Heroes Not Zombies

Lost worlds, emerging worlds.

I’m reading Saul Bellow’s “Humboldt’s Gift” at the moment and it’s one of those novels which contains phrases and sentences which make me stop and think. I like that in a book.

Here’s one passage which has really got me thinking…

….one of Humboldt’s themes was the perennial human feeling that there was an original world, a home-world, which was lost.

That’s so true, and so appealing….from Eden, to Atlantis, to Shangri-la, to……well, think of the lost world stories which have appealed to you so much. Even modern science fiction, like the later version of Battlestar Galactica, with the search for a lost home (Earth), or even Wall-E, with the longing for the home-world before it was destroyed!
Then I came across this post on Mark Vernon’s blog (a post about Owen Barfield)……

Barfield called this earlier consciousness ‘participatory’. He argued that we moderns are passing through a phase of alienation – one that objectifies the world and so brings the great goods of science too. But it is not sustainable, because we distantly recall our participation. What we seek, he thought, is ‘final participation’, a form of consciousness that by deploying the analytical mind in conjunction with a more expansive imagination might move us to a phase where we can know ourselves as subjects and objects. Such a sense is not here yet, on the whole, but various individuals capture glimpses of it, and it draws us to itself.

In the middle of a week where rioting has broken out on English city streets, where people are beginning to ask about compassion, and connection and belonging, the themes of alienation, “smash and grab individualism”, and we are witnessing the collapses of economic, political and social orders in countries around the world, these texts seem particularly pertinent.

What’s the nature of this alienation? Of this sense of being cut off from a better world? I’m sure you could read whole libraries of research and opinion on this subject, but let’s just think of it for a moment in terms of consciousness as Barfield suggests. Don’t we need to support and promote an evolution of consciousness? From the immature, egocentric one, with it’s world-view of separateness and the reduction of human beings to objects, to a much more mature, world-centric one, where we come to know ourselves and others as both subjects and objects.
I hope that more compassionate, more humane, and yes, more human virtues and values will arise from this time.