Civilization is Discontent

1100 words, 5 minute read.

Life is simple! Eat, sleep, have sex, and stay alive. For almost all species, tool use, if any, is situational: grab stick, hit hive, eat honey, discard. The tool does not become  a ‘thing in itself’. Winnie the Pooh does not think to put his Rube Goldberg contraptions into a museum. Christoper Robin on the other hand…

Eve ate the proverbial apple in search of knowledge – a brave if costly choice. But in expelling Earth’s First Family from Paradise, God got the last laugh. From the get-go, the need to nourish, rest, procreate, and survive stimulated the emergence of a Technosphere, an amalgamation of tools and techniques intended to facilitate the human project.

Genesis tells us that Abel tended sheep while Cain grew veg, at least until he went off to build cities. (Apparently, the authors thought that the sedentary life of a farmer was more conducive to urbanization than the nomadic life of a herdsman.)

In Eden, God protected his intellectual property via statue (Don’t Eat the Fruit). Post Eden, humanity is on its own (“everything is permitted” – Dostoevsky), but no bother – God can rely on us to build nearly impermeable ‘physical’ barriers between ourselves and gnosis. 

• To begin, we make a fetish of our tools. They become things in themselves and we house them in museums to celebrate our achievements. (True art cuts the other way – it pierces the veil. Here’s a simple test of artistic authenticity: Does this open-up the ineffable to me…or is it just another brick in the epistemological wall?

• We are unable to see the forest for the trees. We have devised a highly non-linear ego-centric model of the World. Whatever is closest to me in space and time takes on an outsized importance: my family, my ‘garden’, my nation, my planet, my ‘day’. We see the World as if it had been built by Escher. (Perhaps it was?)

•  We form social groups: our families, our neighborhoods, parishes, clubs, unions, etc. and we endow each with almost mystical significance. That ‘manufactured mattering’ obscures the real communities behind them.

• Manufactured mattering leads us to adopt false and empty Values, the ‘idols’ of the Old Testament under a new guise. I refer, of course, to our twin desires for fame and fortune. Longevity masquerades as eternity, security as peace.

• Ingeniously, we build economic systems that positively enslave us. Marx was right: we’ve gone from plantation slavery to wage slavery. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” (The Who) 

• Then we fine tune our economies to ensure that the vast majority of us, around the world and throughout history, remain in a perpetual state of want so that “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” (Wordsworth) Socialism, capitalism, it makes no difference: we all live just below our own personal (floating) poverty line.

• Technology threatens the structural integrity of our cocoon. It develops geometrically and might soon outpace demand: Marx’ surplus.  But ‘we’ are way too smart for Karl. We endlessly proliferate needs to exceed ever so slightly our accelerating ability to satisfy them. Supply will never catch up with demand. There is no such thing as ‘surplus’ in our world.

• Every so often, some ‘goodie two shoes’ (me?) comes along shouting, “Live simply that others may simply live.” But the relentless expansion of the catalogue of available goods and services makes a simple lifestyle unattractive. “’Tis the gift to be simple,” according to the Shaker hymn adapted by Aaron Copeland for Appalachian Spring; but how many Shakers do you know?

• Culture is another symptom, and engine, of Civilization. On the one hand, it is a method of recording and preserving our advances toward Truth, but on the other, it forms a forbidding barrier, shielding Truth from experience.

We acculturate our children, i.e. we train them to be the people we wish we had been. We prepare them for life…our life. We train them to fight the last war. Kultcha projects the past into the future and protects us from having to live in the present. We are always one generation out of sync. 

• As further protection against the possibility of a satisfied citizenry, we have invented yet another ring of fortifications: Society - a new pantheon of needs, e.g. recognition, honors, social status, and fame, i.e. things that make us feel good about ourselves. We must feel good about ourselves; we crave it at all costs – which is why cyberbullying so often ends in self-harm.

At the bottom of this particular rabbit hole, lies the mother of all delusions: our nearly universal desire to ‘leave the world a better place’ - as if we could know what’s ‘better’ beyond our immediate environs, and as if we could ‘make it so’ if we did.  

• Add to that a litany of activities, euphemistically known as ‘hobbies’ (hobbles?). For example, many of us devote two days a week to a pointless pursuit known as golf. We hit a ball and chase after it like a dog playing fetch; from some vantage points, we must appear mad. Yet, we gladly trade family and career in hopes of a pewter cup at the end of the season. 

• And those of us who can’t do, root. We rely on a team of professionals to do our ‘doing’ for us. Like bourgeois draftees during the Civil War, we pay others to perform in our place.

We live and die for the Yankees and the Knicks, though most of us will never know George Castanza, or anyone else connected to either team. Every weekend, New Yorkers sit down to their TVs and joust with their peers in Boston and LA…Philly, Frisco, and Chitown if they’re slumming…virtually.

• We have measured out our lives with coffee spoons and yet we cling to the illusion that “there will be time…there will be time for all the works and days of hands.” (Eliot) And so we create bucket lists – things we want to experience ‘in the living years’, things we will remember, things we may record in journals or on photos, things we can share with others via social media…until the memories flicker out and the records decompose.

How diabolically ingenious! Driven by our unquenchable thirst for sweet gnosis, we have erected virtually impregnable fortifications (aka civilization) to protect the ‘pearl of great price’ from our probes. 

Look upon our works, O Ozymandias, and despair – “nothing beside remains…boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away.” (Shelley)

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Giorgio de Chirico — The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914) presents a deserted cityscape where elongated shadows, rigid architecture, and an unseen threat create a sense of unease beneath apparent order. A small child and a rolling hoop introduce movement and innocence, contrasting with the oppressive stillness and suggesting a world governed by hidden forces rather than human logic. The painting embodies metaphysical uncertainty, inviting the viewer to sense an underlying truth that is felt intuitively but never fully revealed.