I would like to take this time to reflect upon our world of the present, and to question (whine about?) some disturbing trends in the larger picture. The idea behind society is that it is supposed to move forward, to progress to better things, each generation improving on the one before it. Our age, our generation, has seen perhaps the greatest increases in possibility. We have the ability to access the information from a thousand thousand libraries in seconds, the ability to communicate across the globe without moving from our seats. We have millennia of knowledge at our fingertips. To a person living fifty years ago, we have added an entire world, an entire universe. Our age would be unimaginable even as science fiction to someone a century ago. Yet what have we done with all this power? Nothing.
Where are the Shakespeares of our age? Real art has barely flickered in the past twenty, even thirty years. There are more people today in single cities than in the whole of Europe at the time the Bard was alive. There are many times more people in the United States alone than there were in the entire world during the age of Greece, but where is our Socrates, our Plato, our Aristotle? Our literacy rate is twenty times that of our ancestors, and what have we written that would be read a hundred years from now? Beethoven and Goethe collaborated in Vienna, Wagner and Nietzsche discussed Schopenhauer in the streets of Germany a century ago. What do we have today? Britney Spears and Stephen King? Eminem and John Grisham?
Has creativity burned itself out? Have we turned our greatest opportunity into our greatest failure? At the click of a key I can find every word in the English language that rhymes with "grow", I can find every four-syllable word that begins with the letter "t". I could type an epic without quill or ink or scribbled-out errors, print it up a thousand times, and have it sent around the world in a single day. Yet where are the 12,000 line Iliads and Odysseys? Have we stopped caring? Of course, thousands of lines are far too long for us. Our minds are set for the seven minute span between commercial breaks.
Has our technology betrayed us, destroyed us? Perhaps we do not need to wait until the matrix-world of machine domination to see where we lost the path. Is it right to live in a world where students spark-note Nabokov? Where people fall asleep during a two-hour film which has been adapted from a five hundred page book? It truly is a world of "fast food and slow digestion".
Perhaps our geniuses are there, somewhere, and we simply cannot find them. Perhaps Mozart has been reborn, but if he was, could we truly say we could find him? Would he find his place in the world of MTV and Pepsi commercials?
We must remember that the power lies within each individual. We must overcome the mentality of Democracy, and realize that it does not take a majority to create a Da Vinci. With the power in our hands, we can learn anything, but we must first seek to understand something. We have the potential to become the greatest, to be Shakespeare without limitations, Socrates without ignorance, Beethoven without deafness, Homer with full sight. We must free ourselves from the yoke of our pill-popping, zombie birthing times and realize that somewhere there lies a great genius wasting away in conformity, waiting to be freed so he can turn these dullest of times, this neon Dark-Age, into a Renaissance of infinite possibility.
5.03.2005
where have all the flowers gone?
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19 comments:
Is there a lack of creativity and ingenuity? Maybe so, but perhaps we simply need to look for creativity in new forms now that there are more avenues in which we can express ourselves. Certainly many societal trends are disturbing and worthless; there is no doubt about it. However, in an age of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement, let us look at things in a new light. Larry Page and Sergey Brin—the google guys—are undoubtedly creative geniuses. Certainly, I do not wish to compare these guys to Socrates and Shakespeare in intellectual ability and intellect, but perhaps there is room to acknowledge their comparative ingenuity. Maybe this is a stretch.
Today, science is absolutely revolutionary. Advancement in many scientific fields is becoming increasingly exponential. Creativity runs rampant in the fields of astrophysics and neuroscience. There is room for today’s and tomorrow’s geniuses and greats. Far be it from me to pretend that anyone can attest to rivaling Leonardo Da Vinci in cunning, but this status may be practically unreachable.
Denouncing the present and admiring the past is a very romantic stance. Romantics always long for the unreachable, the far away. The present is not so attractive, for the very reason that it is here and now. The past is very far away, and in fact, altogether inaccessible. This is enticing. This is wonderfully fascinating.
I would not doubt that one day in the future a man or woman will look at the modern happenings in the world and then back at history and say, “Why can’t we be more like those 21st century humans. Where are all the flowers?”
long post! I didnt read it all :)
I think that because of this modernized and comfortable life we have, we are becoming more lazy.
And with all the information we can get at the time we need it, we are keeping our minds asleep we are not thinking or trying to be creative :\
I think the creative, the imaginative, the parts of our minds that made us feel special and needed has been replaced by the need to provide, by the need to succeed. You're right when you say so many new opportunities now exist...but such progress is a double-edged blade. As capitalism and general apathy envelop the world, we have become drone-like in our fervor to achieve a happiness that revolves around acquiring money, power, or prestige. Any creative leanings are silenced by this fast-action society we live in now.
Another way to look at the situation is that creativity still runs rife among the people, only it remains much more subdued and transient. I have seen many new artists, new authors, and new bands achieve some modicum of well-deserved popularity, even if it may be somewhat shortlived. They just don't receive the accolades of the masses, so they could never hope to become iconic remnants of this century, or any to come. Whether this opinion sounds elitist or not, I believe it to be the truth.
Will this situation ever change? Probably not, but I assume the human will just continue on its self-destructive path towards an early extinction, so might as well make the most of it...
Thank you for visiting my blog :) I also wanted to say that in 1920's Paris , The Lost Generation was changing the worlds of literature and music and art and even fashion and interior design- that so much happened in that one period of time and in one big extended creative family, makes you wonder in a simple way "must have been something in the water!". I do wonder what it was in that period of time that sparked so many wonderful things. And can I have a six pack to go please? :)
I think you are viewing the situation through the wrong lens. There are no obvious candidates for a Da Vinci or Shaekspeare in contemporary society simply BECAUSE of our connectedness, NOT despite it. There are thousands upon thousands of books published each year; it's not that there aren't any brilliant novels still being written, it's just that the ever-increasing breadth of the field might obscure the existence of exceptional outliers. Modern artists have explored so many different subject matters and mediums that our capacity for shock has been significantly diminished. We make brilliant scientific discoveries with such regularity that they seem to eclipse one another. It's not that no one's discovering gravity or writing the next Hamlet, but rather that developments of--or at least near--this caliber are occurring so regularly that people often overlook their pervasiveness in modern-day society.
I do not argue that we have not made some fantastic achievements in science, and indeed some of the greatest scientific minds are still alive. Certainly I am not saying that mankind itself has devolved, but it seems genius rears its head far more rarely. People like the founders of google have simply found a need and created a fairly simple, clear solution for it, just as Bill Gates before them. While this is admirable, it is simply a good idea at a time when no one else thought of it, far removed from the creative artistic genius I am speaking of. And the problem in my view, though it appears my fellow contributor would disagree, is that there really ISNT anything that someone in the future would look back upon and say "man I wish we were like those twenty-first century humans". Beyond technology, which has only one direction to go, towards progress, we have accomplished little.
As to mister Saper's comment, it is an interesting take on the matter, but ultimately I would have to disagree. You claim that the reason we don't notice the genius around us is that it occurs so frequently at such a high level. But tell me, in the books written in the past twenty years (a number far more than the total written in all of Shakespeare's century), where is something even near to the level of Hamlet? It is no doubt true, and a very valid observation that the "shock value" of things has decreased, but this brings up an even worse problem. Has the well of subject matter, style, and form of people like Shakespeare and the other masters of the ancient world really been milked dry? Has great art lost so much of its "shock value" that we can no longer recognize true genius? I maintain that it is not so, that there is still much to be perfected in all those mediums, and that while we await our next great master, society has changed to make it more difficult for him to break free.
Historians and anthropologists argue that it wasn't until human beings were able to find "leisure time" that they began to develop fully many aspects of art, music, and the sciences. Leisure time means 100 percent of life isn't spent in the pursuit of food or flight from danger.
Interestingly enough, however we now live in a society where most people have more hours of leisure time than any time in our history, and this has in fact been reflected in the advances our society has made in the last 100 years. Literally, we have gone from horse and buggy to space flight in the life spans of some people. This really did require genius on the part of many people.
Keep in mind, da Vinci wasn't always seen as the genius we see him as, the same with many of the people we now admire from the past. They had to die and be dead for a while before people recognized their genius. If we're looking for genius in our own society today, they may be hard to see because they are behind their computers, desks, and drawing boards, not out trying to make sure they are recorded in the history books.
Excellent points made by both mister Saper and mister Furyious. My original stance perhaps did not take into account the possibilities you mention, and this is just the sort of discussion I hoped to elicit. Though I would still say that we don't have nearly the number of creative geniuses that we ought to, based on our population, education, and improved tools, perhaps some of us simply do not look hard enough, or in the right places. Indeed, it is rather unfair of me to point out the lack of art in things such as MTV when the true geniuses who, as Furyious suggests, arent out to get recognized immediately, likely use other outlets.
Yours was the philosopher's version of "Those were the good old days." But stop a minute and think of which old days you were referring to. Did you mean the days of Homer, or Shakespeare or Beethoven? You have about 25 centuries to chose from. Some ages were quite barren of creativity while other times and places were extremely fertile. I happen to think the 20th century was the most fertile since the beginning of time and expect the 21st century (if we don't destroy the world) to far surpass anything that has gone before.
Homer is alive and well in the body of George Lucas, who's Star Wars series has been seen by millions of people. A morality tale the has transcended cultural, religeous and political differences all over the world. Not only did he write a great story, but found a different way of telling it by developing Industrial Light and Magic.
Leonardo daVinci in the 20th century became head of research and development for General Electric and weapons advisor to the Pentagon. He paints and sculpts as a hobby to relieve stress. His friend, Bill Shakespeare, who earned his chops as a writer for "As the World Turns", and "All My Children" has won every award available as the head of the team of writers for Aaron Spelling productions who has had the most TV series in the top ten for the longest time. Most of them are still running in syndication. While they probably won't be remembered in the classical sense, it was good story telling, comedy, tragedy and drama.
A couple of guys from the 20th century who will be remembered forever are Albert Einstein who gave us the key to the Universe, and Steven Hawking who keeps finding new doors for that key to open. Every advance in Physics since has been built on that.
Before you condemn contemporary writing, work your way through all the past Pulitzer Prize winning novels for some very diverse versions of the human condition told by the finest wordsmiths.
Don't despair, creativity is stronger that ever, you just have to learn to recognize it.
Dino, while i welcome the point you bring up about fertility of time and scale, I would greatly have to disagree with many of your examples. A writer for "as the world turns" or any other cheap soap opera does not deserve to share the same planet, let alone the same pedestal as someone like shakespeare. If "All My Children" is the closest our generation gets to "Hamlet" then my point stands proved. While I do not deny that the 20th century has been fruitful, it is particularly the current generation that concerns me. It has been nearly a hundred years since Einstein published his theories of relativity. Every age will have its "successful" people, such as the president of GE, but that does not make make them culturally contributive, and just because he sculpts and paints doesnt put him on level with Michaelangelo. George Lucas made a step forward for technology with his first three Star Wars films, but as I said before, technology has only one way to move, forward, while real art can, and perhaps has, moved backwards. Lucas' "morality tale" is in fact far from original, largely a Frankenstein's monster of ideas copied from other artists, particularly Akira Kurosawa. You also emphasize the number of people that have seen his films, and the popularity of our Bill impostor's TV shows. There will always be something "popular", especially in the age of mass media, but this makes no difference as to the quality of the art. In fact, the "popular culture" of the day is likely one of the reasons art seems to have such a valley in our generation.
"where have all the flowers gone"?
I interpret this question to be one which asks where humanity's sense of creativity and authenticity has gone.
This is a question which indubitably plagues our existence. Technological prowess, and social norms are increasingly defining our roles, duties, responsibilities and ideas. No longer are we free to operate outside of the norm, and we are limited to that which we are already prescribed.
"things must be done this way"... in order to survive in our world we must "do things the right way".
Creativity and authenticity are concepts which have assumed an altogether new meaning.
Seldom, do we come across creativity in it's infinite, open-ended sense in modern day.
Our society has become so success and displine oriented which has resulted in little leeway for alternate ideas and methods.
Is this is the price of our progress? Is this the sacrifice which we must make in order to survive in this modern technological atmosphere?
Creativity is encouraged in certain contexts (e.g. artists, music, etc), yet as is anything else which digresses from the norm, is looked upon with suspicion and skepticism.
Devoid of creativity, humanity is rendered an animal with a greater capacity for learning (intelligence).
It is not intelligence which necessarily distinguishes us from animals, but the capacity and ability to transcend intelligence and concieve of those things which are illogical and irrational (out of the box).. those things which do not necessarily make sense but which are beautiful in their own right.
Without creativity, can alternatives exist? Without creativity, can difference or individualism exist?
Creativity is indispensable to the survival of our species, and the more it is suppressed due to societal pressure, the more susceptible we become to the monotony and rigidity of life.
Bravo, Dvine, bravo. Very eloquent and accurate analysis of the human condition, and one I subscribe to almost verbatim. I look forward to seeing more of your posts in the future.
Ain't no business like show business. And it's ruining all the intelligent life on this planet.
Keep in mind, Shakespeare was not known as Skaespeare in his day. Back then, he was still William.
Seems now that there are less and less inventions. Yet the world is getting worse like hell with all the forests getting cut down, reefs dying. I think it would be really cool to go back in time where we weren't so dependent on planet-wasting energy.
Yet, one day, someone's gonna learn about our time in history books (probrably 100 years from now), and go "Wow, how could they have lived without Shelmickedwu? And what are... s...qu...irrels?"
I hope the future never comes.
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