The Virtual Rambler

Number thirty three: 20^th February 2013

Great Human Achievements

Extending from gamma rays to long wave radio , the electromagnetic spectrum also contains that narrow band of frequencies we know as visible light. The range of sonic frequencies our ears can detect is equally slim when placed into the full sound-wave spectrum. The nature of self-consciousness shrinks our grasp of the world around us to what is contemporary with our own brief lives , for all the imaginative efforts to reconstruct events that took place before we were here , or to conjecture what's going on in outer space. Ours is the slightest of attention-niches for most of the time. Historical worlds or the dark energy that repels gravity occupy just the odd moments of leisure. Was it most peoples' stunted grasp of the world beyond their senses that prompted us to compensate by elevating the “great human achievements” in science and the arts ? We know the brief spasm of the entire human race from earlier hominid to later sapiens took place in the merest blinking of the cosmological eye. That doesn’t preclude us from acclaiming the likes of Montaigne and Shakespeare to be among the crowning glories of our leisure-class Culture. Throughout the period covered by the lives of those two luminaries , there were periodic outbreaks of witch trials throughout most of Europe. Those so accused were often tortured in order to secure the necessary confession of having made a pact with the Devil and of nocturnal flights to attend orgiastic gatherings that featured numerous acts of sacrilege.⁽¹⁾

The origins of writing , as of spoken languages , are lost in time but there is strong evidence to suggest that writing (on clay tablets in Sumeria) developed from the needs of complex bureaucracies to record , monitor and effect their multiple administrations : the requisition of taxes , conscription of armed forces , details of trade. Think of the Domesday Book. The quill pen followed the adoption of parchment and then paper. The printing press and other mechanical means of mass production then multiplied once-singular works a hundred fold. The relentless advance of silicon technologies has ensured that at any given moment across the globe , a hundred people are simultaneously listening to Mozart , another hundred reading War and Peace. The once-obscure Walter Benjamin⁽²⁾ formulated the principle that the aura of any work of art was lost by frequent reproduction. Geoff Dyer rightly observed that ‘the aura of his original idea has itself been bleached out by incessant re- quotation’. Western culture’s earlier elevation of the unique art-object gave way to a commercial Babylon of mass consumption that appropriated the entire culture industry itself. Under a creeping barrage of non-stop advertising the penitential melancholy of modern life is summoned ever further into a wasteland where the monotony of our desires is exposed. It was Machiavelli who removed ethics from politics and in our political wasteland that operation has yet to be reversed.

We toggle between ebay and youtube … whilst facing the unpalatable truth that our muddled lives invite us to live as insecure nomads on the margins of an alien world which recedes further from us with every successive innovation in electronic technology. All the better to feed back our economic , physical and political insecurities. Insecurity breeds fear. Fear of an unfamiliar world , fear of national and personal decline , fear of strangers , they’re all corroding what’s left of civil society. And what about the great forward march of science in general ? For all the uninfectious enthusiasm of Brian Cox , astronomical investigations of an inconceivably enormous universe have little consequence for those who are struggling with famine , oppression or even a toothache. We may embrace progress in anaesthetics at the dentist's while simultaneously feeling that motor cars and computers are mixed blessings at best. Like the steam engine before them , they have enslaved whole populations while enriching a few , as they have accelerated the mass plunder of terrestrial resources – coal , then oil and latterly the rarer elements like silicon – at the same time as they established the notion of waste products as a necessary addendum to “progress”. Slag heaps , carbon emissions , accumulating mountains of back-dated electronic ware. The whole global waste industry that grew out of our updating , throwaway culture.


Wig

⁽¹⁾ See Europe’s Inner Demons by Norman Cohn.

⁽²⁾ Benjamin (1892-1940) was an essayist associated with the Frankfurt School of literary/social criticism. They were what populist ideology would call ‘ foreign highbrows’, doomed to extinction by the rising tide of populism. Modern Culture to them was the capitalist exploitation of all human activity (both physical and mental) to profitable ends. Every private endeavour to escape ‘the System’ can’t help but participate in its further development. Theirs was patrician grousing on an epic scale.

Archive

Virtual rambler #1 – Posturing, 9^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #2 – Managerialism, 17^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #3 – Nostalgia, 27^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #4 – The Alpha Male, 13^th April 2010
Virtual rambler #5 – General Elections, 3^rd May 2010
Virtual rambler #6 – The Leisure Industry, 15^th May 2010
Virtual rambler #7 – Guide to The World Cup, 15^th June 2010
Virtual rambler #8 – Human Nature, 12^th July 2010
Virtual rambler #9 – Communities, 13^th August 2010
Virtual rambler #10 – Worlds Apart, 6^th October 2010
Virtual rambler #11 – Dawdling, 22^nd November 2010
Virtual rambler #12 – ELVIS, 24^th December 2010
Virtual rambler #13 – Transience, 4^th February 2011
Virtual rambler #14 – Regional Accents, 15^th April 2011
Virtual rambler #15 – The Afterlife, 21^st July 2011
Virtual rambler #16 – Bizspeak, 27^th August 2011
Virtual rambler #17 – Night Walks, 3^rd October 2011
Virtual rambler #18 – Bob Dylan & Charles Dickens, 8^th November 2011
Virtual rambler #19 – Another Nutty Professor, 16^th December 2011
Virtual rambler #20 – Customer Choice, 16^th January 2012
Virtual rambler #21 – Wearing Shorts, 18^th February 2012
Virtual rambler #22 – A Brief History of Progress, 17^th March 2012
Virtual rambler #23 – The Myth of Sisyphus, 16^th April 2012
Virtual rambler #24 – Natural History, 20^th May 2012
Virtual rambler #25 – European Self Importance, 26^th June 2012
Virtual rambler #26 – Sweet Dreams, 25^th July 2012
Virtual rambler #27 – Excess, 17^th August 2012
Virtual rambler #28 – In Denial, 20^th September 2012
Virtual rambler #29 – The Way, 21^st October 2012
Virtual rambler #30 – On Rambling, 14^th November 2012
Virtual rambler #31 – Gazing Into The Abyss, 18^th December 2012
Virtual rambler #32 – Intellectual Gloom, 25^th January 2013