PROLOGUE -- PART ONE -- TWILIGHT OF WESTERN CULTURE: "An Idiot's Delight?"

Prologue

The Road Most Traveled

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 2006


PART ONE

TWILIGHT OF WESTERN CULTURE – “An Idiot’s Delight?”


NOTE: This is part one of two parts of the Prologue to my new book “NOWHERE MAN” IN “NOWHERE LAND.”


"If you could ask a fish what was the most obvious feature of its environment, probably the last thing it would say would be 'water'.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
Canadian writer and social scientist

"I’m living the American Dream!"

Taylor Hicks

Winner of the “American Idol” singing contest during the television’s May 2006 sweeps. More than 50 millions Americans voted in the finals of this contest.

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Society appears to be coming apart at its cultural seams. Marshall McLuhan noted natives do not notice the most pervasive feature of their environment. He used the analogy of fish being unaware of water. In the United States, the “water” is corporate consumerism, which is its ethos and essence. Mass media bombards the senses with quality of life issues preempting truth of experience, while destroying the sense of self other than as a consumer. Literature has gone from intellectual to unintelligible; music from the poetry of sound to the politics of noise, while media does a mad dance on the emotions leaving no room for thought. Life has become Present Ridiculous wandering in a fog of constant shopping looking for the Holy Grail of happiness. Nothing of significance is written, recorded, aired, or published following the mantra KISS – keep it simple stupid!

Consequently, shattering dissembling fear is on the rampage. There is no “is” there. People are acting in strange ways. The psychological plates of faith and rationality are shifting tectonically with little notice. Noticed are natural disasters: hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, mudslide, volcano eruptions, and earthquakes, reminding man something is amiss. Weather has become the most important news of the day.

Yet man insists he is in charge. Nature is his domain to control. He imposes regularity, consistency, continuity, and conformity in defiance of Mother Nature’s intrinsic rhythm in his quest to subdue her to his bidding. Nature erupts with a vengeance in defiance of this conceit in one natural disaster after another.

So, does he wake up one morning, finally seeing the light, saying, “The world is not as I see it; the world I have constructed is in chaos, my existence in ruins? I must act differently?”

No, he moves out of the real and quietly into the dreamlike. He does this in a way that makes him think nothing has changed. He becomes inauthentic to himself and his world. He moves into “Nowhere Land” as “Nowhere Man.”

The indicators are always there, sometimes subtle such as erosion over time of an entire coastline or shockingly tragic such as Hurricane Katrina. Katrina set off alarm bells, which instead of waking man from his utopian dream seem to drive him further into it. But it is not only natural disasters that can drive man further from himself. Sometimes it is the diversion of an entertaining novel such as The Da Vinci Code (2003) written by Dan Brown, which has provided welcome escape from the real to contemplate the myths surrounding Jesus. It is easy to debate what has no definitive answer.

Still, even so, timing is everything. Take novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930). He was dying and wrote a controversial novel of Jesus titled The Man Who Died (1928). Lawrence believed his Christian culture had impoverished and deranged Western man. The Man Who Died was his attempt to draw attention to this face in this provocative work of fiction. With profound spiritual insight, deep reverence, and sense of blood kinship and sympathy for the crucified Jesus, Lawrence humanizes him beyond the Cross. He chose to see his final fulfillment in perfected and untroubled physical love with a woman named Madeleine. Lawrence writes:

“Risen from the dead, he had realized at last that the body, too, has its little life, and beyond that, the greater life. He was a virgin, in recoil from the little, greedy life of the body. But now he knew that virginity is a form of greed. Now he knew that he had risen for the woman, or women, who knew the greater life of the body, not greedy to give, not greedy to take, and with whom he could mingle his body.”

This book created not a ripple. Why was that? Lawrence was a giant literary figure, a voice of liberation for his boldness, while Brown is an adventure novelist and hardly an intellectual. Lawrence failed to provoke because it was not the right time or circumstances. Society, might it be said, was not quite mad enough? The madness enveloping society then was just breaking free of rigorous Puritanical convention with Sigmund Freud in the mix. Had Lawrence said that Jesus had died and married and had progeny it would hardly have been reported. Critics might have said, “Well, that’s Lawrence,” and left it at that with readers doing the same.

The timing was off for religious hysteria. The timing is right for it now. The world has grown much smaller with three billion more souls and with more technology to drive these souls further from each other and from themselves . . . into “Nowhere Land.” There is less prudence, less sensual control, less reverence of persons. The American Catholic Church, alone, has paid billions in retribution to scarred individuals abused, sometimes decades ago, by the religious, mainly priests.

It has become a time not only of uncertainty, but a time when relationships are less naturally reinforcing. They are now more contrived and devious. It has become a time when becoming somebody is more important than being someone. It has become a time when life, love, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are only words on a scroll and often mean the exact opposite in practice. It has become Orwell’s “1984,” only in the twenty-first century. It has become a time when rights are confused with privileges.

So, what should we do? A big first step would be to accept that it has happened; that its source is not “out there,” but in the duplicitous heart of man. Resolution is not to be found in robotics, MP3’s, cell phones, iPods or other digital miracles of the times, but in the naked acceptance that man is increasingly anxious and has lost his moral compass.

What of morality? That is a good question. Morality that is constructed for man with the Koran, the Bible, Talmud, Tao Teh Ching, or Confucian ethics has proven the road less taken, corrupting these sacred texts with contrary objectives to their respective tenets. Morality is in the mind of the times. The morality of these times is essentially amoral if not immoral. You don’t bomb abortion clinics, suicide bomb innocent civilians, or preemptively invade sovereign states if conventional morality is intact. The problem is much simpler, however, than a case of morality versus amorality.

Morality is not on trial. Arbitrary standards of behavior are on trial. Lifestyle is killing our planet. We live a bizarre superficial existence and will do anything to escape such recognition. Fifty million residence of the United States voted for their choice on television’s “American Idol,” a fact that got front-page coverage in local and national print and television outlets in May 2006, while only 100 million voted in the national election for president of the United States in 2004. Fame is more important than purpose, fluff more commanding than substance. We live in the prison of our minds, which appears a surreal playground of frivolous images. D. H. Lawrence in Apocalypse (1931):

Man thought and still thinks in images. But now our images have hardly any emotional value. We always want a “conclusion,” and end, we always want to come, in our mental processes, to a decision, a finality, a full stop. This gives us a sense of satisfaction. All our mental consciousness is a movement onwards, a movement in stages, like our sentences, and every full stop is a milestone that marks our “progress” and our arrival somewhere. On and on we go, for the mental consciousness. Whereas of course there is no goal. Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.

This mania for getting somewhere, being someone, soaring above the crowd has only driven us deeper into “Nowhere Land.” This is apparent with graphic clarity, not as a question of morality, but as a passion for improvident waste. Society’s “Wonder of the World” is a garbage dump, and we are all heedless contributors to its construction. If sin there is, and I see no profit in that speculation, then waste is the only sin: waste of talent, waste of time, waste of social chemistry, waste of energy, waste of spirit, and waste of reason.

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