The OUTRAGEOUS!!! and the Ephemeral

A few months ago Gri and I went to see Safe House, a gritty action thriller with lots of up-close sequences of hand-to-hand combat, choppy video and audio, and night-time shots with cameras presumably mounted on shoulders of running men puffing through the darkness. For most of the film I felt like I was in a remake of the Blair Witch Project, but with more gut spillage. When the thing finally ended I came out feeling emotionally adulterated, dizzy and somewhat nauseous. Life looked grim and threatening. Gri, on the other hand, smiled cheerfully and proposed to go grab a bite to eat.

Thing is, I don’t go to the movies a lot. For this exact reason: the surround-sound is way too loud, the spinning, spectacular camera angles make my dizzy, and I feel aggressed by the overwhelming intensity of it all. I understand that it’s a matter of being too easily affected by sensory inputs. If I wanted to, I could train myself slowly, gently cranking up the volume and cruelty meters, dulling my sensitivity to LOUD!!! and GORY!!! and IN YOUR FREAKEN FACE AMAZING!!! This is what typically happens in childhood, isn’t it? A six-month old might feel uncomfortable sitting at a screening of Mortal Combat 3. A four year old might cry when he sees heads blown off, or might instinctively duck when a huge space ship flies off the screen and right into your face in 3D. By the time you’re eight or nine, especially if you’ve been playing video games and watching this kind of stuff, you’re immune to it all.

This, to me, is devastating.

If  major sensory overload does nothing for a thirteen year old, how will they be able to sense and appreciate the subtly nuanced hues of an Old Master painting? Where will they find the attention span to read about the lazy, melancholy South in Faulkner’s Light in August? If they, or we, make Law and Order:Special Victims Unit and Zombie Apocalypse movies household names, how are we going to be able to perceive *anything* that is less black and white, ethically?

I wish it was all that simple: protect your sensitivity to sensory and negative emotional stimulus as much as possible, all the time. Does this mean we should avoid pornography? Yes. What about detailed descriptions of Nazi experiments on humans during the 1930’s and 40’s? Should we read Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom? The answers seem to be in the affirmative, but being “sheltered” is also frowned upon. The issue becomes even more complex when you realize that, as a parent, it is up to you to introduce painful, difficult truths to your children, thereby inadvertently dulling their sensitivity, or causing them pain. “I know it’s unfair, but that’s the way it is” and “Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad people in the world…” are deeply unsatisfying responses that I find myself giving to my kids for lack of anything better.

But this is not a new issue. After all, I am not the first person speaking up for preserving one’s sensitivity. I made a decision a while ago to consciously guard it, so as not to lose it completely. Thankfully, I am still able to marvel at beautiful color combinations in the sunset clouds, and to be totally blown away by movies like Avatar and Life of Pi. Thankfully, I have not lost my hearing. And yet, I wonder if the close attention I’ve paid to my exposure to ethically questionable stimulus has done more harm than good.

By becoming used to violence, crime, immorality, cruelty on TV, we are not as traumatized when we encounter it in real life. Yeah, just another nutcase that murders twenty children…just another story about three girls being held captive for ten years. There is nothing new under the sun, and suffering is an inextricable part of the human experience. In a twisted sort of way, we are protected from it all by a thick wall of abstraction. And, if we do have a moral compass about us, we can calmly help rescue abuse victims, or fight poverty, or combat drug trafficking without getting bogged down by the depravity of everything we encounter.

Recently I got involved in an anti-sex trafficking organization. In order to work with human trafficking victims, all of the volunteers have to go through a training course and read several books on the issues of abuse, poverty, exploited children and human trafficking in the US. The books came in the mail a few days ago, and I peered inside to preview what we’re going to be learning during the training. After a few minutes of reading, I had to put the books down. I was feeling dizzy and nauseous, just like after Safe House: totally unprepared to process the information coming at me. I chose to know it, to learn it and to work in this sphere because here is truth about the world we live in – truth you have to know. And yet, having no preparation in terms of emotional endurance, I feel incapacitated. As a result, I cannot help.

So I start thinking: maybe I should be watching Law and Order too? Preemptively.

The Overeducated Minority

When I was studying in UCSD, I noticed an unsettling trend which has since been confirmed and reaffirmed by many observations. The students entering as freshmen had, by and large, some system of belief that they grew up with and held fast to. By senior year, their instructors, professors and TA’s had successfully torn down any vestiges of conviction that the students may have had in ANY sort of truth, creating yet another graduating class of rationalist, relativist individuals joyfully joining the ranks of the overeducated minority.

The goal was pure and noble, of course: teach the students to think for themselves, to be able to analyze an issue from multiple points of view and respect different perspectives.

We took the proverbial glass and examined it as half full, half empty, as an illusion, as a symbol of purity, as a vessel of truth, as a chemical substance, as an ecological environment. We took it apart and didn’t put it back together again, we studied it and digested it and reinvented it. And in the end, we were able to both see it and NOT see it, to know simultaneous that it was half empty and half full. We mastered the 101 tricks of the master orator who could turn any fact or fiction to benefit his cause. Yes, by graduation time, we were armed to the teeth. The only thing we lost was our ability to distinguish Truth.

Yes! The only loss was our capacity to actually have an opinion, to actually see something as Right or Wrong.

Most of us do not even notice that small price we paid. We are socially versatile, intellectual, competent. We can hold our own in any political or scientific debate, switching from one side to the other without batting an eye, seamlessly streamlining theories and ideas we picked up in our humanities and psychology courses into coherent conversation. Ideas from books we read merge with TED talks and the latest views posed by pop culture science icons, and everything works splendidly until a lesser educated individual makes the mistake of asking us, “Yeah, but what do YOU think? What do YOU actually believe on this subject?”

Then we are stumped in earnest.

We have not been taught to discriminate. In fact, we have been taught that all views have a right to exist, and if rationally argued, are all equally valid. How convenient.

Recently on another blog a simple question was asked about whether all children deserve to live with the same good living conditions and chances to a happy, successful life. The readership, which represents the cream of the crop in terms of intellectual/philosophical development, mostly averted the question altogether. Some eagerly jumped on the terminology of the question (“deserving assumes merit, and unborn children cannot merit anything…”), others were glad to discuss the various socio-economic repercussions of having too many children living in favorable circumstances. Others still began discussing the finer points of curating such dialogue on social media. When pressed by the moderator to actually answer the question, readers presented more theories and possible relativist answers, but were still hesitant to claim any answer as their own. All the while, the answer is so painfully obvious!

I must confess that I fall victim to this too. When a friend of mine who has not been brainwashed indoctrinated with a post-secondary liberal arts education asks me what I think about a certain topic, I involuntarily delve into the various theories existing “out there” on the issue at hand. He immediately makes the perfectly understandable assumption that I am actually stating my personal view, and starts arguing with it. The conversation falls apart when I try to explain that I was just playing the devil’s advocate, and stating the said view point for sake of argument. This frustrates my friend, who just wants to know what I think, and it frustrates me because I am used to talking in theories and propositions, at a comfortable distance from myself and my own personal action.

On the flip side, as my friend explores different points of view and from day to day adopts a different one as his own, I irritate him in my not-so-humble way by coyly identifying each view as nihilistic, or hedonist, or existential, or absolutist, or what have you, making references to this thinker or that, and thereby nullifying the sincerity and intensity with which my friend believed the view to be transcendent Truth. It is that maliciousness in me that wants to destroy something beautiful (ie. his conviction) that is showing its ugly head. Immediately after I make my blow, I regret it.

But I digress.

The bottom line is a curious one. While reason (logos – that same logos that was there In the Beginning…) is supposed to help us get at truth, most of us end up using it to avert truth for the sake of convenience and dialogue. The tool of reason, handled by inexperienced hands, disfigures Truth to the point of no recognition. Through our ineptly handled ability to reason, we begin to believe the fallacy that absolute truth and, by extension, morality, does not exist.