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| Mixed Media Sculpture by Shannon Mack |
Some people seem to think the world is a terrible place. Someone will talk about crime and selfishness as if it is a novelty act and it’s reasonable of you to respond by suggesting that violence, cruelty and immorality are the same as they ever were in the past, that the world hasn’t necessarily become more ruthless and chaotic, not in the lifetime of the person who seems to be disturbed by the publicized tragedies of the modern world, and is recoiling so adamantly from a random topic that coloured this particular party conversation. This person may wish for a not-so-abstract time when the world seemed simpler, purer and innocent, when people were good to one another, or at least seemed to be, and this probably has a lot to do with this person coming from a middle-class family and this time in the past, which might have been better than now, being their childhood, when they were protected from the accumulating horrors of the world. The outraged person probably hasn’t completed their first decade of adulthood either and seems to think that the violence in the media multiplies in front of their eyes as each year passes, as they become aware of the world in front of them, as it really is. You’ve heard this kind of complaint before, and every time you hear it you respond and say that the modern world isn’t any more violent than Ancient Rome or considerably crueller than Nazi Germany. Violent movies and video games don’t necessarily turn people into brutal savages, and that maybe those inclined to act aggressively after watching horror films or dismembering pixelated characters in a video game are going to do something suspect anyway, even without the stimulus. You interject this opinion to add something worthwhile to the party conversation. You think it’s right to say these things, maybe not morally so, but your comments can be absorbed into the discussion and accepted as a valid contribution. But you also notice that it’s not ok for you to also say to the morally outraged one that you accept immorality because it has always been there, which suggests to his binary consciousness that you are somehow passive in the realm of cruelty and abuse, when all that you are trying to communicate is that the human capacity to inflict evil doesn’t surprise you. It makes you look like an indifferent monster. You will come across as a thoughtless idiot to the easily outraged one, and maybe a few other people too, and then you will become the object of all this moral outrage, and seem to represent the selfish malaise of the human race, and you can see this just in the way the person reacts, which makes you feel guilty, as if you really are indifferent and selfish, because you know that the capacity to be evil is within all of us, and maybe it is within you after all? And this conversation has revealed your true self to the party, the self that you didn’t really know you were, until now, and then by extension you feel as if a larger consciousness is watching you and knows all of this already, even though you are momentarily unsure, in the reflexive sensation of your conscience, who this larger consciousness is. It is indifferent to you, it sees you as you truly are, wretched, spoiled and mortal, with all your actions and behaviours that you think make you the individual you are. You really are not that different from everyone else, you have inherited behaviours that have been passed down from your parents, and your parent’s parents, and your parent’s, parent’s, parents, and you realise there is nothing about you that is really unique, and this larger consciousness doesn’t care who you are, and what you do in your life has been done before by people you’ve never met, and what you feel has been felt before, even though the feeling feels unique, and you realise that by the time you are halfway through your life you won’t amount to anything more than being just another human being, despite the achievements that are important to you. And in that moment when the party conversation changes into something else, you realise you will never convince the outraged person, no matter what you say and do, that you maybe have a greater or even a more generous understanding of humanity than they do. But still you feel as if that larger consciousness is holding you in its gaze, even though you know it doesn’t really exist outside of yourself because this larger consciousness is actually you, and it makes you feel guilty, even though you haven’t actually done anything to feel guilty about.
Christian Martius (2009)
