god, and because the idea of god has a basis in reality, the concept cannot be ignored when thinking of human existence. Suffice it for now to say that 'god' is a metaphor for ecstasy, power, lawfulness, or perhaps all three. In every culture with an idea of god, the very least condition for something or someone to be a god is that it is not a part of everyday existence. A god cannot be a human who holds a special place of authority in the culture - that is merely a chief. A god must always be beyond. The relation between our every day existence and a god is highly variable between cultures: in some cultures, one may eventually become a god. In other cultures, god is something that can only be experienced after death or perhaps at certain ecstatic moments of earthly existence, but whose presence is too powerful to be endured for more than an 'earth-day'. Other cultures make gods abstractions - so that what is 'Law' or 'Truth' is synonymous with a god, or what is 'Love' or 'Passion' is also synonymous with a god.
This concept 'god' has arisen because of humanity's recognition of three fundamental things: the possibility of ecstasy, the possibility of weakness and death, and the reality of universal concepts. These things require a little unpacking, so I will go slowly here:
Ecstasy:
There are some experiences in life which transcend everyday experience. Dreams, though they happen every night, are part of this kind of transcendence. These states elevate our consciousness in ways that are nearly impossible in normal situations like, say, when we are eating a hamburger (or a veggie burger). Descriptions of such states include ideas of 'ultimate peace', 'pure happiness', 'spiritual calm'. Some states (as in dreams, but also in some unique waking states of mind) might give us hallucinations of flying or transforming, and we may be able to do or see things that we were unable to do or see while we had been in our regular state of mind.
This rough sketch is meant to describe all those states that we may call 'ecstatic'. The main connection between them is their difference from normality, and this difference has often been aligned (especially in ancient times) with the divine difference, which is to say, these states are attributed to divine causes, divine beings, gods themselves.
Mortality:
That we humans are mortal, weak, and ignorant is readily apparent to anyone who is no longer a child. We cannot live forever, we are readily susceptible to harmful changes in our environment, and there is much MUCH about the world (notwithstanding the universe) that we do not know. This has been true of humans to almost the same degree throughout our whole existence (perhaps the latter two are less true now, but not in any important way). Feeling this, it seems inevitable to me that creative humans would project an opposite: beings that are immortal, powerful, and knowledgeable.
What I think is kind of fascinating is that every culture has a different reason for projecting the existence of such beings. For the ancient Greeks, the gods were how you accounted for the hard things in life. You could be tragically ruined like Oedipus Rex simply because you were mortal - the gods seem to be occasions for meditation on this fact, contrasted us not so that we could ever hope to be like them, but to remind us that we could never be like them, and that we should be prepared to face all the hardships of being mortal.
For other cultures, however, these projected beings are given as contrasts that are available to us as sources of hope, inspiration, or wisdom. They are beings with whom we can establish a connection that allows us either the endowment of these opposite qualities or else the possibility of coming into a state of divinity after our mortal life has ended. People ask the gods for strength to succeed in a difficult task or to grant them the wisdom to make the best decision. I think this is done primarily out of a recognition of our own fallibility, and because divine figures have the power of absolution that not even the most respectable human can grant.
Universality:
We have ideas of things that may not necessarily be found in everyday sensuous reality - mathematics is all idea-based, but so are concepts like 'beauty' 'danger', 'love', and 'justice'. We can only find examples of these things in real life, but not the concepts themselves (nor can we ever find a 'perfect' example of one of these concepts, because our idea of perfect beauty or perfect love would always be subjective).
To be a little brief here: we may wonder where these concepts are located if they are in some sense objective (beauty will always be beautiful), but they only ever appear when there are humans around to think them. The natural step is to say that they exist as part of a divine cosmos, or in the case of the Greeks, that they are the gods themselves (so Mars was not only the concept of war (what made all instances of war happen), but war itself (he was the most war-like of all the gods).
I think this is tied in with our feelings of mortality. We have an idea of what is 'right' or 'just' - but we know of no human being who is perfectly just at all times. Yet the concept still exists, and we are consistently able to identify examples of it when they arise before us. The conclusion might then be drawn: there is actually a god who exemplifies Justice itself (along with other universals like Love and Charity), and when humans do the right thing, what they are really doing is obeying this god.
Now...
These are the conditions under which we live. My question is: how do we get from all this to utopia?
Am I making sense yet? Probably not...
What I feel like I understand about the fundamentals of the human world (given above) makes me feel as if I have a select few roles to play.
The first and most obvious is: I can help people better understand these fundamentals. But that only begs the question: what then? So what if people know the truth about existence? The real question is: will they be happy? Or better: was it better that they were born rather than not?
I think we should all try to come to a consensus about the truths of the world. I think it would be great if everyone knew that we evolved from a previous species and that we could explain this process completely naturalistically. But it is not enough to know the origins of our species. We also want to know: what are we supposed to do now that we're here?
Along with teaching wisdom and knowledge (my two very lofty goals), I would also want to make life good for everyone on earth. Which means: I want everyone to be able to experience and create art if they want to. So long as teenagers are shooting each other with weapons in Downtown Oakland, this task is not complete, and I would NOT feel okay with teaching wisdom and knowledge to a group of people who only have access to me because of historical accident. Just because we've arrived here by a contingency doesn't mean we should continue to live based on contingencies. Let's work together to create a utopia that is good for all humans, and then let's worry about aesthetics.
...
Obviously that just blew up into something very grand, but I've realized that my mind and heart will not settle for anything less.
posted by Jackie | 10:31 PM
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