|
A recent issue of The Nation had an article on float tanks -- sensory deprivation chambers that people pay to enter in order to ream out the modern technological sludge gumming up their senses and their thoughts.
Since the article appeared in The Nation, it took the journal's expected politico/cultural turns. The writer, Neima Jahromi, brought in Thoreau to counterpoint arguments made by the tankers regarding the stresses of (and solutions to) modern corporation-curated life. He also mused about whether the sense of self-redemption that tankers experience could be a trigger for social changes that would reduce income inequality and the corporatist-induced urge toward overwork. Sherry Turkle and a group of like-minded writers appear speaking about the insubstantiality of self and social connections caused by clicking on too many hyperlinks and having too many open browser tabs and how we need to hit the off-button to get back to basics.
I guess.
Maybe.
Though such speculation feels about as substantial as the water upon which the tankers float, in part because it simply reprises an old American superstition that the way to social reform is best done through the reform of the self -- the e-z revolution, no barricades needed, the kingdom of God to come by and by. And we all know how well such self-focus has worked in creating an egalitarian compassionate society in America.
But underneath the silliness, or at least thinness, of tank-mentality and digital anxieties simmers a fertile uneasiness about balance in a life curated by corporate interests, an uneasiness which is, at heart, religious: what would human life be like if the kingdom of God on earth in fact arrived tomorrow?
I've just finished Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Shitestorm of reaction across the Internet, of course, but the most interesting thing about the reaction is the idealism that drives it -- "idealism" meaning, for me, a straining towards the perfect and the perfected by a species evolved (irony of ironies) through selection by imperfections, otherwise known as evolution.
This idealism, whether it adopts Aslan's revolutionary Jesus or the Pauline Redeemer as its herald, is at heart a hunger to understand the source and purpose of human suffering and to figure out what can be done to stop it, otherwise known as "the kingdom of God on earth."
Is this achieved by active political resistance? Is it achieved by floating in a dark tank? What is the proper mix of private and public moralities upon which to found the kingdom? Can the kingdom dissolve the territorialities of self that spark violent conflict yet still maintain the benefits of individual conscience and freedom? How much violence can we use to achieve peace before the violence overawes everything? And so on, and so on.
This struggle can even be seen in the recent knuckle-headed arguing over debt ceilings and government shutdowns because embedded in the shouting are notions about how much suffering government should or shouldn't blunt in the lives of the citizens. Governments are, from this angle, attempts to make the kingdom manifest in people's lives.
But the kingdom of God on earth in corporate America -- a balanced life in a regime built on manufacturing unbalanced appetites -- idealism achieved through our bought-and-sold political system? Maybe the tankers are right -- best to withdraw to one's own kingdom and soothe one's own suffering. But they are right in the way that adolescents are wrong when teenagers think that they are the only ones to have ever suffered the travails and embarrassments of growing up. It's a limited perspective, and one destined to degrade after a short shelf life.
Because outside the tank, someone controls the water, someone controls the materials that make-up the tank -- the electricity, the property, the time we are allowed to allot to any leisure, all controlled by not-you -- "you" meaning not just the singular you but also the plural "you" of which your personal "you" is a part -- the commons, the common-wealth, the kingdom -- under assault by the "not," exploited daily for profit, privatizing the legacy, making you superfluous.
The American version of the species needs to stop amusing itself to death so that it can wake up and give itself a fighting chance to correct what needs correction and build a kingdom worth living in before the end-time finishes the work it is already doing.
Or it can continue to float on its own minor oceans, in the dark, encased, and soothe itself into irrelevance.
Ding! Time's up!
|
