thoughts negligible: Elaborating on the despair of our age

I almost put this up on Facebook but decided, why don't I use the blog I'm paying for that no one looks at instead, thus imposing some sense of double irony on the topic of talking about technology and spreading ourselves thin digitally where no one reads or comes; secondly, decrying the death of the human soul due to technology through means of technology. I'll just quote from an essay by Heidegger that I continually go back to lately, called, "Why Poets?"

"What has long threatened man with death, indeed with the death of his essence, is the absoluteness of his sheer willing in the sense of his deliberate self-assertion in everything. What threatens man in his essence is the willful opinion that through the peaceful release, transformation, stockpiling, and delivery of natural energies, man could make man's being bearable for all and happy in general. However, the peace of this peacefulness is merely the undisturbed, lasting frenzied restlessness of self-assertion deliberately thrown back on itself....What threatens man in his essence is the opinion that technological production would bring the world into order, when it is exactly this ordering that flattens out each ordo, that is, each rank, into the uniformity of production and so destroys in advance the realm that is the potential source from which rank and appreciation originate out of being.

...

The essence of technology is dawning only slowly. This day is the world's night made over as the purely technological day. This day is the shortest day. It raises the threat of a single endless winter...What is whole withdraws. The world is being emptied of what is whole and heals. As a result, not only does the holy remain hidden as the track to the godhead, but even what is whole, the track to the holy, appears extinguished. Unless there are still mortals capable of seeing what is unwhole and unhealing threaten as unwhole and unhealing."

Combine this "essence of technology" with what Freud said about the individual consumed within the "mass mind"

“The mass is impulsive, inconstant and excitable. It is ‘guided almost exclusively by unconscious motives’…Nothing about it is premeditated…it is incapable of any long-term intention. It cannot abide any delay between its desire and realization of the thing desired. It has a sense of omnipotence; for the individual in the mass the concept of impossibility vanishes” (Mass Psychology 25).

What do we have today other than a politics and a religion (combined under the auspices of what I call "Americanity") completely and solely dominated by the socialization of the herd, the blind inconstancy of a group mind, ever growing and expanding with the aid of the internet and round-the-clock communication. We can now easily think with one mind, share the opinions more faithfully and thoughtlessly of our group/clan/tradition/party.

Take for one example, the hysteria over the health care reform bill. Why are so many so irrationally opposed to it. I say "irrational" because of the fear of euthanasia panels and the sort, not through any reasonable opposition, although there are no doubt rational fears. What I believe is coming out more in the opposition (other problems arise with the proponents, but let's be honest, nothing so crazy) is a mass expression of guilt and the fear of death. After all, what is health-care other than "death-prevention"? When the word of letting the government (obama, no less!) kill our grand parents and disabled children arises, it seems as if something within us, some unconscious motive, as Freud calls it, peaks its head out. Are we not already euthanizing our parents and grandparents by shoving them off into homes and hospitals to die alone? Do we not suffer from some massive guilt in our hearts for how we treat and see the dying, the disabled, the sick? Thus we can say "THEY" want to kill our old people, all the while the guilt of us killing our old people, and our children through different means

I've long pondered the offense of Nietzsche's critique of democracy, that it will usher in a new and stronger herd from which it is more impossible to distinguish or individuate oneself, that the free spirit is dead under the torrential flood. Ladies and gentlemen, I cannot help but fear Nietzsche was more right than I ever wanted him to be.

Isolation is unheard of; therefore the individual is too, increasingly so. We seem to increasingly be shedding our skins as humans, draining the marrow from our bones and meat from our flesh until "human" might altogether seem like a misnomer someday.

3 Comments

So far, my experience with the emerging/emergent out here in Oregon has been that those attending are of one set, white, middle class, moderately educated, and overly exposed to facts about social issues.

They also all blog.

There was no diversity though they claimed there was community. Can the two be exclusive?

So long as there are rednecks, I have hope for the individual, for the free spirit.

I have decided, in the best since, I must always be an Ardmorite and an Oklahoman. It might be what saves me. Especially out here in Portland.

Posted by: brandon | September 15, 2009 at 10:29 AM

"So long as there are rednecks, I have hope for the individual, for the free spirit.

I have decided, in the best since, I must always be an Ardmorite and an Oklahoman. It might be what saves me. Especially out here in Portland."

Brandon, this is one of the more beautiful and true things I have read in a long time. You, sir, are a philosopher and poet.

One might read the redneck as the last site of resistance against the global deluge of the capitalist-democratic leveling of all that is individual and singular. They often still exhibit the least bit of thought that hasn't been pre-packaged to them by an elite class of ass-holes and undergrad professors; theirs may be pre-packaged alright, but at least it's grounded in tradition and not some new product of the market, and in fact often contradicts it. And they don't exhibit the arrogance and elitism of the "moderately" to highly-educated. To the extent that they ignorantly stand against certain political and social reform they expose the weakness of the liberal positions--yes, the liberals and enlightened are indoctrinated, bigoted, and fundamentalist, too, we find out. They (and post-colonials) may be the last to question the liberal-democratic automatonization of all things. They do not turn against all they've been taught through some "liberation"--and to the extent that a Christian finds his or her liberation in education and turning over tradition, they have neither been educated nor become truly Christian, but rather a cult of the new and artificial.

Ok....I have to stop, I'm just rambling.

Posted by: Tyler Akers | September 15, 2009 at 10:52 AM