The Beatles had a trippy tune on the White Album @ 1968 or ‘69, whose refrain was “Looking Through a Glass Onion,” and boy, at age fourteen, I thought I had found enigmatic wisdom…somehow, because I really didn’t understand it. Maybe there was nothing much to understand anyway, but I think I see something of truth in it now, regardless of the clay feet of John Lennon. Like a glass onion, I suppose I could expound on many things in it, but what I see clearly is that we, as our personas (who we think we are on a normal day), are really layered. By this I mean that one aspect of our consciousness is often looking down on another aspect, objectively critiquing it from one perspective or another. Do I like big motorcycles because, unknown to my running persona, I have to bolster my sense of manhood, a la Freud and his cigars? Am I reacting to this woman in such a way because she reminds me of a bossy mother, or whiny sister? Do I chase after heaven because I miss the all-encompassing comfort of the womb? (Freud, again). Often this introspection begins when we suddenly notice, as if we were a specimen in a lab, that something we have been habitually doing is just plain odd. Why this?, we ask, and then we grasp from our drawer of utensils a tool or two to try to explain it.
This happened to me a month or so ago concerning a previously unknown habit I had, and still have, on the computer. It is this: late in the evening after I have done whatever I normally do on the computer, from reading emails to a book on Kindle Cloud to the MSN news page, I pause to continue to look – for something. I might hit “Weather Channel” a few times, but still I feel that there is something more that I must do. I go to Google Search and pause, my fingers hovering over the keyboard, and then stop. I want to ask something, but I don’t know what. I feel incomplete, but cannot find the right question that will end that emptiness. I give a sigh, and turn it off for the night.
As said, I was not aware of this habit until another layer in the glass onion became activated and asked: what the hell is this particular layer doing? What is “it” needing to ask but cannot?
Given my proclivities, that question might be something about ultimate reality or God or such, which is revealing but not so much. It is what my normal “I” does as a matter of course. More revealing, however, at least to the layer in the onion who is now writing, is why I want to ask such things of a computer. What has Bill Gates and his jumble of diodes and circuit boards and what-not have to do with cosmic truths? That I give up shows that a part of me understands the folly of it; but that I search for the question to put into Google night after night shows that another part of me believes that, somehow, The Truth Is Out There (My apologies to The X Files).
I think the answer to this is really part of the answer to the march of civilization as we can now see it. While technological innovations were once slow and at times imperceptible, now we can measure advancement in days, and because of technology, we can all know about that advancement in even less time. And while technology once almost exclusively answered the needs of the people to survive, providing such things as weapons and irrigation and medicine (as primitive as it was), now there is another dimension to it. Now, technology answers the needs that were once restrained by the struggle to survive, or given us through religion; now, it answers, or tries to resolve, the insatiable inner hunger for fulfillment that drives us all. The only problem is, technology does not first define that hunger, and without that, must dangle before us only the promise of tomorrow. It must continue to tell us that tomorrow it will fulfill its vision, which is really only our promise to ourselves that we can solve all problems through technology – without any outside help, thank you very much.
And I have bought it. How could I not? It is the dominating ethos of our times. I must have, for otherwise, why would I reflexively hover over the keyboard every night wanting the answers to what bothers me somewhere and somehow like an itch? Why would I think that I could find the answers to the questions that I cannot even articulate? Like some political revolution based on the promise that it will give us all we need, many of us giddily trash the mansions of the past, expecting that such actions will permanently relieve us of our misery, only to find that our misery has increased, and our masters have become even more unbending and heartless.
We, or many of us, have naturally given human or superhuman qualities to fields of inquiry meant only to resolve temporal challenges. Like a sex-bot, they might seem to give us exactly what we want without argument, but there is something vital missing. Humanity is not in a robot or a rocket, and neither these nor our other inventions can fulfill that deep need for fulfillment. It is only something that understands us better than ourselves – that understands us as well as we can understand our machines – that can give both voice to our questions and the answers. And, whether we like it or not, and we usually don’t, to get the answers we must reach for something greater than ourselves In so doing, we must admit to our lack of power. We must, in the words of religion, humble ourselves.
When a civilization has machines that can move mountains almost as easily as God, it is hard to not believe that the civilization and its members are not gods. Like a real-life spouse, however, extraneous gods do not do as we please, much less an all-powerful one- and -only God. We don’t like this; we want it our way when we want it. But like a programmed machine, we don’t have the mind of the programmer; we function, but we do not necessarily know why. If we could articulate our basic needs, our first question might be exactly that: why do we function? And our second, far more problematic still, might be: why do we want to question our existence at all?
So I hover. Perhaps those questions are exactly the ones I want answered, but I cannot admit it because I know I would get nothing definitive. Yes, it might be exactly those questions that I want answered but know they cannot be, and so I pause as if confused when I really am not. I know that no computer, or flying car, or even the cure for cancer will ever answer those questions, so I block the questions out, thinking that someday I will find the right keys to push on a machine that will relieve the itch. I pause, hoping that I might find the right questions that a machine can answer. I hover, almost believing that someday we will slip by warp drive into a future that is thoroughly controlled through our brilliance, where I will find the questions and the answers that will give me everlasting peace and joy and meaning and fulfillment.
It is night now again. I do not want to give up the computer, not just yet. There is something that I want to ask it. One layer of the onion does not consider the other, but goes on, Pavlovian-like, searching for a question that cannot be answered, not here on this device, not now, not ever.
The Beatles had a trippy tune on the White Album @ 1968 or ‘69, whose refrain was “Looking Through a Glass Onion,” and boy, at age fourteen, I thought I had found enigmatic wisdom…somehow, because I really didn’t understand it. Maybe there was nothing much to understand anyway, but I think I see something of truth in it now, regardless of the clay feet of John Lennon. Like a glass onion, I suppose I could expound on many things in it, but what I see clearly is that we, as our personas (who we think we are on a normal day), are really layered. By this I mean that one aspect of our consciousness is often looking down on another aspect, objectively critiquing it from one perspective or another. Do I like big motorcycles because, unknown to my running persona, I have to bolster my sense of manhood, a la Freud and his cigars? Am I reacting to this woman in such a way because she reminds me of a bossy mother, or whiny sister? Do I chase after heaven because I miss the all-encompassing comfort of the womb? (Freud, again). Often this introspection begins when we suddenly notice, as if we were a specimen in a lab, that something we have been habitually doing is just plain odd. Why this?, we ask, and then we grasp from our drawer of utensils a tool or two to try to explain it.
This happened to me a month or so ago concerning a previously unknown habit I had, and still have, on the computer. It is this: late in the evening after I have done whatever I normally do on the computer, from reading emails to a book on Kindle Cloud to the MSN news page, I pause to continue to look – for something. I might hit “Weather Channel” a few times, but still I feel that there is something more that I must do. I go to Google Search and pause, my fingers hovering over the keyboard, and then stop. I want to ask something, but I don’t know what. I feel incomplete, but cannot find the right question that will end that emptiness. I give a sigh, and turn it off for the night.
As said, I was not aware of this habit until another layer in the glass onion became activated and asked: what the hell is this particular layer doing? What is “it” needing to ask but cannot?
Given my proclivities, that question might be something about ultimate reality or God or such, which is revealing but not so much. It is what my normal “I” does as a matter of course. More revealing, however, at least to the layer in the onion who is now writing, is why I want to ask such things of a computer. What has Bill Gates and his jumble of diodes and circuit boards and what-not have to do with cosmic truths? That I give up shows that a part of me understands the folly of it; but that I search for the question to put into Google night after night shows that another part of me believes that, somehow, The Truth Is Out There (My apologies to The X Files).
I think the answer to this is really part of the answer to the march of civilization as we can now see it. While technological innovations were once slow and at times imperceptible, now we can measure advancement in days, and because of technology, we can all know about that advancement in even less time. And while technology once almost exclusively answered the needs of the people to survive, providing such things as weapons and irrigation and medicine (as primitive as it was), now there is another dimension to it. Now, technology answers the needs that were once restrained by the struggle to survive, or given us through religion; now, it answers, or tries to resolve, the insatiable inner hunger for fulfillment that drives us all. The only problem is, technology does not first define that hunger, and without that, must dangle before us only the promise of tomorrow. It must continue to tell us that tomorrow it will fulfill its vision, which is really only our promise to ourselves that we can solve all problems through technology – without any outside help, thank you very much.
And I have bought it. How could I not? It is the dominating ethos of our times. I must have, for otherwise, why would I reflexively hover over the keyboard every night wanting the answers to what bothers me somewhere and somehow like an itch? Why would I think that I could find the answers to the questions that I cannot even articulate? Like some political revolution based on the promise that it will give us all we need, many of us giddily trash the mansions of the past, expecting that such actions will permanently relieve us of our misery, only to find that our misery has increased, and our masters have become even more unbending and heartless.
We, or many of us, have naturally given human or superhuman qualities to fields of inquiry meant only to resolve temporal challenges. Like a sex-bot, they might seem to give us exactly what we want without argument, but there is something vital missing. Humanity is not in a robot or a rocket, and neither these nor our other inventions can fulfill that deep need for fulfillment. It is only something that understands us better than ourselves – that understands us as well as we can understand our machines – that can give both voice to our questions and the answers. And, whether we like it or not, and we usually don’t, to get the answers we must reach for something greater than ourselves In so doing, we must admit to our lack of power. We must, in the words of religion, humble ourselves.
When a civilization has machines that can move mountains almost as easily as God, it is hard to not believe that the civilization and its members are not gods. Like a real-life spouse, however, extraneous gods do not do as we please, much less an all-powerful one- and -only God. We don’t like this; we want it our way when we want it. But like a programmed machine, we don’t have the mind of the programmer; we function, but we do not necessarily know why. If we could articulate our basic needs, our first question might be exactly that: why do we function? And our second, far more problematic still, might be: why do we want to question our existence at all?
So I hover. Perhaps those questions are exactly the ones I want answered, but I cannot admit it because I know I would get nothing definitive. Yes, it might be exactly those questions that I want answered but know they cannot be, and so I pause as if confused when I really am not. I know that no computer, or flying car, or even the cure for cancer will ever answer those questions, so I block the questions out, thinking that someday I will find the right keys to push on a machine that will relieve the itch. I pause, hoping that I might find the right questions that a machine can answer. I hover, almost believing that someday we will slip by warp drive into a future that is thoroughly controlled through our brilliance, where I will find the questions and the answers that will give me everlasting peace and joy and meaning and fulfillment.
It is night now again. I do not want to give up the computer, not just yet. There is something that I want to ask it. One layer of the onion does not consider the other, but goes on, Pavlovian-like, searching for a question that cannot be answered, not here on this device, not now, not ever.
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