Unless you choose the life and cultural environment you want, society will do the choosing for you. Society will make that easy . . . but at what cost?
Perhaps you can think of some examples already. No need to list them, is there?
It’s easy to go along with what everyone else is doing, but going with the flow also carries you where everybody else ends up. You might look around at all the plastic, debris, and garbage there and decide you don’t like it.
Maybe you begin to realize that everyone else’s choices may not be in your best interest.
We live in a polluted world–no doubt about it. A couple thousand years of civilization and several billion people have had an effect–especially over the past hundred, or hundred-fifty years.
If you live in a major city, you see some of this pollution in the air almost every day. If you don’t live in a major city, you’re probably breathing cleaner air–and you probably notice the difference when you do visit a metropolis . . . and just walk around!
Here’s the truth: sometimes you don’t even need to breathe to detect it. You can just look.
This is Athens.
This is Jakarta.
This is London.
This is Shanghai.
They don’t look all that different (in atmosphere), you may have noticed.
These are the places more and more of us are living, from Quito, Bogota, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Nairobi, and Kinshasa at the equator to Yakutsk, Anchorage, Reykjavik, Helsinki, St. Petersburg, and even Murmansk in Russia beyond the Arctic Circle.
The French conservationist Jacques-Yves Cousteau once told us an unfortunate truth: “Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.”
In the Prologue to his masterpiece Thus Spoke Zoroaster, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.”
You know what? Not all pollution is as visible as the smog over a city skyline.
Civilization creates other kinds too.
In a letter to his friend Paul Dukas, the French pianist and composer Claude Debussy wrote, back in 1901,
I confess that I am no longer thinking in musical terms, or at least not much, even though I believe with all my heart that Music remains for all time the finest means of expression we have. It’s just that I find the actual pieces — whether they’re old or modern, which is in any case merely a matter of dates — so totally poverty-stricken, manifesting an inability to see beyond the work-table. They smell of the lamp, not of the sun. And then, overshadowing everything, there’s the desire to amaze one’s colleagues with arresting harmonies, quite unnecessary for the most part. In short, these days especially, music is devoid of emotional impact. I feel that, without descending to the level of the gossip column or the novel, it should be possible to solve the problem somehow. There’s no need either for music to make people think! … It would be enough if music could make people listen, despite themselves and despite their petty mundane troubles, and never mind if they’re incapable of expressing anything resembling an opinion. It would be enough if they could no longer recognize their own grey, dull faces, if they felt that for a moment they had been dreaming of an imaginary country, that’s to say, one that can’t be found on the map.
Reflect on that for a moment.
How well does it seem to relate to the world around you today?
That brings us to the second branch of this look into our lifestyles and the role of art or creativity.
Noise
Noise might be the opposite of boredom, in a way, but it’s also the opposite of engagement.
It’s what we’d like to get rid of, and often can’t.
Most of us are impulsive enough without all the distractions!
Back in 1971, the economist Herbert Simon described this problem in his paper “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.” Here’s part of what he said:
. . . in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
There’s metaphoric noise and literal noise. Both are kinds we’d probably be just fine without, wouldn’t we?
There’s also sound that we like to hear. Need to hear.
Sound that nourishes us spiritually in places we didn’t realize how empty and thirsty and parched and barren they were until we got our last refill.
Music has sustained people through the some of the worst situations that humanity can create: the genocides that have occurred against Jews and gentiles, the infamous Gulag Archipelago of the Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution in China, and events that continue in some places even today.
If we find that music helps us through our hardships, gives us buoyancy and hope, or reason to persevere and persist, we shouldn’t be all that surprised when we consider the actual lives of most composers and their desperate backgrounds.
In 1885 the Chicago-based journalist, music critic, and cultural educator George Upton wrote:
It is a curious fact that nearly all the great music of the world has been produced in humble life, and has been developed amid the environments of poverty and in the stern struggle for existence. The aristocracy has contributed very little to music, and that little can be spared without detriment. Nearly all the masters have been of lowly and obscure origin, and have lived and died in comparative poverty; for, with rare exceptions, musical composition has been miserably unremunerative until within the last fifty years. The enduring music has been the child of poverty, the outcome of sorrow, the apotheosis of suffering.
For most of history, life has been HARD not only for peasants. It has been for most composers, too. We don’t usually tend to put them in the same category, but in lots of cases they’ve been closer than you might think.
So far, we’ve considered the toxic effects of pollution and the damaging effects of noise.
But people don’t just create pollution and they don’t create only noise. They’ve also created cures for malaria and rickets and vaccines for polio and sculpted marble into art, turned words into poetry and music into sonatas and rhapsodies and fantasies, serenades and divertimentos.
They’ve written ballets, tangos, polkas, and waltzes that make us dance.
They’ve transformed text into something we sing, and given it an entirely different meaning in the process–far richer than it had as speech.
Due to musical notation some of those sounds now resonate in places far and very different from where they were written.
Beauty
Humanity has not only spent the past few centuries creating pollution and distractions. Some members of humanity have also captured beauty in forms durable enough to outlive them. Others who are alive today travel in their footsteps and create according to their own inspiration with the tools and media of our culture.
Despite the distance in time and geography, art communicates beauty, humanity, and energy to us in the ways it uniquely can. And that’s where classical music comes in, and the essential topic of beauty it connects us with.
As you go through life, the general list of things you find beautiful and wonderful should always be growing longer.
Shouldn’t it?
After all, there’s a lot of beauty and wonder out there to encounter.
We appreciate it so much because in comparison to the world that’s usually around us it can be so rare.
Not all of it is.
We can also find beauty in the simple and the familiar too. Anyone who can see can watch a sunrise or look up at the moon in the night sky. These sights are often beautiful.
And that brings up the notion of our surroundings–and not just anyone’s, but yours in particular.
If beauty and meaning are relatively absent from most people’s lives, that’s only a weakness when you deny it. Admitting that life can be painful and empty is not a weakness: it is a strength that empowers us to change and search and find what’s missing from our lives and then start including more that will nourish us . . .
I’d like to share with you an observation made long ago by someone who lived in a country and culture quite different from ours today. Although his environment was different, his wisdom is true because he wasn’t making an observation specific to his time and place. He was thinking about humanity, and his name is Arthur Schopenhauer.
The distinction he was making was between people who are ordinary and people who are extraordinary.
Here’s what he said long ago, as translated in 1970 by R. J. Hollingdale:
Talent works for money and fame; the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine. It isn’t money, for genius seldom gets any. It isn’t fame: fame is too uncertain and, more closely considered, of too little worth. Nor is it strictly for its own pleasure, for the great exertion involved almost outweighs the pleasure. It is rather an instinct of a unique sort by virtue of which the individual possessed of genius is impelled to express what he has seen and felt in enduring works without being conscious of any further motivation. It takes place, by and large, with the same sort of necessity as a tree brings forth fruit, and demands of the world no more than a soil on which the individual can flourish.
That agricultural metaphor about the soil in which we develop points out a vitally important thing about our surroundings: they determine if we can flourish and thrive or whether we starve, founder, and decline, which is what makes the media we consume so important.
It’s shaping our brain all the time. Any neurologist can confirm this.
Every click and every distraction rewires you for more. And every time you engage it wires you differently. Then we have the matter of what you’re engaging with . . .
For lots of people a lot of the time it’s not very wholesome.
If you dare to uncover the truth about your listening, there’s a self-assessment everyone should take who is new to this web site. You’ll find it here.