Mark White talks about how our growing embrace
of the fake aggravates our estrangement from nature and ultimately
from ourselves.
Our society is comfortable with the
artificial: it's much less troublesome than
the real, and a lot
more obedient. But
the dislocation from
nature poses growing problems, not the
least the fact that our physical survival
is hanging in the balance. By living in
this hyper-artificial reality we're ignoring
deeper problems or dismissing them out
of hand. Rates of mental illness continue
to rise as our societies grow richer, and
this epidemic is dismissed as an interior
problem: he couldn't cope; she's not up
to it; they're sick. The solution? Swallow
a pill, and get back into your box.
We're dislocated. Cut off. Unsure of what is
real, and what was manufactured.
Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek
has touched on the phenomenon of
self-harmers, mostly women, who cut
themselves. The act is usually dismissed
as suicidal or a desire for self-obliteration,
but Zizek argues differently: 'This is
strictly parallel to the virtualisation of
our environment: it represents a
desperate strategy to return to the Real
of the body... Cutting is a radical
attempt to (re)gain a hold on reality,
or... to ground the ego firmly in bodily reality, against the unbearable
anxiety of
perceiving oneself as non-existent.'
I agree. Self-abuse is at least partly about
digging into the reality, the meat of who we are. It'a about affirming
that we feel, and that we exist. Pain as affirmation.
Ecopsychologist Chellis Glendinning explains
that the Neolithic era was the first time man walled himself off
from nature. What was inside the fence was good and could be
consumed, but what was outside the fence was a threat and must
be destroyed. The threats from outside the fence are growing. There's
climate change, new technologies, AIDS, Islamist terrorism and
unrest caused by globalisation. Zizek argues that 'it is the awareness
that we live in an insulated artificial universe which generates
the notion that some ominous agent is threatening us all the time
with total destruction', but you can turn his argument on its head.
The bigger the threat, the greater the need for control. We are
trying to extend that fence outwards, because what we control can't
hurt us.
Control again! "...what
we control can't hurt us." But what about chaos? What about the wild,
the UN-controlled. Passion, hunger, sexuality... and chance?
...people born before 1930 described
a natural smell as evoking their
childhood, but people born in the
following 50 years were more likely to
describe something artificial, like Play-
Doh or jet fuel. And the scents
and sounds of nature? What about them? What about the scents and
sounds of our bodies. What about real, authentic, lush, healthy
bodies, and minds? What about real, authentic, lush, healthyminds?
We are so screwed up.
Psychologically, Glendinning
sees deep trauma in our societies. 'I
look around and everyone is being
traumatised, whether it's by war or
leaving their homeland or living in a
mechanical-technological society and all
the trauma that goes along with that,' she
says. The rise of fake culture is, for her,
the next step of the dissociation caused by
such trauma. 'It's mentally ill. That people
would fall for it or go for it is a testimony
to the level of dissociation.'
Cultural dissociation. We're cutting ourselves
off from nature. Cutting ourselves off from our bodies. Cutting
ourselves off from our families, and allowing children
to be raised by strangers in daycare, and create
housing-development ghost towns from Monday through Friday while
the occupants are away. Cutting ourselves off from our culture.
Who has time to learn, or to create art, or music, or to simply
think?
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