I am on the fourth floor of USC’s Levey Library. I look out the window to my right; I face the south – I see the Aerospace Museum, MacArthur Quad and much of the USC campus with its summer-school students - they look like ants at this distance.
I look again, and this time, I see a world devout of meaning but with a purpose – a utilitarian purpose. I see that every atom that we lay our hands on is put to use. The trees are planted, aligned and trimmed to efficiently provide greenery to the campus, oxygen to the city and shade for the students. The grass lawns are cut and watered daily to remove the feeling of claustrophobia in an urban environment. The red rock of a San Diego query has been cut into identically shaped blocks and placed on the ground with a repetitive pattern to soothe our obsessive compulsive personalities.
Granted, this is not actually bad, I at times enjoy the look of my campus – it really does remove the feeling of claustrophobia brought out by the city. But it’s the omnipresence of this feeling that bothers me. Everywhere, nature is harvested and given a purpose to serve us humans. National parks are no longer just “nature” – they are locations for people to escape the stressful urban environment in a “pseudo-natural” manner. Fruits, vegetables, and animals are no longer creatures that roam this land, they are our nutritional requirements – we farm them – we use them. And now, humans are taught in schools, colleges and academies to further our evolution – to be used as machines.
All of this is done by man and none of it is done the way nature intended it to be.
Before, there was an anarchic beauty to the world, things that were needed, existed, things that were not, did not.
Is this wrong? I honestly don’t know.
2 comments:
I have thought about this a lot, especially recently, and I don't think it's inherently wrong - quite the contrary - but it obviously became too disconnected, escapist and excessive to be acceptable or to continue along that path.
Was it right or wrong for Prometheus to steal fire from the gods to give it to wingless, hornless, slow and weak man?
Prometheus was punished for eternity by being chained to rock while having his liver eaten by an eagle.
Beyond good or bad, it simply is the inevitable evolution brought along by technological change, the lethargy, procrastination and superficial desires we all share, and historical events and society systems created in the process.
The death of paganism and the triumph of dualism separating body from mind, consciousness from physicality, probably did come too strong too fast.
It is good for scientists to learn about the world by disassembling holistic reality into variables to isolate, examine and measure to create models. Galileo, Newton, Darwin enabled us to leave the tyranny of superstition and gave us chances to have a healthier relationship with nature from our better understanding of it.
I think it is bad to use the discovered never-as-complex-as-reality variables and models the scientist develop to create artificial environments increasing the dualistic illusion in the process. Making everything so square when nature is wiggly (A. Watts). So lifeless and boring because our variables are so separated and limited.
What arrogance and self-importance!
A compromise has to found. A state of nature is not the solution. To feed ourselves and give us a chance to move forward, we need to be Promethean and transform nature to a certain extent; but it's like between choosing between organic gardening and waging war against "pests" (which wouldn't be a problem in the first place if it were not for monoculture) destroying forests, the soil, ecosystems, the water plate and probably our healths in the process.
Let's drop the attitude and accept that our variables are not sophisticated enough to be employed on such a scale yet. Let us learn from nature for architecture, city planning, food production, health, and so on, to go from a square artificial Promethean world to a wiggly Promethean world.
You know what the ironic thing is? I wrote all this knowing that I'm destined to either stay an observer - an aimless traveler, or to be part of this whole charade, to be a Prometheus with a wiggly twist.
The question for me is, can I truly be both, like I wish to be? Can I be the shepherd?
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