Essay: The New Thinking, Part 1
I'm sick today, so I had time to write all this down in between naps. It's sort of a part one of my take on what I call the New Thinking, meaning those little red flags that we can see in art and culture that mean our society is changing its tune in a big way. Today I'm concentrating on a quote from The Subtle Knife, because I believe it may be the first mainstream instance of New Thinking. So, let's get to it:
"There are two great powers," the man said, "and they've been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit."
This is a quote from Philip Pullman's series His Dark Materials, and it is possibly the most important passage yet written in my lifetime.
The time of the Baby Boomers is gone. What they did for social freedom in the twentieth century can never be fully repaid, I agree; they sparked such a massive cultural upheaval that in little more than ten years we went from crew cuts to Stonewall, and I am proud to be a part of that heritage. But it's been nearly half a century, we've allowed all they fought for to stagnate, and we should be ashamed.
I am so, so tired of our media and our priorities being determined by the fundamentalist, nihilist dregs of a social movement gone stale. We've become too lazy to solve widespread problems, instead subscribing mindlessly to ideas of inescapability and inexplicability by ascribing our difficulties to gods and other constructed abstracts like "human nature". This is not the behaviour of the heirs to the Age Of Enlightenment.
See, the whole idea of their having invented Science and Reason all those centuries ago was to give humankind more control over its destiny. For example, we no longer needed to live our lives in constant fear of communicable diseases after we used Science to produce vaccines and antibiotics. We learned to predict the weather, use machines for tedious labour, and even to use radiation to cure cancer.
There have been social advances as well, thanks to our ability to use Reason. In 20th century America, we saw massive strides in this vein, with African-Americans, women, and queer people demanding political equality. Yet at the turn of the century we seem to have been at a standstill. We seemed resigned in so many ways-- resigned to the racism, sexism and homophobia which permeated our society, calling it "human nature". We likewise excused the delusional godmongering of the religious right, allowing them to render us virtually powerless in the political sphere as though theirs was the norm rather than a tragic aberrance. We were resigned to war and abuse and hate and fear, believing and being told that these "evil" elements are somehow necessary to maintain some greater balance, and which must be weathered in order for some great cosmic pendulum to swing back over to "good". We believed we should therefore fear any progress we might accrue, as it was sure to result in an equal retrogression.
But we're not being controlled by some outside force, and this idea is the very backbone of atheism, and it's why Philip Pullman is able to see what he does in the above quote. In saying this, Pullman reduces the ages-long quandary, what we have always perceived as the ultimate battle Good vs Evil, to a nothing more than a simple objective: win.
It's not a matter of winning individual battles anymore. We should no longer accept, for example, that it's necessary to fight for decades just to secure this or that right for this or that disempowered group of people, and a further set of decades before we can begin to expect social equality. Instead, we can use Reason and Science to identify and effectively solve these problems. For example, we see Third Wave Feminism doing just that in its invention of terms for social patterns that have heretofore gone unrecognised. We as leftists can and will boil down to a quantifiable science what causes people to have prejudice and how to relieve a population of that problem using a targeted, well-executed allotment of resources.
The time of the Baby Boomers is over because they sought balance between society and social disease. They believed there was equal misunderstanding on both the left and the right, that both sides were necessary to that previously mentioned ultimate balance, with neither able to exist or prosper without the other. Even the terms "left" and "right" are misleading; suggesting balance where there is none, and attributing social strife to the equal deviance of both parties from some theoretical "norm" or "centre".
Pullman's quote is so important because it re-sorts the old political categories; instead of The Right and The Left, we are now looking at The Problem and The Solution. He dares to verbalise in print a possibility to which many of us have only just awoken:, that there is a political allegiance, a school of thinking, which is just manifestly incorrect.
This is not to say that everything we consider "left" or "right" could be neatly sorted into these new categories, rather I would encourage us all to begin re-sorting our behaviours and assumptions accordingly. Instead of asking whether a behaviour would be a Liberal thing to do, for example, I might instead ask myself whether that behaviour is reasonably likely to help or hinder.
This collects all social strife in a way, I believe, that it has never been collected before. There is a suggestion distinct to newer works that if we should dig deep enough below a problem, we may find that all barriers to human progress as have the same root system, and that it is, as I have said above, scientifically quantifiable. Thus is the possibility boldly expressed that we might strike at that root and actually win. The method by which we might go about executing such a campaign is, I believe, also expressed here and there in newer art, and will comprise the next essay on New Thinking.
"There are two great powers," the man said, "and they've been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit."
This is a quote from Philip Pullman's series His Dark Materials, and it is possibly the most important passage yet written in my lifetime.
The time of the Baby Boomers is gone. What they did for social freedom in the twentieth century can never be fully repaid, I agree; they sparked such a massive cultural upheaval that in little more than ten years we went from crew cuts to Stonewall, and I am proud to be a part of that heritage. But it's been nearly half a century, we've allowed all they fought for to stagnate, and we should be ashamed.
I am so, so tired of our media and our priorities being determined by the fundamentalist, nihilist dregs of a social movement gone stale. We've become too lazy to solve widespread problems, instead subscribing mindlessly to ideas of inescapability and inexplicability by ascribing our difficulties to gods and other constructed abstracts like "human nature". This is not the behaviour of the heirs to the Age Of Enlightenment.
See, the whole idea of their having invented Science and Reason all those centuries ago was to give humankind more control over its destiny. For example, we no longer needed to live our lives in constant fear of communicable diseases after we used Science to produce vaccines and antibiotics. We learned to predict the weather, use machines for tedious labour, and even to use radiation to cure cancer.
There have been social advances as well, thanks to our ability to use Reason. In 20th century America, we saw massive strides in this vein, with African-Americans, women, and queer people demanding political equality. Yet at the turn of the century we seem to have been at a standstill. We seemed resigned in so many ways-- resigned to the racism, sexism and homophobia which permeated our society, calling it "human nature". We likewise excused the delusional godmongering of the religious right, allowing them to render us virtually powerless in the political sphere as though theirs was the norm rather than a tragic aberrance. We were resigned to war and abuse and hate and fear, believing and being told that these "evil" elements are somehow necessary to maintain some greater balance, and which must be weathered in order for some great cosmic pendulum to swing back over to "good". We believed we should therefore fear any progress we might accrue, as it was sure to result in an equal retrogression.
But we're not being controlled by some outside force, and this idea is the very backbone of atheism, and it's why Philip Pullman is able to see what he does in the above quote. In saying this, Pullman reduces the ages-long quandary, what we have always perceived as the ultimate battle Good vs Evil, to a nothing more than a simple objective: win.
It's not a matter of winning individual battles anymore. We should no longer accept, for example, that it's necessary to fight for decades just to secure this or that right for this or that disempowered group of people, and a further set of decades before we can begin to expect social equality. Instead, we can use Reason and Science to identify and effectively solve these problems. For example, we see Third Wave Feminism doing just that in its invention of terms for social patterns that have heretofore gone unrecognised. We as leftists can and will boil down to a quantifiable science what causes people to have prejudice and how to relieve a population of that problem using a targeted, well-executed allotment of resources.
The time of the Baby Boomers is over because they sought balance between society and social disease. They believed there was equal misunderstanding on both the left and the right, that both sides were necessary to that previously mentioned ultimate balance, with neither able to exist or prosper without the other. Even the terms "left" and "right" are misleading; suggesting balance where there is none, and attributing social strife to the equal deviance of both parties from some theoretical "norm" or "centre".
Pullman's quote is so important because it re-sorts the old political categories; instead of The Right and The Left, we are now looking at The Problem and The Solution. He dares to verbalise in print a possibility to which many of us have only just awoken:, that there is a political allegiance, a school of thinking, which is just manifestly incorrect.
This is not to say that everything we consider "left" or "right" could be neatly sorted into these new categories, rather I would encourage us all to begin re-sorting our behaviours and assumptions accordingly. Instead of asking whether a behaviour would be a Liberal thing to do, for example, I might instead ask myself whether that behaviour is reasonably likely to help or hinder.
This collects all social strife in a way, I believe, that it has never been collected before. There is a suggestion distinct to newer works that if we should dig deep enough below a problem, we may find that all barriers to human progress as have the same root system, and that it is, as I have said above, scientifically quantifiable. Thus is the possibility boldly expressed that we might strike at that root and actually win. The method by which we might go about executing such a campaign is, I believe, also expressed here and there in newer art, and will comprise the next essay on New Thinking.