I realized a few months ago that I don't play games like I used to. I used to sit down and enjoy a good story line, investigating every nook and cranny, and taking my time. Now I rush through as much as possible and only look into the details if I'm awarded something for it. My goal in mind is to beat the game as soon as possible so I can get access to all the best items.
Several nights later I was sitting down drinking some wine and watching a TV show. I had an entirely different outtake. I actually resented progressing further into the seasons. This show has already been completed and will have no further seasons. So like the game, there is a finite about of material for me to enjoy.
Now for the game I quite zealously try to accomplish as much as possible as quick as possible. On the other hand, for the show I had a moment of disappointment at the end of each episode because I realized I was closer to the end of something I wished not to end.
So my question became one of progress. Why did I wish to progress through the game so quickly but not so with the show?
I used to tell my parents growing up that I enjoyed games more than movies because they were interactive. I'm finding that is slowly fading away. My interaction with games is dictated by the inner-workings of the games. And games today are highly centered on achievements, trophies, accomplishments, challenges, all of which require you to beat the game numerous times under differing circumstances and difficulties.
Now get any two gamers in a room long enough and they'll begin to discuss how games have changed in the last twenty years. They're rather simple yet poignant observations. One that is most notable in my mind is that of difficulty. Older games are notoriously more difficult. No one beat NES games in a day nor a week, but these things might take months or even years to beat. No infinite continues, no respawns, etc.
Now compare the modern counterpart which has all of the above. If you can't beat it there are more attempts to be had, no restarting from the beginning, you can invite your friends to help, so many other outlets are provided. What this translates to in the gamers mind is this -- games today are meant to be beaten with relative ease. If one checks gamer review sites, articles, magazines, there is always a "replay value" category that goes into the game's overall score. All in all, games are meant to be worn out over and over, beaten like a dead horse, then you await for the sequel.
Now this might all seem like nerdy gamer jargon. But it raises an interesting question in my mind. How do the inner workings of the arts and tools we use habituate us?
In games I am expected to have one of each type of character, to max each one out, encounter all the playable material, try out all the possibilities of play style. And the community of gamers, the inner working of the games themselves, push for you to rush. There is an overwhelming sense of there being more material, more quests, more levels await. Expansions are released, more levels allowed, and so forth. But there always comes a point you reach when you realize you've worn a game out. At this moment the total absurdity of it all hits me. Why did I do all this? What do I have to show for it?
One might posit the story line. But here I would say the telos, the end, of the game is always placed beyond the story. In order to unlock all secrets, experience all the material, you would have run through the storyline ad nauseam. And I don't use this phrase lightly. Video game plots are like whore's apartments, they've been in every novel and movie all day and night and only come back to video games when they've been worn out. No offense to whores, for my Lord did love harlots as any other person, but it is a fitting analogy. Point is, the telos of the game hardly ever stops with the story. Or, the story is afforded little time and development whereas the gameplay is fed by the cash monster.
So then the telos is separated from the storyline. Games become nothing more than a series of actions which lead to further actions, strength building strength, with no particular goal in mind. The villain is dead, the world is saved, romance fulfilled, yet you continue to play the game, and the producers' design is such that you haven't "beaten" the game until you do so. So you go onward, ad infinitum or until you realize there's nothing left to do, and the end is so anti-climatic that there's no grand end of the tale, no completion to your effort, you simply level one day, stare blankly at the screen, then turn off the machine.
Now this reminds me of other motifs I see in culture.
This notion of building onward to greatness is remarkably Enlightenment era thinking. Simultaneously with the rise of some sciences, came the idea that man was progressing towards something. In most references to this I'm never sure exactly what people meant. It often seemed to be an ad infinitum march which is absurd.
I say absurd because all actions have some end. If we ever realize there is no end we cease to do those things we thought led to some perceived end. E.G. I stop playing the game when I realize there is no grand end. E.G. A person who thinks they're in a race stops running when they realize there is no finish line.
In the last decade there have been some...progressions...on how progress is spoken of though. Sometimes our communities of medicine believe we are progressing towards immortality, that medicine will stop death. Some communities of technology believe humanity is progressing towards a sort of transcendental, pseudo-technological existence where humanity and technology become integrated. Think cyborgs, or matrix, or some other such thing. These aren't just radical claims people make to jostle people into argument, some people believe these sorts of things, and they have good reason to.
The point here is to say that the progress culture is seeking an end. They know they value progress as a virtue. Society must progress. Humanity must progress. We have better medicine and technology and sciences. Again, this word, better, needs qualification. By better all we can do is look at the inner workings of the communities -- their institutions, goals, tools, etc. The group wants to live forever, they desire immortality, so their narrative about progress gets dressed up in language about progress and science and medicine. All that is really being said though is, I want progress for the values I have. And value, much like rights, often means nothing more than I like, prefer, want, etc.
So the Enlightenment terms like objective also get thrown onto the science and medicine, and get drawn into a conclusion that can't be drawn from their premises. The data can be extrapolated, interpreted, put into general theories, but no where does a value statement come out of this about we ought be immortal or we ought progress technologically. These are additions which are tied haphazardly to the tools of our society, much like politicians sometimes add self-directed, self-interested clauses into bills with completely unrelated material.
What is medicine progressing towards? From our current political debates and the inner workings of medicine practiced, i.e. preventative, it seems we very much imagine a world where death is no longer a problem. The American narrative consists in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now we can argue about the last two all day long, but the first is typically ignored. Life and mortality is something not taught to the sort of Liberalism (classical, not political use) that has infected America.
Death is something you hide from your children. You don't tell a child with they're dying. It's a tragedy if anyone under 65 dies. Theodicy is still a huge problem for American protestants. There is no sense of mortality, there is an ignorance of death at best, and at worst a fear and misunderstanding.
Funerals are some of the most awkward events I witnessed in my time at an Episcopal Church last summer. Never did I see the generational gap between the Great Generation and the Baby Boomer as I did in funerals. The former were dying off one a week, the latter were their children. The Great Generation dealt with two Great Wars, they knew how to die, had always been ready. This was a generation who were faced with it in great numbers. And as most veterans will tell you, once you come to acknowledge mortality as a fact, it never leaves. This is one of the many reasons why reintegration into society is such a problem for veterans, but this is another tale for another time.
The second generation were the children of the deceased. They were the ones who lived through Korea and Vietnam. They were children who wanted nothing to do with the wars their parents went through, rejected the ideology of their parents that they perceived as being under the auspices of Capitalism and Democratic propaganda. Whether or not they were right or wrong, the end result was a generation that didn't want to see another death. They rioted when 1,000 boys came home in coffins, which their parents generation would have thought was by the grace of God that so few had died.
The Great Generation still a generation of The Church, the Liturgy, of ritual and mystery, of faith despite great atrocities. The latter moving to separate spirituality from the Church with the rise of ecumenism in the 50's and 60's, a growing distaste for any sort of institution or authority, The Church claiming both.
So meet the two generations.
Mother or Father dies. Son or daughter suddenly wants to read a letter at the funeral. It is quasi-spiritual, a sort of pagan pep talk mixed with progress ideology, "Remember her/him and march on! S/he lives on in us!" The next generation literally believes they are the stepping stone from their parents. This implies the purpose of childbirth, of family, is simply to reproduce. But the same problem occurs, to what end? So the Baby Boomer generation doesn't know what to do with death anymore now than they did in Vietnam.
Work is easier. We can progress day to day in our own individual way. So enters the individuality factory. Civilian duty is reduced to being a good capitalist. If you cut as many throats as possible economically we call that being efficient. If you find a way to convince someone they need the newest model or new shit they really don't need, that's called being innovative. The inner workings of our society necessitate themselves. We need cars to go to work and we go to work to afford our cars.
Therefore, death is not a viable discussion in much of society. By extension the question of how to die well made impossible. Instead, our culture opts for another question, how do we remove death? To this we have harnessed medicine as the panacea to all our anxiety.
Others latch onto technological advancements, or both, either way there seems three options for the culture of progress that I can think of now. The first two are that it must find a viable telos. This requires something like immortality, either bodily through medicine, or consciously through technology. Case in point, socialized healthcare. Another option is for the culture of progress to acknowledge it has no aim, and without aim it is like a toddler pissing all over the toilet seat at 2AM who is too busy being proud of doing something the way his parents habituated him to do that we doesn't acknowledge to what end or what it means to do it well.
This pissing toddler example raises two important points in my mind. Both of which deal with modern philosophical "fallacies." The question of what is best or what one ought or should do is often referred to as the is-ought fallacy or problem. This was coined by old Hume, a product of the Enlightenment strangely enough... :-| ... who was left a system of philosophy without any sort of teleology.
So like our toddler, the question of doing things well was out of the question. What triumphed in the system at the time was Kant's ethics which teaches that most beloved categorical imperative. Strangely Kant's ethics do nothing but reaffirm his own societal teaching. What one can universalize is going to be determined by the inner workings of his societal structure which gives definitions, language, available ideas, and so forth. No one remembers Kant as the great ethicist who led a rebellion to a great society. In fact I'd imagine his quiet German town and those who read him continued to affirm their own beliefs, but attached "universal" to it in hopes other people willed as they willed.
So much of Kant is still rampant in today's cultures its yak worthy. But that's what we've inherited, and its mixed with so many other ideas we have incoherent language for ethics.
Instead of telos we're left with progress. Case in point, President Obama's campaign slogan was "Change." There was no direction nor qualification to this word, just merely an idea of something changing. Much like progress it says nothing more than "movement." And the notion of progress or change implies "good" change. But to say something is "good" or "better" implies some notion of functioning well. And without telos, functioning well becomes a nonsense question to ask. The telos determines what it means to do a thing well. For instance we judge a cook's expertise by tasting the product and by watching their method. Tasting good gives one sense of functioning well. But if they used box stuff we say they're not really a good chef. Thus the ends don't justify the means entirely, but the end and the function towards the end are integrally connected.
This is what Progress lacks.
And I have been habituated to it.
So I play games as if I'm trying to get somewhere, when I should fully well know I live in a culture that produces games that typically don't have much of an end in sight (at least the top hits). Another case in point would be first person shooters. People play these all day and you get nothing for it. So they introduced a leveling system for them, unlocked weapons at levels, and SHAZAM, progress. When you unlock it all there is no ultimate goal. One might say to dominate everyone else, but there is no clear and sufficient amount of this. Do you do that for one game? A thousand games? Until you feel sated? It's usually this last one. And this sort of habituation leads to people only performing actions believing there are pleasurable ends awaiting them -- but the "orgasm moment" never occurs.
But the Christian must prepare for suffering if need be, and has need to do many things out of love which are not always pleasurable. Thus virtues are needed which will habituate pleasure to right passion and reason.
And there seem so many other examples of progress in our habituated thinking. We say "time is money." We rush in cars, honk at pedestrians if they're too slow, always trying to get somewhere faster and with more efficiency. Friends and work are equally scheduled in with certain dates and limits on time. E.G. I can hang out for two hours then I have to meet so-and-so. There is no room to allow time with friends to transform naturally. We have limited time we are jealous of and if something is to be done it must occur in this slot.
There is public and private. In the public we progress to something. Rousseau and Tocqueville (if memory serves) often critiqued French and American culture in the 18th and 19th centuries for vegetating while not at work. Leisure time was turned into private time in which brain activity came to record lows. No longer was leisure time the activity of bettering oneself. It seems true vegetation has set in as a cultural norm.
We feel entitled to desert, a long weekend, sitting on the couch for 8 hours because we worked hard the day before. Part of this might be that our society is extreme by nature. Americas work longer work weeks on average than other societies. This means to work here is by definition a system which often habituates people into bad habits.
But what's more, even the vegetative acts I once partook in seem driven by progress now. I have a long list of movies I need to see. I need to watch all five seasons of this TV series before the next comes on in the fall. I have to beat all of this game by Friday. I have to see seven friends by the end of the week. So goes the list.
Even the home is dominated by it. We progress through types of furniture, TV's, gadgets, entertainment, and so on. As we progress in society and income so do our toys and our living styles. There is some sense of "climbing the ladder" as we say. This leads to indefinite indulgence at the service of one's pleasures. Reason is subjugated to the appetites, and the ultimate passion guiding it all is an absurd telos of Progress, that vague pie-in-the-sky word that can't place it's finger on anything concrete as an ultimate end. So our person becomes habituated to myths and tales told by our forefathers which teach us falsities about the human person, in how to organize the human anthropology, to what end we were made and ought to seek, and it pushes aside the question of what it means to live well altogether.
There is a lovely narrative told of man reaching into the stars, the infinite cosmos on and on through progress. But the truth is this is absurd. Should man do this for so long, we will eventually tire and ask "Why?" If a man seeks water and does not find it, he does not mythologize and romanticize his search this way, he says he's lost in an infinite abyss, wandering the desert thirsty. Maybe it was a cute and novel journey for the first few days, but by year forty one tires and seeks an out. And surely there are many temptations and wonderful things we are discovering through this idea of progress, but without telos the novelty where's off sooner or later. And I do hope my generation will shed this skin of novelty for it's own sake, change for its own sake, Progress for its own sake, for all are equally absurd.
So then we must ask questions. What is the end of our medicine? Of our sciences? If we do seek immortality why and how? There must be discussion on death before any such question can even be posed though. But I do not think our culture is prepared to have such a discussion.
Here the Church has much to say. And I could go on well into the evening. But I think the end would only be to feel as if I'm completing this rant as a whole. And I find this passion to be somewhat...progressive...in that I realize I could go on infinitely trying to justify positions. So I shall stop here, where I realize I sit comfortably within the Church, but will at least make a few parting comments.
The Church is well acquainted with death, much more so than our culture. We teach it, we show it, we preach it. Our Liturgy and Daily Office prevents the commodification of time and space that progress has lent itself to. "Time is money" where money has no ultimate end other than continual progress, but the Church has taught through prayer that time should not be thought of this way. Instead time revolves around God, not around my personal goals. In one sense of "happiness" I think God very much cares about us and wants us to be happy. But in another sense, the sense that most people mean when they say "happy," well, to quote one of my favorite quotes from a professor, "God doesn't give a shit about your happiness." Through Him we live, move and have our being, and prayer reminds us of this. Finally, the Church has been well acquainted with teleology, has never lost it in the faithful circles, and teaches that the human soul reveals telos in everything we do.
So instead of playing that damned game today, I went for a walk and read a book. I am rehabituating myself into finding how some arts are good in themselves, not in an unqualified sense, but good qua arts for how they make us think, feel, and view the world. I need to be careful of how I view things. I realize progress is a nasty vice that has infected many of my ways of thinking, from school to relationships to arts but luckily stopped short of my rituals. Instead progress hit my rituals like a brick wall so I got to thinkin'...So I read, I walked, I wrote, and damn if I don't think and feel more like a well functioning human than I have in a while.
Peace,
G. Blake Tipton
Several nights later I was sitting down drinking some wine and watching a TV show. I had an entirely different outtake. I actually resented progressing further into the seasons. This show has already been completed and will have no further seasons. So like the game, there is a finite about of material for me to enjoy.
Now for the game I quite zealously try to accomplish as much as possible as quick as possible. On the other hand, for the show I had a moment of disappointment at the end of each episode because I realized I was closer to the end of something I wished not to end.
So my question became one of progress. Why did I wish to progress through the game so quickly but not so with the show?
I used to tell my parents growing up that I enjoyed games more than movies because they were interactive. I'm finding that is slowly fading away. My interaction with games is dictated by the inner-workings of the games. And games today are highly centered on achievements, trophies, accomplishments, challenges, all of which require you to beat the game numerous times under differing circumstances and difficulties.
Now get any two gamers in a room long enough and they'll begin to discuss how games have changed in the last twenty years. They're rather simple yet poignant observations. One that is most notable in my mind is that of difficulty. Older games are notoriously more difficult. No one beat NES games in a day nor a week, but these things might take months or even years to beat. No infinite continues, no respawns, etc.
Now compare the modern counterpart which has all of the above. If you can't beat it there are more attempts to be had, no restarting from the beginning, you can invite your friends to help, so many other outlets are provided. What this translates to in the gamers mind is this -- games today are meant to be beaten with relative ease. If one checks gamer review sites, articles, magazines, there is always a "replay value" category that goes into the game's overall score. All in all, games are meant to be worn out over and over, beaten like a dead horse, then you await for the sequel.
Now this might all seem like nerdy gamer jargon. But it raises an interesting question in my mind. How do the inner workings of the arts and tools we use habituate us?
In games I am expected to have one of each type of character, to max each one out, encounter all the playable material, try out all the possibilities of play style. And the community of gamers, the inner working of the games themselves, push for you to rush. There is an overwhelming sense of there being more material, more quests, more levels await. Expansions are released, more levels allowed, and so forth. But there always comes a point you reach when you realize you've worn a game out. At this moment the total absurdity of it all hits me. Why did I do all this? What do I have to show for it?
One might posit the story line. But here I would say the telos, the end, of the game is always placed beyond the story. In order to unlock all secrets, experience all the material, you would have run through the storyline ad nauseam. And I don't use this phrase lightly. Video game plots are like whore's apartments, they've been in every novel and movie all day and night and only come back to video games when they've been worn out. No offense to whores, for my Lord did love harlots as any other person, but it is a fitting analogy. Point is, the telos of the game hardly ever stops with the story. Or, the story is afforded little time and development whereas the gameplay is fed by the cash monster.
So then the telos is separated from the storyline. Games become nothing more than a series of actions which lead to further actions, strength building strength, with no particular goal in mind. The villain is dead, the world is saved, romance fulfilled, yet you continue to play the game, and the producers' design is such that you haven't "beaten" the game until you do so. So you go onward, ad infinitum or until you realize there's nothing left to do, and the end is so anti-climatic that there's no grand end of the tale, no completion to your effort, you simply level one day, stare blankly at the screen, then turn off the machine.
Now this reminds me of other motifs I see in culture.
This notion of building onward to greatness is remarkably Enlightenment era thinking. Simultaneously with the rise of some sciences, came the idea that man was progressing towards something. In most references to this I'm never sure exactly what people meant. It often seemed to be an ad infinitum march which is absurd.
I say absurd because all actions have some end. If we ever realize there is no end we cease to do those things we thought led to some perceived end. E.G. I stop playing the game when I realize there is no grand end. E.G. A person who thinks they're in a race stops running when they realize there is no finish line.
In the last decade there have been some...progressions...on how progress is spoken of though. Sometimes our communities of medicine believe we are progressing towards immortality, that medicine will stop death. Some communities of technology believe humanity is progressing towards a sort of transcendental, pseudo-technological existence where humanity and technology become integrated. Think cyborgs, or matrix, or some other such thing. These aren't just radical claims people make to jostle people into argument, some people believe these sorts of things, and they have good reason to.
The point here is to say that the progress culture is seeking an end. They know they value progress as a virtue. Society must progress. Humanity must progress. We have better medicine and technology and sciences. Again, this word, better, needs qualification. By better all we can do is look at the inner workings of the communities -- their institutions, goals, tools, etc. The group wants to live forever, they desire immortality, so their narrative about progress gets dressed up in language about progress and science and medicine. All that is really being said though is, I want progress for the values I have. And value, much like rights, often means nothing more than I like, prefer, want, etc.
So the Enlightenment terms like objective also get thrown onto the science and medicine, and get drawn into a conclusion that can't be drawn from their premises. The data can be extrapolated, interpreted, put into general theories, but no where does a value statement come out of this about we ought be immortal or we ought progress technologically. These are additions which are tied haphazardly to the tools of our society, much like politicians sometimes add self-directed, self-interested clauses into bills with completely unrelated material.
What is medicine progressing towards? From our current political debates and the inner workings of medicine practiced, i.e. preventative, it seems we very much imagine a world where death is no longer a problem. The American narrative consists in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now we can argue about the last two all day long, but the first is typically ignored. Life and mortality is something not taught to the sort of Liberalism (classical, not political use) that has infected America.
Death is something you hide from your children. You don't tell a child with they're dying. It's a tragedy if anyone under 65 dies. Theodicy is still a huge problem for American protestants. There is no sense of mortality, there is an ignorance of death at best, and at worst a fear and misunderstanding.
Funerals are some of the most awkward events I witnessed in my time at an Episcopal Church last summer. Never did I see the generational gap between the Great Generation and the Baby Boomer as I did in funerals. The former were dying off one a week, the latter were their children. The Great Generation dealt with two Great Wars, they knew how to die, had always been ready. This was a generation who were faced with it in great numbers. And as most veterans will tell you, once you come to acknowledge mortality as a fact, it never leaves. This is one of the many reasons why reintegration into society is such a problem for veterans, but this is another tale for another time.
The second generation were the children of the deceased. They were the ones who lived through Korea and Vietnam. They were children who wanted nothing to do with the wars their parents went through, rejected the ideology of their parents that they perceived as being under the auspices of Capitalism and Democratic propaganda. Whether or not they were right or wrong, the end result was a generation that didn't want to see another death. They rioted when 1,000 boys came home in coffins, which their parents generation would have thought was by the grace of God that so few had died.
The Great Generation still a generation of The Church, the Liturgy, of ritual and mystery, of faith despite great atrocities. The latter moving to separate spirituality from the Church with the rise of ecumenism in the 50's and 60's, a growing distaste for any sort of institution or authority, The Church claiming both.
So meet the two generations.
Mother or Father dies. Son or daughter suddenly wants to read a letter at the funeral. It is quasi-spiritual, a sort of pagan pep talk mixed with progress ideology, "Remember her/him and march on! S/he lives on in us!" The next generation literally believes they are the stepping stone from their parents. This implies the purpose of childbirth, of family, is simply to reproduce. But the same problem occurs, to what end? So the Baby Boomer generation doesn't know what to do with death anymore now than they did in Vietnam.
Work is easier. We can progress day to day in our own individual way. So enters the individuality factory. Civilian duty is reduced to being a good capitalist. If you cut as many throats as possible economically we call that being efficient. If you find a way to convince someone they need the newest model or new shit they really don't need, that's called being innovative. The inner workings of our society necessitate themselves. We need cars to go to work and we go to work to afford our cars.
Therefore, death is not a viable discussion in much of society. By extension the question of how to die well made impossible. Instead, our culture opts for another question, how do we remove death? To this we have harnessed medicine as the panacea to all our anxiety.
Others latch onto technological advancements, or both, either way there seems three options for the culture of progress that I can think of now. The first two are that it must find a viable telos. This requires something like immortality, either bodily through medicine, or consciously through technology. Case in point, socialized healthcare. Another option is for the culture of progress to acknowledge it has no aim, and without aim it is like a toddler pissing all over the toilet seat at 2AM who is too busy being proud of doing something the way his parents habituated him to do that we doesn't acknowledge to what end or what it means to do it well.
This pissing toddler example raises two important points in my mind. Both of which deal with modern philosophical "fallacies." The question of what is best or what one ought or should do is often referred to as the is-ought fallacy or problem. This was coined by old Hume, a product of the Enlightenment strangely enough... :-| ... who was left a system of philosophy without any sort of teleology.
So like our toddler, the question of doing things well was out of the question. What triumphed in the system at the time was Kant's ethics which teaches that most beloved categorical imperative. Strangely Kant's ethics do nothing but reaffirm his own societal teaching. What one can universalize is going to be determined by the inner workings of his societal structure which gives definitions, language, available ideas, and so forth. No one remembers Kant as the great ethicist who led a rebellion to a great society. In fact I'd imagine his quiet German town and those who read him continued to affirm their own beliefs, but attached "universal" to it in hopes other people willed as they willed.
So much of Kant is still rampant in today's cultures its yak worthy. But that's what we've inherited, and its mixed with so many other ideas we have incoherent language for ethics.
Instead of telos we're left with progress. Case in point, President Obama's campaign slogan was "Change." There was no direction nor qualification to this word, just merely an idea of something changing. Much like progress it says nothing more than "movement." And the notion of progress or change implies "good" change. But to say something is "good" or "better" implies some notion of functioning well. And without telos, functioning well becomes a nonsense question to ask. The telos determines what it means to do a thing well. For instance we judge a cook's expertise by tasting the product and by watching their method. Tasting good gives one sense of functioning well. But if they used box stuff we say they're not really a good chef. Thus the ends don't justify the means entirely, but the end and the function towards the end are integrally connected.
This is what Progress lacks.
And I have been habituated to it.
So I play games as if I'm trying to get somewhere, when I should fully well know I live in a culture that produces games that typically don't have much of an end in sight (at least the top hits). Another case in point would be first person shooters. People play these all day and you get nothing for it. So they introduced a leveling system for them, unlocked weapons at levels, and SHAZAM, progress. When you unlock it all there is no ultimate goal. One might say to dominate everyone else, but there is no clear and sufficient amount of this. Do you do that for one game? A thousand games? Until you feel sated? It's usually this last one. And this sort of habituation leads to people only performing actions believing there are pleasurable ends awaiting them -- but the "orgasm moment" never occurs.
But the Christian must prepare for suffering if need be, and has need to do many things out of love which are not always pleasurable. Thus virtues are needed which will habituate pleasure to right passion and reason.
And there seem so many other examples of progress in our habituated thinking. We say "time is money." We rush in cars, honk at pedestrians if they're too slow, always trying to get somewhere faster and with more efficiency. Friends and work are equally scheduled in with certain dates and limits on time. E.G. I can hang out for two hours then I have to meet so-and-so. There is no room to allow time with friends to transform naturally. We have limited time we are jealous of and if something is to be done it must occur in this slot.
There is public and private. In the public we progress to something. Rousseau and Tocqueville (if memory serves) often critiqued French and American culture in the 18th and 19th centuries for vegetating while not at work. Leisure time was turned into private time in which brain activity came to record lows. No longer was leisure time the activity of bettering oneself. It seems true vegetation has set in as a cultural norm.
We feel entitled to desert, a long weekend, sitting on the couch for 8 hours because we worked hard the day before. Part of this might be that our society is extreme by nature. Americas work longer work weeks on average than other societies. This means to work here is by definition a system which often habituates people into bad habits.
But what's more, even the vegetative acts I once partook in seem driven by progress now. I have a long list of movies I need to see. I need to watch all five seasons of this TV series before the next comes on in the fall. I have to beat all of this game by Friday. I have to see seven friends by the end of the week. So goes the list.
Even the home is dominated by it. We progress through types of furniture, TV's, gadgets, entertainment, and so on. As we progress in society and income so do our toys and our living styles. There is some sense of "climbing the ladder" as we say. This leads to indefinite indulgence at the service of one's pleasures. Reason is subjugated to the appetites, and the ultimate passion guiding it all is an absurd telos of Progress, that vague pie-in-the-sky word that can't place it's finger on anything concrete as an ultimate end. So our person becomes habituated to myths and tales told by our forefathers which teach us falsities about the human person, in how to organize the human anthropology, to what end we were made and ought to seek, and it pushes aside the question of what it means to live well altogether.
There is a lovely narrative told of man reaching into the stars, the infinite cosmos on and on through progress. But the truth is this is absurd. Should man do this for so long, we will eventually tire and ask "Why?" If a man seeks water and does not find it, he does not mythologize and romanticize his search this way, he says he's lost in an infinite abyss, wandering the desert thirsty. Maybe it was a cute and novel journey for the first few days, but by year forty one tires and seeks an out. And surely there are many temptations and wonderful things we are discovering through this idea of progress, but without telos the novelty where's off sooner or later. And I do hope my generation will shed this skin of novelty for it's own sake, change for its own sake, Progress for its own sake, for all are equally absurd.
So then we must ask questions. What is the end of our medicine? Of our sciences? If we do seek immortality why and how? There must be discussion on death before any such question can even be posed though. But I do not think our culture is prepared to have such a discussion.
Here the Church has much to say. And I could go on well into the evening. But I think the end would only be to feel as if I'm completing this rant as a whole. And I find this passion to be somewhat...progressive...in that I realize I could go on infinitely trying to justify positions. So I shall stop here, where I realize I sit comfortably within the Church, but will at least make a few parting comments.
The Church is well acquainted with death, much more so than our culture. We teach it, we show it, we preach it. Our Liturgy and Daily Office prevents the commodification of time and space that progress has lent itself to. "Time is money" where money has no ultimate end other than continual progress, but the Church has taught through prayer that time should not be thought of this way. Instead time revolves around God, not around my personal goals. In one sense of "happiness" I think God very much cares about us and wants us to be happy. But in another sense, the sense that most people mean when they say "happy," well, to quote one of my favorite quotes from a professor, "God doesn't give a shit about your happiness." Through Him we live, move and have our being, and prayer reminds us of this. Finally, the Church has been well acquainted with teleology, has never lost it in the faithful circles, and teaches that the human soul reveals telos in everything we do.
So instead of playing that damned game today, I went for a walk and read a book. I am rehabituating myself into finding how some arts are good in themselves, not in an unqualified sense, but good qua arts for how they make us think, feel, and view the world. I need to be careful of how I view things. I realize progress is a nasty vice that has infected many of my ways of thinking, from school to relationships to arts but luckily stopped short of my rituals. Instead progress hit my rituals like a brick wall so I got to thinkin'...So I read, I walked, I wrote, and damn if I don't think and feel more like a well functioning human than I have in a while.
Peace,
G. Blake Tipton
