Eclecticism is a Humanism

The only advantage our age has--I stress this: the only advantage--is our ability to look back on all the previous ages. We include those pasts in our presents. We experience their effects, their echoes, their vibrations, their mindsets. Our only blessing is our ability to evaluate those times. Our curse: paralysis. Clearheadedness breeds pessimism. Any conversation about history will demonstrate this amply. We move in cycles of flourishing complacency, stagnation, catagenesis, flourishing. And we never seem to learn anything.

And in the modern age, we see this particularly with people coming of age. They are brought up in an individualistic culture that inculcates in them this concept of absolute agency. And then the encounters with the real world are left to de-program these ideas wordlessly. Bureaucracies do the un-teaching. Massive universities destroy all idea of transcendent wisdom. Social mores and people with puny R-complex minds knock down the would-be creator. All hillsides and mountains melt back to the sea as slurry carried in industrial-strength PVC piping. You are taught to memorize and reproduce, even though we have machines that do that hundreds of thousands of millions times better, all so progenitors can wave pieces of paper in the air in front of their neigbours who live in identical houses (maybe of slightly different hues).

That's why we must again take up the rallying cry of the liberal arts. We must stop their own small-mindedness from consuming them. We must take up the stories of Yggdrasil and the Earth Mother, the Sky Father and the Great Moose. We must erect our inukshuks in the naves of cathedrals on flaoting islands on the backs of giant turtles. We must stare with kaleidoscope eyes at the djembes and resonate the hamonics unfazed, write our tests in crayon in Urdu. We must throw wine in their pig faces to fatten them for the feasts as we dance around the maypole, taking the supersaturation of images passing through flashing TV screens woven into the fabric of our shirts. And we must poison our lungs even as we overturn streets with ploughs drawn by bio-power of many teams of oxen. We must play our pan-flutes and call down the guardians from the four corners of the world to break down the firmament and pluck the bureaucrat-demiurge from his office enthroned and crush him underfoot, in a wine press, in a Bacchic orgy. We must spit on our hands and lift them up to guide the sun across the sky. We must listen to the worries of the middle-aged spinster. We must build the plexiglass brains. We are struggling for nothing less than the survival of basic consciousness. If we fail, the world belongs to the beetles.

Consider: "Most people think that shadows follow, precede or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories."