Man and Crisis

Lately I've been reading Man and Crisis by the Spanish liberal philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset. In it I've found a few interesting ideas with implications for human ecology.

To begin with, let's suppose that every man is caught in an existential plight, struggling to orient himself within his unsolicited circumstances. The main focus of his life is simply to survive in this strange, incomprehensible world. This means experiencing, testing and determining which ideas we can rely on: will that chair remain solid if I sit upon it, or will it dissolve into nothingess? Humans go through this fundamental and necessary process of forging a functional reality, so that we may continue to live. Each man and woman is charged with the construction of their own convictions, because we are ultimately individual agents and cannot transmit the right to live onto our fellow. Even by surrendering to the will and whim of another, we still choose that such is the mechanism we will make our decisions by.

In order to aid ourselves in the fabrication of effective realities, man has arrived at culture; the accumulation of thoughts and opinions held by those who preceded us or our contemporaries. This cultural knowledge reduces the pressure on the individual to industriously build up his understandings through firsthand experience and internal consideration. He can now let others do it for him.

The net result, however, is a society of men who take their ideas on the good words of others, and often do not care to test them out personally. For instance, it can be said that much of science is characterized by a certain kind of faith equal to that of religious conviction. Have you ever seen the electrons transferred between the sodium and chloride atoms of your table salt? I sure haven't. Of course, being a science major, I'm clearly not here to deny its practicality or the suitability of its theories. The point simply remains that that it is a system largely taken on faith by those outside of the scientific community.

Continuing on though. By Ortega y Gasset's defintion, man is in crisis when he cannot locate or differentiate his own personal beliefs and ideas amidst the myriad offered by the culture of others. He is only at peace when he is in agreement within himself. As evidenced by history, man must occasionally shake off his amassed culture in order to reconnect with what is in his own mind. The Renaissance, for example, was the action of escaping Christianity to embrace the immediacy of human reason.

My conceit then is that mankind today is staggeringly encumbered by his own culture. The proliferation of information has in effect alienated the individual to a greater distance from his own tried and true realities. We live in a world governed not by our own conscious opinions and decisions, but by the ideas of mass society. These are the faceless ideas that cannot be attributed to any one person, because they were not generated in such fashion. Man trades in his own beliefs for those of the fickle and unnamed 'people' with whom he identifies.

Yet as mentioned, there inevitably comes a time to divest ourselves of these sedimentary conventions. Like depositions of silt, they weigh down on us from many sources; assumptions, suppositions, dogma and the like.

It is clear that our world today is in crisis. There is a great deal of dissatisfaction, regarding nearly every facet of our modern lives. We crave social justice, gender equality, and corporate responsibility. We crave a closer connection to the natural world, away from the industrialization that has come between us. Or at least some of us do. But all together we crave to be at home within ourselves. And according to Ortega y Gasset, this is a natural human cycle.

The challenge thus becomes one of choosing the best solution to our specific crisis. It's the chance to replace the underpinnings of our society and our culture with something more ecologically sensitive; perhaps that holistic worldview I posted about recently. That's the link in all of this. Man has come to a historical point in its progression, and now the stage is set to decide how we will move on from our alienated relationship with the land and with ourselves. Capitalist culture has weighed down on us long enough. Now is the time to stand on our own two feet and decide was is the truth of our surroundings, of our interactions therein. Of our human ecology.