Putting Perspective in Perspective

David Cowles
Jul 11, 2024
“God did not discover ‘space’ at the moment of Big Bang. Space as we think we know it was ‘invented’ about 500 years ago…”
When you remember something that happened in your life 10, 20, 40, 80 years ago, how does it seem to you now? Does it differ from the experiences you’re having at this moment, for example? From more recent memories?
Do your memories become fainter, vaguer and sparser as you reach back through ‘the gossamer web of time’? Or like Proust, do you experience long ago events as though they were happening IRT?
Contrary to public opinion, God did not discover ‘space’ at the moment of Big Bang. Space as we think we know it (inert, continuous, and distinct from the events that occur within it) was ‘invented’ about 500 years ago at the ‘dawn’ of the Renaissance.
Beginning c. 1500 CE, we began to ‘put things in proper perspective’…so to speak. As a result, finite, concrete ‘things’ lost value and that value transferred to virtual entities - structures, networks, landscapes, and systems.
X no longer means ‘X’; X means ‘X in the context of Y’.
At about this same time, Machiavelli taught us that any means could be justified from the perspective of its intended end. We learned that continuous time (history), no longer a barrier but a river, acts like a superconductor, without friction, connecting 16th century Florence with 1st century Rome.
Perspective enables us to aggrandize…and trivialize…persons, places, and things by placing them in their ‘proper contexts’. Value no longer resides in the thing-itself; now value is conferred on things by their contexts, their intentions, their ends. The same event can be important or unimportant, good or bad, depending on the context in which it occurs and the perspective from which it is viewed.
It was 1500 after all; we had to put the new races Columbus was discovering in perspective. We had to contextualize them. For that we needed a new model for the assignment of value. I value X to the extent that X is near (in space and time) and alike (in qualities).
Value varies according to the inverse square of physical, and cultural, distance. Or is it the other way around? Does distance (physical or cultural) vary according to the inverse square of Value?
A lodge brother was killed on my street this morning – tragic! A child of illegal immigrants was struck down by a stray bullet in an LA bodega - unfortunate! An unnamed Japanese soldier was killed in Burma during WWII – so what?
A good shepherd will lay down his life for his sheep…but when the dinner gong is struck, it’s the sheep who lays down its life for the shepherd. Believe me, there’ s nothing better than shepherd’s pie after a long day roaming the hillsides. It’s all about context!
Question: did we invent continuous spacetime so that we’d have a convenient place to stick inconvenient people (like Uncle Louie)…or events (like slavery)?
Seeing things in perspective was a breakthrough for Western society. As we encountered more and more folks who did not look just like us or act just like us, we were able to marginalize them by applying the inverse square law.
Ultimately, seeing people in the context of their location and culture entitled us to infect them, despoil them, and enslave them - all part of the ‘Natural Order’ of things. Of course, we had to view our religious scruples in perspective as well. We needed to see Faith in proper ‘context’. Love your neighbor is ok on the Sabbath but for the rest of the week it’s just business. Charity is laudable, but ‘income equality’ would erode motivation, undermine productivity, and suborn the sort of idleness that can lead to ‘unchristian-like behavior’.
Modern life is much too complex to be regulated by a bunch of outdated Biblical norms, isn’t it? We need to understand such norms in the context of their times…and then apply them in the context of our own. A neat trick, if you can do it.
We know from the Bible, or was it Star Trek, that God wants us all to ‘live long and…prosper in the land’. And are we not commanded to be ‘fruitful and multiply’? But first, the World must be made safe for Capitalism (or Socialism, take your pick)!
For 500 years, we have been living in Machiavellian spacetime, formally defined 400 years ago by Sir Isaac Newton. But c. 1870, our icy intellectual prison started to melt. A group of Parisian painters challenged the Newtonian idea of space as a sterile womb. They were derisively labeled Les Impressionists by their critics.
The Impressionists transformed space from an inert container into a trestle strong enough to support the ‘hanging gardens of Montmartre’. After Monet, space would never again be a neutral element in art, or life.
Cezanne took things a step further. He painted space itself, or rather, the manifestations of space, structures like houses and hillsides. He didn’t paint objects; he painted object-ness.
And then, Picasso (like his brother from another mother, Einstein) blew Newton entirely out of the water. He brought Western civilization back to its glory days before the Machiavellian Captivity. Newtonian space, sterile, continuous, vanishing to a point, was banished.
Space became an active, generative element in art. Space no longer contained figures; it emanated from figures. Each figure carried its own space (‘frame of reference’) – like Linus’ blanket or Peter Pan’s shadow. As Einstein had shown, figure (mass-energy) and ground (space-time) are just two poles of one phenomenon.
Picasso, Matisse, et al. reconnected us to the artists of the Late Middle Ages (e.g. Giotto). Size, lighting, spacing, liberated from the tyranny of Machiavellian perspective, again became independent variables, each carrying discrete information from artist to audience.
It’s time we put perspective in perspective – it’s not ‘a reflection of objective reality’; it’s a limiting and often unfortunate choice, aesthetically, ethically, and politically.
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