[First off, I am going to say, slightly off topic, that this five minute thing is really helping me relax through the day. I set my phone alarm for 9am, 3pm, and 6pm. When it goes off, I drop what I’m doing (usually working), and go sit in my car quietly for a timed 5 minutes. All you do is focus on the body, what you are feeling. You don’t try to direct it, or organize it in any way. Just feel i
What I am seeing come up, first, is anger, latent, hidden anger. What I am seeing come up next is how superficial my emotions have been. This latter element is bringing into yet more clear relief how superficial our culture has become. Left and right, agnostic, Christian, atheist, rich, poor: all of us have been infused via movies, music, the internet, and TV with emotional superficiality.
What is pornography, but an attempt to bypass the emotional intimacy that is the most interesting part of our sexual appetite? Even Casanova said that the most interesting thing was not treating a seduced woman like any other woman, but reveling in her uniqueness, what made her special.
And is pornography–and I would include here all portrayals of sex as an act of possession and conquest– not ubiquitous? Are we not taking a course culture and making it worse? I have dreams–de facto nightmares, although it is revulsion, not fear, that I feel–where sex acts become a regular part of primetime programming, where children are exposed to everything virtually from birth; where the ethos of the Simpson’s manifests literally. We are already largely there.
One sees people who try to be “deep”. You can see them, buried in Erica Jong, or “Into the Wild”, or Dostoevsky. They major in Liberal Arts: English, Spanish, Philosophy. And they wind up having huge nose rings and working in bookstores or restaurants. They have little to say, but they strike a pose.
I remembered reading some time ago, in “Meetings with Remarkable Men”, who the Turkish (roughly) writer G.I. Gurdjieff, writing in the 1920’s, roughly, thought all modern literature decadent. The other day I was reading the liner notes for a series of compositions based on his music, and came across this:
Although artists, writers and musicians flocked to him, he was often contemptuous of the “self expression” that characterized Western creativity and sternly warned his followers against “loving art with your emotions”. For him, most modern art was all surface activity: subjective, uncritical manifestations of the personality, egotism unchecked.Ancient art, on the other hand, had, in his estimate, an “objective”character that transcended petty likes and dislikes. It was concerned with the preservation and transmission of knowledge.
Now, this “knowledge” was not how to treat man as a machine, and life as accidental and meaningless. Modern art–and modern life more generally–is driven by the victory of the “man as machine” story. How can one but be emotionally superficial, when the cost of depth is despair? Have we not all seen the effects of modern “liberal” education? It breeds brooding, angry, self absorbed creatures, whose moral engagement with life is through radically destructive politics. They are driven to hate, and their politics justifies the hate. They are not driven to love.
My oldest is currently reading Wuthering Heights. Where in that novel is what Gurdjieff would call “knowledge” transmitted? It isn’t. It is entertainment, not altogether different in principle or effect from “Fifty Shades of Grey”. It is meaningless. It is just a story.
And that sort of thing qualifies as deep. I posted some time ago about speaking with someone who thought “life is a joke”, who was very consciously trying to read all the important literary works of the last 200 years or so. I would argue that most of the work in that period is decadent. The triumph of Scientism as a CULTURAL phenomenon has led to the mechanisation of the rest. Modern artists are fish out of water, gasping for air.
And as I say relentlessly, NONE OF THIS IS NECESSARY. ATHEISM DOES NOT WORK AS THE BEST EXPLANATION OF HOW THE UNIVERSE WORKS. Materialism has been falsified outright, but nobody wants to admit it, within the hallowed halls of our actual churches: the science departments of our major universities.
Spirituality is nothing more or less than becoming more aware, which means being able to first relax, then go deep into places unsuspected on the roller coaster of most lives.
It has perhaps always been largely so, but countless lives are being wasted even now, due to pervasive stupidity of our cultural and political elites. So much more is possible.