9. Blind
Willy Wordsworth and the Scar’borg Blues Machine
Over my
decades-long personal meditation on human relations with technology,
I’ve occupied many positions. In my teens and early twenties, I
suppose like a lot of people with an appreciation of natural beauty
combined with a growing awareness of the environmental costs of
industrial society, my thoughts tended toward the easy demonization
of technology and the equally easy nature/technology dichotomy. This
was, and for many still is, a comfortable position. It allowed me to
distance myself from the worst excesses of industrialization—excesses
from which I continue to benefit—while at the same time maintaining
a sense of integral humanity bound up with a notion of actual or
potential purity. It allowed me to create a narrative in which I, and
by extension everyone, was navigating a world of traps and illusions
threatening to tempt us away from our essential selves. Especially
after discovering the poetry of William Wordsworth and the other
English Romantics, these thoughts took up much of the bus and subway
commute between the apartment I shared with my father and sister in
Scarborough and the University of Toronto’s downtown campus, where
I was pursuing an undergraduate degree.
Riding
the Bloor line in from Warden Station, feeling in my waking gut the
rhythm of wheels on rails and the rocking of the subway car—crush
of rush-hour commuters and smells of coffee and cigarette-breath—I'd
vacillate between losing myself in reading and losing myself out the
window: “Nature never did betray / the heart that loved her,” a
screen of low earth embankments rising to a concrete cave mouth,
“well pleased to recognize / In nature and the strange language of
the sense, / The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, / The
guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being,”
pillars and tracks, pillars and tracks, pillars and tracks, “In
darkness and amid the many shapes / Of joyless daylight.” It's easy
to imagine oneself an outsider in a great machine, inside an alien
imposed clockwork architecture at odds with the impulses of blood and
instinct, aspiration and vision—to feel ourselves swallowed by
systems within which we live and think. It was simple and comforting
to not see these systems as reflections of humanity and humanity as a
reflection of these systems, to imagine that there was something more
integral to memories of long paddles in northern marshland or hikes
through wooded October hills than to these daily commutes into the
heart of the city—or rather, as I archetyped it, The City.
But what
were the systems of thought and perception that had set the fault
line for such an intimate fracture in my psyche? How, as a young
adult, had I come to feel so isolated within the very world in which
I moved? Well, as so often happens when we look at the roots of our
thoughts, the answer comes down to myth. We live, after all, in a
world of myth—we see through myth, think through myth, aspire
through myth—and whether we like it or not, doing otherwise may be
impossible for us. Myth is the narrative, sometimes changeable and
sometimes ossified, underlying the stories we tell ourselves about
who we think we are. In my case, the main two myths were, in my
informal nomenclature, the Myth of Human Purity and the Myth of
Radical Individuality.
There
are many ways of approaching the Myth of Human Purity, so for the
sake of brevity I'll refer to the version that has exerted the
greatest influence on my society: that underlying the Abrahamic
religions. According to Genesis 1:27, Yahweh made humans “in his
image” as the pinnacle of his six-day creation. According to the
myth, we were created last and best; there is something of the divine
in us that sets us above the rest of the world both animate and
inanimate. This Myth of Purity leads logically to a subordinate
motif, The Myth of Dominion, which incidentally receives a most
influential articulation in the next verse of Genesis: “God blessed
them and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the
earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and
over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves
upon the earth.'” The gist of these two bits of scripture is
arguably this:
- Humans are different from, and superior to, the rest of the world.
- This difference, rooted in superiority, gives us authority over the world.
- The quality that defines our difference is non-physical, but arises from a transcendent source.
- Human distinctness is thus absolute.
- Therefore, insofar as the world or things of the world exert power over us, our non-physical essence is at risk of corruption.
As this
is not a theology blog, my purpose is not to go into the finer points
of the argument. Rather, it is to try to understand the effect that
such thinking had on the development of my own psyche. And as near as
I can tell decades after the fact, the effect was to set the fault
line mentioned above. To see myself, and thus humanity, as beings
distinct from the context for our flesh-and-blood existence was to
see, or at least assume, an unbridgeable gap—an absolute set of
categories that set us apart from everything else. And the more years
went by, the lonelier our position on one side of that binary seemed:
the deeper the chasm separating my psyche from the rest of the world
grew. It is difficult to articulate how absolute that division
appeared—how far outside the world that notion of special creation
seemed to place us. And it is similarly difficult to articulate the
spiritual consequences of positing the human as the subject, and
everything else as the object, of both observation and thought.
Whatever else the world becomes in this view—and there are many
interesting arguments on the subject—it becomes, from a human
perspective, an external means to an end.
As for
the Myth of Radical Individuality, its fullest articulation is rooted
in the Western Philosophical tradition, most especially in the
political philosophy of the European Enlightenment, and can be summed
up as follows. The quality that distinguishes humans from all other
living beings is reason, or maybe we should call it Reason. Because
we alone among temporal beings possess Reason, we alone possess Free
Will, so while plants undertake no action at all, and other animals
act only on desire and will, or on instinct, we, because we can think
about cause and effect, can imagine the consequences of our actions,
and can hold ourselves in mind as object of thought (i.e. we have
self-awareness), are unique among living things. We alone have
identities, and we alone are capable of moral and thus immoral
actions. We alone are capable of acting with purpose and of choosing
to align ourselves with purposes outside of ourselves. Our identities
in this quick sketch are rooted in Reason, and thus we alone, as
self-contained freely willing beings, are responsible for them. In
this conception, Reason gives us a means to know and affect the world
through conscious thought and action, but it also lets us know that
we are separate from what we perceive and affect. There is Nature,
and there is Us. And within Us, there are Self and Other. These two
myths combine, I think, to form a context for profound alienation. We
are in the world, as the saying goes, but not of it. We are superior
to it, and yet subject to its forces—spiritually and intellectually
above and yet materially embedded.
The
Romantic conception of Nature expressed here through Wordsworth is
one attempt to overcome this alienation. Wordsworth proposes—and he
is not the first to do so—an understanding of human consciousness
in which the Nature we perceive, occurring as it does in our own
minds, is a combination of objective reality and subjective
experience. He proposes as well that Nature is not merely a neutral
field of data or worse, the face of a sinful, fallen world, but
rather the source of our moral and spiritual being. It is from Nature
that we learn the organic and intertwining relationships of things,
and from nature that we learn how to attune ourselves to those
relationships and thus place ourselves, with all of our subjectivity,
into a broader living web of ever-expanding connections. Through
contemplating the logic and texture of our unique experience of
objective reality, we become able to understand others' uniqueness as
well and thus become, or at least have the opportunity to become,
empathetic moral beings.
For this
reason, I suppose it's unsurprising that a young man already inclined
toward alienation through both temperament and experience might, when
first encountering Wordsworth and contrasting his thought to the
myths of Purity and Radical Individuality, come to experience The
City as an alienating construct. Inclined by the overt mythology and
covert assumptions of post-Christian society, his eyes looked out at
the world as an object to which his conscious being gave him
superiority—as something above which he could hold himself even as
he worked his way through it. He maintained an unexamined distinction
between mind and body, seeing his individuality as rooted in the
former, often to the extent that mind could hold itself aloof from
flesh through rationality and self-discipline. Questions of personal
virtue were non-physical questions that had to be answered in the
isolation of the intellect. And then, while living across the street
from a housing project and immersing himself daily in the stink and
grind of public transit, along came Wordsworth to tell him that the
environment in which he lived, itself a product of that disembodied
dominating rationality, was divorced even from worldly Nature and
thus doubly corrosive to his spiritual and moral being.
Well,
fuck.
But why,
then, was it always a little exciting when, just west from Warden
Station, the subway plunged from above-ground to below-ground? Why
did that sudden darkness always feel like a homecoming?
There is
truth in darkness. The choice to use light as a metaphor for truth is
culturally driven, probably pragmatic—certainly a function of the
fact that our brains devote more space to processing visual
information than they devote to the other four generally recognized
senses combined: where we might see The Light, a dolphin might hear
The Sound. But as Walton in Frankenstein
fails to realize, the light half of the arctic year is not the only
half. And as our hypothetical dolphin friend might tell us, The Sound
can only have meaning in the context of The Quiet through which it
propagates. An a priori association
of light with truth, even metaphorically, constrains as much as it
enables our capacity to understand ourselves and our world. We make
our illusions out of light, but our blood flows in darkness; under
the City, below its roads and schools and malls and offices and
museums and hospitals and parks, wires run, sewers bubble, and wheels
screech.
But we
are the ones who make the wheels and fill the sewers and lay the
wires. We are the ones who design the parks, who build the hospitals
and museums and offices and malls and schools and roads. The tendency
to make these things seems to be a part of our nature. In fact, were
it not for our ancestor species' facility with early technology—hand
axes, fire—our species would not even exist. Our paltry skeletal
musculature, our feeble jaws and thin-enameled un-fanglike teeth,
our inept guts—these bodies alone would never have withstood the
pressures of natural selection. They have been sculpted by millions
of years of stone and fire to the point where we can now tell
ourselves, and believe until we know better, that we are not apes.
These mutations that define us spring from the technologies that went
before them: we are not merely what we are born to but also what we
make. That is our nature; that is Nature.
And
this, it occurs to me now, is why I have become uncomfortable with
the Romantic notion of Nature as something opposed to the City—the
notion that in modern urban life we are doing something that is
unnatural and therefore corrupting. This false dichotomy places
Nature outside City limits pretty much by definition when in fact
there in nothing more natural to humans than making things and living
in community. The lone rational actor of Enlightenment political
philosophy is as much a fiction as the pure human being distinct from
and above the surrounding world. We evolved in community; we evolved
as tool makers. We have never been alone, and in our current form, we
have never been without technology. Those squealing wheels are the
voice of our psyche every bit as much as our most inspired and
insightful poetry.
So to return to old Willy
Wordsworth, a slight revision may be in order: “Nature never did
betray / The mind that understood her.” And
to understand nature, or rather Nature, is to understand precisely
this: that while we arise from it, it also arises from us. Nature
with a capital N—Nature in the Romantic sense as it functions in
popular awareness—is a category on one side of a slash, one half of
a binary: nature/technology, nature/culture, nature/artifice. Yet
these binaries are products of consciousness. They are tools for
thinking, not facets of the world distinct from our experience of it.
While we may find it useful to think in terms of a nature/culture
binary, for instance, we should also recognize that the capacity to
even frame such a construct arises from our nature—that our culture
is a product of our nature, which in turn is a product of earlier
forms of culture, and so on back through countless recursions and
multiple species. To distinguish between the two absolutely is to
participate in a type of myth to which the Western world in
particular is prone. Of course a myth may be useful—and arguably no
society can function without them—but being useful will never make
them true: they are tools no less than are hammers and measuring
tapes, and like measuring tapes and hammers, their forms constrain
what can be achieved with them. And when we recognize that the Myths
of Purity, Dominion, and Radical Individuality are just
that—myths—then we may also realize the capacity to set them
aside as we would set aside any other tool and, in doing so, set
aside our alienation as well. If I were able to go back thirty years
and speak with that troubled lost young man, it is something like
this that I would like to be able to tell him.