Liberation

“The unhappiness of men arises from one single fact: that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.” - Pascal’s Pensees (139), published posthumously in 1670. Keeping busy in America is seen as meritorious; while solitary confinement is the harshest of all punishments.

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Silent confinement, Pascal believed, forces you to face the demon underbelly of existence. It resembles a truth too miserable to bear. It’s an infinite abyss in which we play an inconsequential role. All of our actions, he wrote, are construed to divert us from confronting emptiness incarnate: dating, earning money, war, the hustle of daily life – they’re distractions from the void. It’s the journey not the destination; the chase, not the catch – distractions dressed as maxims.

Were Pascal alive today, I imagine, he would see democracy in America as proof of his argument. Nowhere is distraction more prevalent than in America: TV; obsession with news; music in your car and your local CVS, preventing the possibility of one moment of complete silence; working out long at the gym; restaurants and movies; the type-a persona, arguably born of American capitalism, always on the go.



Pascal’s distractions are particularly alive and well in American cinema: Hollywood plays an ever-growing role in our culture; while providing escapism is becoming more and more profitable (The Lord of the Rings trilogy grossed $2.9 billion; The Dark Knight, over half a billion.)

Las Vegas is the most striking example – an oasis of light, music, gambling, decadence, intoxication, plop in the desert. It’s no coincidence that it’s surrounded by the emptiness and silence of a desert, as the city provides an equally strong distraction from ever noticing the imposing landscape.

Cynicism, though, is too easy.

The flip-side to Pascal’s infinite abyss is completely immersing yourself into your surroundings: the glowing passionate socialite, a perfect pass from a QB, a musician totally in the moment. You’ve likely experienced it yourself when you’re doing something passionately, something that you’re good at, but in which you strive to improve. Academically deemed flow, it’s a state of consciousness devoid of all ego, as if the boundaries between self and the world disappeared. Flow is as inspirational as Pascal’s abyss is a downer, although they both share a transcendental quality which swings between surreal and all too real.

Both distraction and flow are alive and well in America. They’re subjective states that vary across individuals. One person’s gateway to flow is another’s distraction from the abyss. And another person’s distraction is someone else’s flow. Each action in life contains some distraction and some flow - some hollowness and some soul. It’s messy. But that’s freedom.



-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Portrait of Pascal; (2) Poster advertising Lord of the Rings, fair use rationale: to convey the spirit of the film; (3) Las Vegas Sightseeing World Helicopter Rides

Video: (1) R.E.M., "Drive", from Automatic for the People, 1992 (2) Highlight from the first season of NBC sitcom 30 Rock, 2007
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Upcoming ideas:

• More concrete examples of these concepts in daily American life
• Application to religion, science, specialties, and industry

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Existentialism (nowhere to be found) in America

Democracy, freedom of speech, protected privacy…what next? Revolution’s won. Freedom. Independence. What do you do now? Oddly enough, these questions formed the core of Tocqueville’s fascination with America.



His treatise, Democracy in America, is not so much a well-documented historical work as it’s an essay about the changing face of humanity - about an era which may later be seen as a tipping point, so to speak, when more than a handful of people started leading themselves, rather than being fed noble lies. But after those wishes are granted, then what? What do you do with your free time when it’s finally yours?

This question fascinated – and irritated – Europe to no end. It was all quite new. Wrote Tocqueville, “Individualism is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth.” What do you do when you’re not being told what to do? In America this was just daily life. But in Europe it was a mindfuck.

Europe’s attempt to answer this seemingly simple question gave birth to existentialism, to completely new notions of the truth (now with a lowercase t); it underscored the French notion of ennui.


For obvious reasons these philosophical insights fell deaf on American ears. It’s no mystery to us, it’s just the life we lead. Yet even in modern times Europe seems at times blindsided by America's embodiment of progress and change. Ironically, France - the biggest ally in our fight for independence - most embodies the continent’s old spirit. Their government even obsesses over keeping their language authentic – or, at least, by the government’s interpretation of authentic.

Keeping with such policy, in 2003 the French government tried to ban the word "email" from their language. It seems silly - at least to an American mind, who’s immediate response is:

"Isn’t language determined by the majority of people who speak it? Doesn’t it change with the times? Doesn’t it change with technology?"

To these questions the French government emphatically answers, no.

To which the American would reply, “That’s just ridiculous.”

Well, in a sense it is and in a sense it’s not. Certainly there was a time when that type of authority was widely accepted. The French just still feel that way. However the absurdity of the whole situation - the government’s obviously futile efforts to keep their language pure - shines favorably upon the American argument: yes, language is determined by the majority of people who speak it; yes, it is changing with the times; and more broadly, yes, the masses don’t all have to be told what to do.

New terms and emerging slang - these are the sorts of things that we take for granted, a natural byproduct of democracy in America. But they're surely not universal. Even an ally as close to us as France looks down upon such social change as pedestrian, degrading, dirty.

Underlying these subtle differences, Tocqueville saw shades of America that were industrious, practical, superficial, passionate. He observed our apathy towards purely theoretical questions in life. We had our Mark Twain while Europe had its Immanuel Kant - two authors who are actually quite similar - that is, if any American could ever understand Kant, whose sentences today would surely qualify for the worst sentence contest…or, for that matter, if any European ever really got Twain.

Every day, the question - what is one to do when obeying his own will? - is answered through daily action.

What do you do everyday?

Watch TV? Read paperbacks? Check out blogs? Go hiking? Follow football?



America's restaurants and its movies tell all about us - they're two industries with a distinct American twist. I enjoy all these things to no end.

But I still do wonder what a more controlled life would feel like - a simpler one, with less choices, perhaps a more "pure" language. Would it feel less hollow? Our neon lights and entertainment and technology - are these just distracting us from life's real meaning?

The answer seems to come from existentialist literature.

The answer is no.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Photograph of Alberto Giacometti (used) by Henri artier-Bresson; fair use rationale: An artistic depiction of the nature of European philosophy in the 20th century; (2) "Femme aux Bras Croises", by Pablo Picasso, 1902, fair use rationale: An artistic depiction of the nature of European philosophy in the 20th century; (3) official logo of the French government; (4) Mark Twain; (5) Immanuel Kant

Video: (1) Sigur Ros, "Njosnavelin", live in Paris; (2) Ratatat, "Seventeen Years", from Ratatat, 2004

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Upcoming ideas:

• Freedom through the eyes of Pascal
• "Distractions"
  
• Concept of flow

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The Internet, conceptually

Ever wonder what it’d be like to view the world for the first time, as a complete stranger? So did Tocqueville view America.

He saw it through the eyes of a skeptic. Yet he was immensely drawn to it – the “experiment of democracy”, its citizens’ buzzing political fervor, freedom at a level that the world had not yet known. America somehow reflected the good, the bad, and the ugly of humanity, all at the same time, and to a new extreme. But Tocqueville knew for sure that the rest of the world was to follow its trend with an unrelenting inevitability.

It wasn’t just “democracy”. It was freedom of the press. It was the rising of masses over the few and powerful. It was liberation. The world was getting bigger. It was becoming impossible to contain it all. In America was a group of people who had broken through their shackles to lead themselves. It was a new world to say the least – filled with exotic differences from the old world, equal parts raw potential and unbridled danger.

By all means the experiment now appears to be a success. But Tocqueville’s observations – a, perhaps giddy, excitement strung along a sliver of dark foreshadows – remains acutely relevant today.

It wasn’t just America. The whole world was changing, it can’t be stopped. Like evolution. Capitalism. Like the image of Coke bottles being passed through the Berlin wall – which goes beyond smart PR, it speaks to the inevitability of progress.

It’s no accident that the world's first democracy also guaranteed freedom of the press. To Tocqueville Americans appeared hungry for knowledge. The newspapers seemed to bring out the best and worst in them. Unlike the pristine press in France, American newspapers were littered with advertisements, gossip, and scandal. But sprinkled in were also small journalistic gems – brought, hand-in-hand with all the noise and dirt, through pure public demand.

For the first time, newspapers were controlled by readers – their interests, desires, curiosities – rather than by authorities. Just as ruling authority was spread thin across the people and through additional checks and balances, an authority of intellect was also spread thin over thought. Independence became virtue. All of which you can see reflected in their newspapers. The whole country was littered with them. And they weren’t the same one or two or three publications, they were all different – cities all had at least one local paper, many had more.

Communication of information has driven America ever since. The progression of its history can be measured in related technological advances, from railroad and Morse-code to the telephone, radio, television, and cable television, movies, new methods of transportation – and finally to the world wide web. Parallel to such advances is an exponential increase in man's capacity. If measured by the number of significant world events, time is certainly speeding up, hurdling us through the boundaries of the unkown.

But at the same time, the internet is just the next step in this forward march. Like the first American newspapers, it offers a reflection of mankind that's sometimes flattering and sometimes wretched. This blog, I hope, will portray the former, as if it were through the eyes of a stranger.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Alexis de Tocqueville; (2) Coke Bottle; (3) newspaper vendor; (4) Internet Map by Matt Britt, created 11/2006 based on interconnecting IP Addresses using data depicting the internet on 01/15/2005

Video: (1) Underworld, "Born Slippy", 1995, featured in the 1996 movie Trainspotting

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Upcoming ideas:

• How Americans handle freedom
• Differences between democracy in America & attitudes in Europe, particularly France
• European existentialism/ennui vs. American practicality
  

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