The Melancholy Dawn
I love the early scene in the film 2001. The beast beating another beast with a bone, tossing it into the air, and as it revolves it resolves into a spaceship. Violence was the birth of technology, the lineage of dominance was born. I think the word 'truth' is indefinable. It will always elude philosophy, but art, I think, can give us glimpses, fleeting aspects of a constantly changing whole. So, that scene for me has always been a bit of truth, a hard one and one more true by the day. We industrialized primates are inventive but qualitatively we are the equal of our genetic ancestors....philosophy, technology, language and mind: the killing blows of frightened beasts. I'm beginning to suspect that Sisyphus was the first man, not Adam, and that repetition is our genetic hell.
posted by Samwick @ 3:02 AM
2 Comments:
At 11:47 PM,
Christopher said…
Hi Matt – You essentially pointed out the paradox of us human animals - that we have created wonderful art and poetry, and have invented the most sophisticated gadgetry, but emotionally we are not much further along than our ape forbears. In other words our intellectual self in the form of all our marvellous technology, has far outstripped our emotional self.
If we look at the all the millions of sentient species of life which became extinct throughout the aeons, we will see that they did so because they couldn’t adapt to changes in their environment. Applying this to ourselves, we can conclude that the we will soon become extinct because we have created a radically different environment through our technology which is exponentially pawning new technology, and changing our environment even more, yet emotionally we are static.
Other way to look at this is in terms of balance. We have become irreparably imbalanced in ourselves, because our emotional selves haven’t kept pace with our intellectual selves, and this imbalance is growing ever more acute. What with the growing world population, diminishing natural resources, global warming, and more easily accessible nuclear bombs, it doesn’t require much imagination to see that our days are numbered, and that we will soon become just another of the millions of sentient species which have become extinct.
At 12:07 AM,
Stan said…
RE. Melancholy Dawn.
Yes, really well stated, Matt. We are beasts with big brains. And like Chris says, we are doomed. Unless we evolve rapidly. So what is the next stage of our evolution? The brain without the beast, of course, which is the Robot. They're evolving very rapidly as we speak. Out of our brains. But with no beast.
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