When the Human Race Gradually Faded Away
This happened mainly during the 19th and 20th Centuries but started in the late 18th Century with two events – the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. How these two were connected is a mystery, no doubt there was something more basic going on – something that McGilchrist has identified as the coming to power of the left hemisphere, Ortega y Gasset associates with the coming of mass man, and the destructiveness and the unconscious behavior that Freud and Eric Fromm have commented on.
I am poorly qualified to analyze anything so complicated, all I can do is point out the obvious – that this is not just complicated, it is complex (with many interdependent variables and feedback loops).
As an example of this see Who’s Responsible For the Euromess? on Mother Jones. Or any of the ongoing debates about Climate Change. The response of most is to simply throw up their hands, and say, in effect “This stuff is so complicated I am going to ignore it and pretend that it (reality) does not exist, only my fantasies about it exist.” Which only makes the situation worse.
In other words, as human reality has become more complex, people have become more simple, even simple-minded. The worst possible situation.
These same people will insist on asking “So what’s the solution?” Not realizing (consciously at least) that this an inappropriate question. Unconsciously they know full well that this question is a trap meant to discredit you.
The only answer is to more carefully define the problem, in all its complexity - a strategy they will reject completely as too much work. As spoiled children, they want everything easy – and reject anything else. But let me get back to my original thesis – that the human race has gradually disappeared.
The world gradual is important here, this happened over many generations, and people have almost no ability to detect such gradual changes. They think the way things are now is he way it has always been – something historians warn about constantly. But they have no interest in history. They only live in the present.
In other words, what we have here is a feedback loop: the Industrial emphasis on production, produced simplified (more mechanical) people, who were less capable of understanding what is like to be human (but more capable of being a mechanical part of the Industrial machine) – and also incapable of understanding their increasingly technical world – which went out of control, since there were no people to control it.
I hope that makes some sense. If not, please ask me about it.
No trackbacks yet.