Saturday, December 15, 2007

The dead lay still in the cold earth

I am reading C.S. Lewis' "Ransom Trilogy", which are stories that encapsulate the writings in his book The Abolition of Man. He deals here with the de-humanization of Western culture by modernization.
We have become even more dehumanized since he was alive, having continued this trend. And we see it everywhere. Abortion is a procedure that doesn't even take into account in its description its implication for human life. We talk about disasters and famines in respect to their geo-political ramifications and in numbers. We don't believe anything unless there is a statistic behind it. We have become moral adding machines...and moral is about to fall off the title.
Lewis believes the problem with this tendency to dehumanize and scientifically explain or justify all of our experiences is the abolition of what makes us human. He believes emotion and sympathy are too vital to the human soul to always be validated by our rational side. This is not how we learn or live, merely calculating and weighing all things objectively as they fit towards everything else.
He gives an example of military units. Many units have a flag, or a standard, or an emblem that they use to promote a sense of identity and pride. During the heat of battle, Lewis knew that all the rational information in the world would not keep a soldier in the trenches during hours of bombing. (He fought in WWI). What kept soldiers there, fighting, was not rational; it was something far deeper and more simple. "Don't let the flag fall boys, forward! forward!" No scientist can explain why an emblem could stir such fortitude and emotion in the human soul to endure the savage nature of war for a mere flag, but it worked.
No equation can explain how emotion and inanimate objects bleed together and we feel love for a simple spot of ground just because our dead loved ones lay there for a while. But it is utterly human to experience these illogical draining of ration and intellect and emotion and passion into one another's tanks. Pure, cold, hard logic; humanity cannot stomach it. It has produced the vile dictatorships of the 20th century, it has neutered our poetry into a study of semantic domains and linguistic influences rather than just experience the image for what it is worth.
I'm afraid our culture does not even know how to live without someone pounding us over the head with our own soulish nakedness. We deconstruct our literature, we shackle our businesses with rate of returns, and we sacrifice our marriages for efficiency. Morality is the chief victim of this exchange. We no longer even know why good is better, we go by pragmatism.
Despite all of my criticism, I am all slice and no stitch tonight. I will have to think on this more until I even can think of how we could possibly change it on a societal level. We are too entertainment sodden. It starves a boys soul to be brought up on a Wii rather than on Lord of the Rings. A boy needs dragons to kill in his imagination, not a button to press to defeat pixels. I am unsure our music can even carry themes strong enough to change culture anymore, it is produced to maximize profit rather than to be prophetic. I think we are done for. We've burned the very lifeboats culture had built in to save us.

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