Image and imagination

I've noticed, and you probably have too, that our world has taken a turn for the worse lately.

No, I'm not talking about temperatures heating up; I'm talking about tempers heating up. Not global warming, but social meltdown.

Just look around and consider the condition of our institutions, our morals and our manners. Obscenity is our lingua franca. Rudeness is our social glue. Respect is a lost art.

The only conclusion you can reach is (and the fact that I can say this proves the point) we suck!

Indeed, the more our civilization empowers us as individuals, the more apparent it is that selfishness, not love of money, is the root of all evil. Love of money is but one manifestation of the selfishness that is the worm in the apple of the world. Throw in love of self-gratification (whether through sex or drugs) and love of power, and you have the unholy triumvirate of selfishness that is also known as "doing your own thing."

Unfortunately, it turns out that when everyone is doing his or her own thing, the only thing that isn't getting done is the business of building a better tomorrow.

As W.B. Yeats wrote in "The Second Coming": "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

If one could take one's snout out of the trough of slop we are fattened on long enough to look around, one could not help but be worried. But there is nothing to make worry go away quite like a trough of slop.

And so our heads are continually pointed downward, and our appetites continually sated as we hog down on Hollywood's latest golden calf.

But should we not be a little bit worried that almost every commercial on television these days is about how you can steal from your loved ones, hurt your friends, or take advantage of your family - all in the name of getting what you want?

Should we not be a little worried that 90 percent of the new cartoons on television portray children as ill-mannered, spiteful, dangerous, misshapen trolls? Do we really want our kids to grow up with that self-image? If we are so concerned that young girls get the wrong self-image from super thin models and actresses, don't we see any problem with tots and toddlers feeding on the filth of Cartoon Network's Grim Reaper?

Should we not be concerned that the evening news is no longer fit for the family hour because so much of what happens in our society is unrelentingly evil? Indeed, should we not be concerned that our intellectual environment is fully 90 percent trash that appeals to our basest instincts?

I know, I know. Good liberals will tell me - If you don't like it, don't look at it.

But what they either don't realize or don't care is that people do like trash. They do like self-gratification and slop, and as long as society panders to the lowest common denominator, then the portrait of our future will be an endless perplex like one of those famous M.C. Escher staircases where no matter which direction you are going, you are always heading downhill.

It was Rene Descartes, the 17th century French philosopher, who said, "I think, therefore I am."

A couple thousand years before him, the author of the Proverbs wrote: "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."

But as a corollary of these famous expressions, I would propose that we are what we think we are supposed to be, and therein lies the problem.

No human being is capable of objective truth or absolute understanding, but rather has just a glimmer of what the world is and only a thought of what he himself is. And since every human being starts as a student, a learner of the language of accepted truth, he or she is bounded by the limits of what the teacher tells him.

When nature was the teacher of mankind - most particularly in so-called primitive societies that lived in communion with the whims and ways of the world - this was a limit that stretched as far as the eye could see and as far as the imagination could follow. The cycles of the sky, the weather, the seasons provided a rich tapestry of possibility, along with the animal kingdom, the mystery of life and death, and the dramatic range of the human species itself.

In such a circumstance, when mankind mirrored itself in the world, there was such a depth to human experience that it birthed all the great ideas and stories that still shape our civilization thousands of years later.

But those stories and ideas have been refracted and bent through the millennia just as surely as a child's innocent message is corrupted by repeated tellings in a game of "telephone" until it is a thing that is unrepeatable in a room full of innocent children.

With each succeeding generation, the story of who we humans are has become less and less a reflection of the world and more and more a simple reflex that tells us nothing. Call it the miracle of the transubstantiation of the sacred into the mundane. The further removed we grow from nature, the less we learn from experience and the more we learn from what we are told. Eventually, all experience becomes second-hand, and as actual experience declines, the more we grew dependent on the artificial experience of education - formal and informal - to tell us who or what we are.

It is perhaps no accident, then, that the Book of Genesis formalizes this as the departure from the innocence of the garden to the hard knocks of the knowledge of good and evil. And it is certainly no accident that "knowledge" of good and evil is what purportedly starts mankind's decline.

All that knowledge is an endless temptation, and through the years many men have thought themselves gods because their knowledge was plentiful and they felt that it gave them power over good and evil. But now, in a sense, good and evil are irrelevant. All that matters is knowledge for its own sake. Information is just a commodity, to be bought, sold and stored. Nature itself is just a raw material for the electronic version we watch on cable.

As Bob Dylan wrote, "The kingdoms of Experience in the precious winds they rot while paupers change possessions, each one wishing for what the other has got, and the princess and the prince discuss what's real and what is not. It doesn't matter inside the Gates of Eden."

Today, it seems we've gone as far as we can possibly go from the place where we are "the image of God." Instead we are the image of our own imaginings, and the picture is not pretty.