You know, I did not really want to write today. Having one of those days of disenchantment with the “art”, I felt no worthy pull towards creation or output. Yet I picked up a book today that just demanded I write. I could not NOT write, for it spoke of what I wrote about last week, almost perfectly, and I had to share it. Coincidence, happenstance, fate, destiny, life, serendipity. Pick a poison, for they all work with me, and at the end of the day their differences only boil down to an approach of interpretation. The more I exist, the more I cursingly feel the hand of fate to be my master, for so heavily she smacks me about that I cannot deny her any longer.
Well, last week I wrote an article on the nature of the pen, sword, and camera. I spoke of how the work of the pen shall be abolished with the advent of the camera, as the time for detail, nuance, and understanding have been traded-in for passive consumption and a general dumbing down.
Today I picked up A Brave New World Revisited on a whim, never touched it before, read the first one back in 2014. I was merely bored and looking for something to flick through, and anyone familiar with the book knows that it is closer to a pamphlet in size, under 150 pages, perfect for an afternoon skim. Sitting down and starting with the forward, I could not help but laugh. Looks like I am not alone in my thinking. Read on:
The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand–but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator’s neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.
But life is short and information endless; nobody has time for everything. In practice we are generally forced to choose between an unduly brief exposition and no exposition at all. Abbreviation is a necessary evil and the abbreviator’s business is to make the best of a job which, though intrinsically bad, is still better than nothing. He must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification. He must learn to concentrate upon the essentials of a situation, but without ignoring too many of reality’s qualifying side issues. In this way he may be able to tell, not indeed the whole truth (for the whole truth about almost any important subject is incompatible with brevity), but considerably more than the dangerous quarter-truths and half-truths which have always been the current coin of thought.
The subject of freedom and its enemies is enormous, and what I have written is certainly too short to do it full justice; but at least I have touched on many aspects of the problem. Each aspect may have been somewhat over-simplified in the exposition; but these successive over-simplifications add up to a picture that, I hope, gives some hint of the vastness and complexity of the original.
Omitted from the picture (not as being unimportant, but merely for convenience and because I have discussed them on earlier occasions) are the mechanical and military enemies of freedom–the weapons and “hardware” which have so powerfully strengthened the hands of the world’s rulers against their subjects, and the ever more ruinously costly preparations for ever more senseless and suicidal wars. The chapters that follow should be read against a background of thoughts about the Hungarian uprising and its repression, about H-bombs, about the cost of what every nation refers to as “defense,” and about those endless columns of uniformed boys, white, black, brown, yellow, marching obediently toward the common grave.
Brave New World Revisited (1956)-Aldous Huxley
I mean, he called it. What I prescribed based on my reading of the times and history, he here describes to us before it has happened, as it is going to come. You can see that the trend began even earlier than I claimed it did. It is perhaps, then, not even the blame of the camera, but the blame of those behind the lens. The blame lies only in our nature as people.
Film allows quicker consumption. I can enjoy a story over 2 hours with a movie that I would otherwise have to commit real time to watching. I can also think about other things, engage in other activities such as texting and browsing, and just generally consuming the information without attempting to gain real understanding. Does our mortal coil mean we are doomed to this ignorance perpetually? It would seem that way.
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This is also an interesting exercise–side note–in the creation of unique ideas. I felt like I was coming up with something unique in that essay. I felt proud, smart, like I had earned some insight through my synthesis of current events, history, philosophy, and the rest. But I have read Huxley before, albeit not this book, and I have read no doubt much of the same canon through which he himself was educated and came to understand the world. So are these ideas even mine? Is what I thought to be my unique creation merely my subconscious filling in the pieces of works already created and combined with other created works to get a new spin, a different take. Am I just serving the world by freshening up stale or forgotten ideas for modern times? Truly, none of my peers would read the book, so would not come upon these ideas independently, and so there is a strong draw to the idea that I am merely messenger.
I keep spinning down this slide and I do not know where I will land, for then I begin to get spooked out by the scale and scope of these things. Our ego says we create our ideas, but perhaps it is ideas and beliefs alone that shape us. I cannot remember the philosopher now, much to my shame, one of the H’s (but there all H’s it seems), I think it’s Hume or Hobbes has an idea of the self as merely an amalgamation of experiences done unto a body. Our mind and identity come to us from a selection of the ideas and experiences of the world being thrown into one body-pot and slow-cooked until all the flavors amalgamate into the self.
I said in a previous essay that we are as individuals just the great nerve endings of the unified human body. Perhaps though, it is more complicated–well it is definitely more complicated. But perhaps personhood really is just an illusion, and all we are, and all we will ever be, are higher values and ideas bound to mortal bodies trying better to understand ourselves through the experience of life. That famous hippy saying comes to mind: our brain is just the universe experiencing itself. This idea itself is not unique to me, it is what Anne Hathaway’s character cries about in Interstellar when she speaks of love. That only came to me at the end of the paragraph, another example of the subconscious being the true driver of creation.
I like to believe I am in charge of my choices and life as they come about by my conscious decision-making. Yet almost every essay I ever write has been as much a creation of my subconscious as that of my active mind. I get to points more profound than my initial intent (as exhibited with this essay, funnily enough), I delve into issues beyond the remit of where I planned to wander, and end up somewhere entirely new, a creation barely my own as it was written by a part of myself almost beyond my understanding and control. Many writers experience these feelings and talk of it, many artists in general, the feeling of being merely a conduit for something more, a vassal for the higher will of god, powers, creation, SOMETHING. Yet what if that’s true of the entirety of life? What if I am not a free person at all, but merely a body to be used for by higher ideals and values that exist outside of mortality? What if it is not that I believe in the liberal international order, but that the value system that created the idea of the liberal order believes in me, uses me to achieve its ends and aims? This laughs entirely at any notion of freewill and choice, it causes my ego to begin trembling in a deep panic, followed by a horrible calm. What if I did not choose to pick up Brave New World Revisited, but rather that these greater forces knew the inspiration to create that would be found therein and so pushed me towards it? This force would naturally be described as god by believers and the subconscious by rationalists, but what if it is something wholly apart and different entirely?
These ideas trouble most of us, as they call into question our fundamental understanding of ourselves, our universe, our life, and the way we treat everything around us. It spreads doubt-dust over all we can see, and so it is easier to merely relegate the notion to philosophy classes and thought exercises. I’m curious to hear if it would change anything for anyone, for I have real doubts.
Alas. Nothing is new, nothing is old, nothing is found, nothing is lost. It all just spins round and round and round and round and round, again and again and again. Another essay on nothing but gobbledygook shite, perhaps.