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:

1. Humans are different from, and superior to, the rest of the world.
2. This difference, rooted in superiority, gives us authority over the world.
3. The quality that defines our difference is non-physical, but arises from a transcendent source.
4. Human distinctness is thus absolute.
5. 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.