Bleak moments

Do you ever have super-cynical moments where you know the human condition to be much bleaker, simpler and mechanical than we usually admit? I do and I suspect many others do too.

I don’t mean I’m torn to ribbons by bouts of uncontrollable angst or anything remotely like it. I'm rather fond of a spot of bleak every now and then. But I sometimes wonder if we’d be better off making a clean breast of things - in a socially honest kind of way.

Allow me to take the arts as an example. Let’s apply a bit of bleak simplicity to the arts.

The arts are a loose grouping of artificial stimuli which affect us emotionally. Paintings, sculpture, music and literature are socially constructed stimuli designed to induce certain emotional responses – we call them aesthetic. They do not originate within the aesthetic creation itself, but from the social rules by which it was created. The rules do not have to be rational.

I don’t want to pursue this argument as an argument, but as an example of how one could quite easily and consistently analyse aesthetics into nothing but socially approved emotional responses to stimuli. The details of how these responses gain their social approval may be complex, diffuse and fragmented, but once they are established, the analysis is simple. Bleakly mechanistic but simple.

Now we all know that this kind of mechanistic thinking isn’t at all new and I suspect substantial numbers of people have always teetered on the edge of it from time to time. But most of us don’t take the plunge, because to do so would deprive us of our aesthetic pleasures. The music, the appreciation of beauty, harmony – the whole gamut of aesthetic satisfactions would be lost, or at least degraded.

Now let’s apply some bleak simplicity to science:-

Science is all about tools –how to make them and how to use them - nothing else. We are tool-makers - science and engineering are merely tool-making. Sooner or later all scientific speculation must end in the building of a new tool or in a new use for existing tools. Otherwise science is merely gossip. It may be mathematical gossip – but still gossip.

Maybe this kind of bleak simplicity is the key we throw away, the one we are all aware of but prefer not to use - the key to unlock comforting social illusions. Once unlocked they would offer scant comfort and little business for professional wordsmiths of the soundbite persuasion, so we are persuaded to leave them alone.

In fact most of us seem to be conditioned from birth to go along with many useful social illusions. Maybe it’s why intelligent people become frustrated. My own view is that bleak = true, but whether I'm inclined to go along with my own view is another matter.

And as you may have guessed - I'm reading Zola again.