I grew up a child of scientists and graduated as one in the 90’s. My creation stories arose amidst the geology of Tasmania and the dance of ecology wandering the bush behind our home. Evidence based reason was the modelled methodology for how to understand the world. Some characterise science as cold rationalism but to me it is full of wonder and love. Like most kids I presumed my experience was the normal and it took knowing people unlike me to realise alternatives existed. The discipline of science to analyse our own conformational bias brought an understanding that my own world view was not purely rational. In my late 20’s and early 30’s, under the tutorage of the likes of Joseph Campbell and Nietzsche, I quested to transcend my own conditioning. Throw in a bit of Kerouac and it was a wild, enjoyable ride into the abys and back. It is not for everyone, some fellow travellers suffered much or were lost along the way.
listen to the song cycle
That is a story I tell about myself. A narrative that makes sense of my life. I am still coming to terms with just how fortunate it is in the scheme of things. At the beginning I assumed we all should be fully responsible for what we make of our lives. Empirical evidence of the choices some people don’t have smashed that assumption and the neoliberal narrative built on it. The loss of a life narrative in my mid 20’s was a crisis but it turned out to be well covered in literature. I was lucky to jump with the resilience to benefit from the brief experience of flying in the void. I landed ok.
The scientific method is a brilliant bullshit detector and knowledge builder. Everyone these days wants to claim it as their foundation, but our public dialogue shows how little we have progressed from the killing of Socrates. Given the choice, most of us seek comfort most of the time, our impulse in accepting or rejecting an idea is how it fits with our established narrative and aesthetic ideals. These then become political banners and Ideological tribes rally around stories and images with rationalisations masquerading as reason in their defence. Red pill, blue pill etc.
I value the aesthetics of living systems above those of machines. This is not true for everyone. I love a permaculture garden but there are others who prefer a vast monocultural cropping system with big harvest machines and ordered plantation of trees in straight lines. These two contrasting aesthetic ideals have massive implications in the systems we design. Are they built on cyclical and dynamic processes to be optimised or a linear production system maximising desired outputs and assigning some things as externalities to be conveniently ignored? The critical difference between cultivating and building is the creative contribution of other organisms. This dichotomy is as old as Eden (cultivating the garden) and Babel (building the tower). The planet is a closed system and the sting in the tail of climate change seems beyond the capacity of the narrative of machine minds believing in a linear arrow of time with humans sitting at God given apex of progress.
The aesthetics of ‘cool’ will excite people more than a well-reasoned argument, unless you’re a scientist who finds well-reasoned arguments cool. In the yolngu culture of East Arnhem Land the word for cool is the same word for balanced; balance is a predominant aesthetic ideal. What are the aesthetics of cool in empire derived cultures? Is it cool to optimise or maximise power?
A number of years ago I gave a TEDx talk on the function of some mythic images derived from science in contemporary society. One function of any mythology is to provide the narratives and aesthetics that condition what is normal. I researched a line of enquiry that did not make the talk; in the USA the total advertising budget was around seven times greater than the total spent on education. That is a significant disproportion of resources focused on turning children into consumers compared to critically literate citizens. In the Hindu system it could be described as domestication through cultivating bass chakra dependence, little wonder the planet is getting hotter while we argue about having our cake and eating it too.
There are some standard issue narratives that frame our identity for better or worse. The Karpman drama triangle is a narrative of the interaction of victim, rescuer, and persecutor. It is particularly prevalent amidst people experiencing intergenerational trauma where people may switch between roles but struggle to transcend the cycle and come together to solve the cause of negative situations. The dynamics of patriarchy map neatly into this triangle. It took me a decade to stop defaulting to seeking damsels in distress to form intimate relationships with. A narrative of superiority frames identity for many and maps neatly into the good and evil tribalism described in the alienation essay and is also the security blanket as described in the fear of freedom – see the feeble closet white supremacists of our day constantly seeking for failures in others. A traditional kinship system also provides a narrative structure of sorts defining roles and providing scripts for all occasions. A narrative of transcendence frames identity for the mystic and scientist in different ways as we aspire to rise above the subjective nature of our being.[1]
Whose interest do the narratives and aesthetics shaping us really serve and how do we go about taking them back from exploitative power? Nietzsche’s ‘ubermench’ better translated as ‘overman’ than ‘superman’ as it describes someone who has risen above the conditioning of their cultural context and becomes the author of their own lives. In the current cultural context, this is a sensible aspiration for those who can endure the abysmal loss of received narrative. Is it for everybody or do we just need to provide narratives of some kind of kinship in harmony with our natural systems for people to find their roles?
The narratives and aesthetics of empire need not colonise our children's minds but the village that raises them will need to be fully conscious of the medium they are growing into.
checkout the GFX video of song:
[1] This is the only essay in this series written predominantly in first person and I am drawing so heavily on my personal perspective in acknowledgement that the aesthetic ideal of transcendence to objectivity is more of a guiding star than destination. Peer review helps triangulate towards it but science lays no claim to absolute truth - we just know bullshit when we see it. This is a strength in the method of understanding the nature of being but a political weakness to be exploited when the population is feeling increasingly insecure as described in the fear of freedom essay.
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