More and Less
The best skill at cards is knowing when to discard. —Baltasar Gracián
Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales? —St. Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum —Margaret Atwood
Above: Words as symbols. Symbols as words.
It’s become no more than a trope to write about and pine for the halcyon days of old. And yet, here I find myself, dear reader.
As progress marches on and software continues to feast on our world, I fear we are hurtling uncontrollably towards desolation at the expense of our sanity, decency, and grasp of reality.
Three recent tweets of mine highlight my thinking:
As I wrote just a few days ago in The Enemy is Us:
Alarmingly, it feels as though the collective hand of humanity is more volatile and reckless than ever before due to the extraordinary tools at our disposal. In this way, I feel as though progress—much like power—does not corrupt, but rather reveals. What this says about us as humans given the dire state of our world, I’m not quite sure.
All I know is that we as a species dance on an ever-narrowing tightrope to a rapidly-increasing beat. As the acceleration and velocity of our progress increases, our ability to make sense of what we make and how it can be used decreases.
Each advancement—whether aeronautical, avionic, or articifial(-ly intelligent)—seems to beget another problematic, paradoxical encumbrance. It’s as though we are accelerating around Indianapolis Motor Speedway while avoiding ever-more-frequent speed bumps and spike strips.
In a way, modernity’s gifts are her curses and we are, in a sense, blessed by her cursing. Though her Midas touch provides riches, we seldom tally the cost of this counterfeit treasure or consider how it tarnishes our minds, bodies, and souls.
Our gold is gilded.
It is an ugly replica, a cheap facsimile. Science cannot satiate our souls’ need for deeper, truer things.
It is delusion, dadaism writ large.
We are all Duchamp. We have defaced our Mona Lisa.
Above: Marcel Duchamp, 1919, L.H.O.O.Q.
In order to change—and change we must—it’s imperative to know where we stand. After all, firefighters use water, not gasoline.
As C.S. Lewis once wrote in The Case for Christianity:
We all want progress.
But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer.
If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake.
And I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.
The below meditation is not meant to be prescriptive, but rather reflective.
What follows is neither condemnation nor excoriation; it is meant to be consumed and considered for its own sake.
More and Less
There is…
More pressure and less peace.
More helplessness and less happiness.
More eating and less enrichment.
More mediocrity and less majesty.
More information and less wisdom.
More conflagration and less compassion.
More farce and less freedom.
More money and less meaning.
More years and less life.
More greed and less gratitude.
More pleasure and less purpose.
More time and less presence.
More critique and less creation.
More intelligence and less wisdom.
For what? Inflated egos and deflated spirits?
And yet—as the poets once wrote—so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past future.
We can’t go on. We’ll go on.
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