House of Eratosthenes

Scrooge was a benighted individual, twisted by his circumstances, but ultimately redeemed by the good example set by everybody around him. He’s not dumb, and it dawns on him that the hoarding of everything, including –especially– his love for his fellow man, brought him no pleasure; and he can’t help but notice that people that he considers fools and knaves are happy despite their circumstances. He has his epiphany, and we ours watching him.

The tale is backwards now because Scrooge was alone in his misery, surrounded by plenty and bonhomie if he would just partake of it; we are now multitudes; nations; a veritable globe of hoarders and schadenfreude peddlers, searching for any last outpost of goodwill towards others, simple pleasures, or just plain harmless fun that can be vilified and then dismantled.

Yes, in spite of the economic gloom, even the “poorest” among us are enjoying a stratospheric level of comfort compared with some pockets of the rest of the world. And yet we’re spiritually famished. Famished, wallowing in companionship, the same way Scrooge wallowed in his solitude.

I saw this when I was shopping in the mall the other day. This is why Obama won, I think; there are quite a few people walking around, drunk not on the milk of human kindness, but on the milk of human babble. Like fish, they swim through the mall corridors in great big schools; half a dozen, eight, ten, twelve or more. It’s not enough. Not enough companionship. Against all odds, there is still a delta between what is provisioned and what is desired. Out come the phones, text text text.

How old was I the first time I discovered the delight of driving on an empty road, by my lonesome, with the radio turned off…just thinking? Are these young people virginal to this? And if that is the case, what all are they missing? There’s no way to detect inconsistencies about things, is there, if every waking minute of every day you’re surrounded by “Hey man, what’re you doin’, nothing much, can you meet us in fifteen minutes at such-and-such?” No way to scrutinize. No way to — what was it the sixties-hippies told us we should do — Question Authority?

Reminds me of something linked by Gerard a few weeks back —

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

That’s it, I’m afraid. We are spiritually confused by this abundance of — not so much wealth, but — comfort. We think we have something to worry about, because we don’t know what worry really is; we don’t put down our cell phones long enough to think about it. We just installed a man into the most powerful office the world has ever known — a guy who hasn’t really done anything. Maybe he’ll succeed in what we want him to do. But if so, there’s no way to measure it. There’s no way to define what exactly we wanted him to do. In short, there’s no way to qualify this as a decent decision, even if you happen to like what we did.

This is the case with just about everything we’re doing nowadays. I see it with the bailouts. These might be “right” things to do, but how right can they be, with no definition of success and no real plan?

We are spiritually impoverished, just as much as poor old Scrooge ever was. Spiritually impoverished from a surfeit of text-messaging, and other silly rituals of centrifugal bumblepuppy.

Update 12/26/08: Speaking of Gerard, he linked to this one with an intriguing title:

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Thursday, December 25th, 2008