This Essay Gets a C Minor

Is it wrong of me to find this video philosophically fascinating? It is, isn't it?

In all seriousness (By which I, naturally, mean "more than a little tongue in cheek"), though, I wanted to change tack a bit with this post and discuss something I don't talk about terribly often: music.

This comic, from back before XKCD jumped the shark (Yeah, I said it. More on webcomics in a future post. Await with anticipation!) illustrates perfectly my feelings on the matter. We suck, guys. We really do.

This is not to say that there aren't artists, that we don't produce excellent music, or even that some of it isn't popular. But good music and great music are two different things. When you listen to Bach or Beethoven or Mozart, you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this is great music, that this is art which transcends everything that came before it and will be the bar to which all after it must be held. And the same, I will contend, is true of art from the musical revolution that preceded my generation. There is a sense of greatness, of achievement, of some kind of transcendental musical experience, that you get when listening to Queen or the Beatles or Led Zeppelin. Whether or not you like their music, there is a quality of greatness which must come through.

I'm going to go on the record here with an address to future musical historians:

Dear Future Musical Historians,

When you decide that the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s were a period of musical rennaissance which rivaled that of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, please remember that I totally called it.

Love, Etarran.

PS. I agree, Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" is totally awesome.

It is telling, I think, that university campuses, supposedly bastions of cultural revolution, primarily have the sounds of forty-year-old music drifting from students' rooms. Not even the generation making modern music thinks it's better than our parents' music.

Perhaps it is too much to expect. After all, a great cultural revolution can come along only once in a very great while. And we do, of course, have our cultural successes. But even those, which are primarily internet-related, are based on technologies and cultures that fundamentally belong to the generation before. And I can't help but think that, in an era of unprecedented cultural freedom and diversity and intercommunication, surely we should be coming up with something better than webcomics and the Rickroll.

Perhaps art simply isn't our destiny. After all, we have more practical problems to deal with. Our parents may have produced excellent music, but they also produced a hell of a lot of carbon dioxide and enriched uranium. But surely we could save the world and rock out?

Get on that, will you?

PS. I was totally serious about Hot n' Cold being philosophically fascinating. I invite you to contemplate its symbolism, which is surpassed, perhaps, only by this video.

Going to Class

So, here's the story.

I sat down about an hour ago to write a post, because I felt like I should write something. So as I usually do, I began brainstorming ideas for topics. My thought processes when I do this generally run something like this:

"Hmmm.... blog post. Blog post, blog post, blog post.... 'blog' is such a stupid word. It doesn't even mean anything. You know what else doesn't mean anything? Election promises. Those wacky politicians, am I right? Maybe I should write about them, and their election promises, and how McCain's campaign has been going completely batshit insane.

Oh, right. Then I would be pretty much the mainstream media. Only without money or credibility.

Friggin' media. Seriously, what'd they ever do for us, anyways? It's just commercials and exploitation and capitalism and sadism and decadence. There's no real content or intelligent debate or examination of actual issues anywhere in the whole dreary nihilistic morass of it.

Hehehe. Boobies.

Okay, so maybe I could write about feminism and stuff, because the media is basically why modern feminism sucks, but I keep doing that. Then again, isn't that basically the point? You gotta keep saying stuff, gotta let the message free, because if you don't say it loudly and often, how will anyone ever take notice? Do you really expect to change the world by being silent?

Do I really expect to change the world at all?"

It was at this point that I made a realization. I do expect to change the world. I do, against all reason, against all better judgment and all prior experience, expect to be important. Expect to mean something.

So I asked myself the obvious question: why? What possible reason could I have for this ridiculous assumption?

And the answer quickly came to me: it's a class thing.

You see, as long as there have been civilizations, there has been a certain kind of person who knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they will be important, that the world balances on the tips of their fingers. Kings, aristocrats, oil barons, priests: all of these people have known, many for as long as they have been alive, just how important they are.

But I am none of these things. Though I live a life of shocking and frequently appalling privelege compared to the vast majority of human beings on this terrifying planet, I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, upper class. I have no power, nor any particular prospect of power. And yet, I believe in it anyways.

Witness, my friends, the triumph of the modern world. Call it the American Dream, if you like, call it the historical dialectic and the principle of Communism, call it the triumph of rationalism and man transcendant... call it what you will, we are achieving it. For the first time in history, ordinary people can legitimately believe themselves to be special. Important. Valuable. Everyone can believe themselves to be the kind of person who is destined for greatness. And belief is the first step on the road to truth.

It won't happen tomorrow, and it may not happen for hundreds or thousands of years - it may not happen at all; after all, far too often we seem to slide backwards, to lose the progress we have made. But on the whole, the road we are travelling is a good one. Someday, I think, we will be free.

Etarran Sums Up the Canadian Federal Election

Meh.

Etarran Gets Back on the Lovewagon

(A note on the following post: This is a Philosophic Work in Progress - an idea that is half-formed in my mind, and which I would greatly appreciate help in developing. Particularly, in this case, from female readers - after all, this is essentially my take on modern feminism, and the perspective of actual females would no doubt help immensely.)

Yes, yes, I know it has been some two months since I last even attempted to post on this blog. Well, that isn't strictly true - I have a lovely topical piece on the Beijing Olympics half-finished somewhere, but I think I will spare you all from having to suffer through that one.

And so, what I really need is a suitable topic for my return to the mighty blogosphere. And somehow while writing this preamble, I think I have come up with it. Let's talk about love, shall we?

See, love - romantic love, in particular - is my favorite emotion, because no one knows what it is. Ask anyone to give a proper definition of love, and they will almost invariably say something along the lines of "Oh, you know it when you see it." The irony that something into which we invest enormous amounts of effort is something that we don't even properly understand or even attempt to really understand in any meaningful way is both staggering and hilarious.

So, what do we know about it? Well, probably the first thing that someone would say if asked about love is that it can be life-changing: romantic, erotic relationships are considered one of the most, if not the most, important things that can happen in someone's life.

But the interesting thing about this is that that has not always been the case. The idea that romantic love is a core, defining principle of someone's existence and personality is relatively new - originating as recently as 800 years ago. Before then, the important relationships, the ones considered worthy of song and story, were the ones with your fellow-soldiers; the relationship between a man and his shield-mate (Which modern readers often characterize as "Totally ghey LOL") was by far deeper and more meaningful than relationships between people, who, when you really get right down to it, have no reason to be together other than to make babies.

So even that supposedly core fact about love - that it is deeply meaningful and important - is subject to a certain amount of speculation. And we're still no closer to anything like a working definition. Which is unfortunate, really; how can one know if they are in love if they don't even know what it is?

The problem, as I see it, is that modern western culture is trapped between different ideals of the romantic - we cannot really reconcile chivalry with equality, objectification with respect, subjection with overmastery. We have managed, in our commercialization and modernization, to become stuck between Galahad's ideal of love and Labatt Blue's.

How, after all, is one supposed to go about romance in the modern world? A silly question, you might think ("Hurr Hurr, Etarran's post title from three posts ago was totally a lie!"), but it is nevertheless valid: every Western culture for the last thousand years, except ours, has had strictly codified rules on the subject. Certainly, romance was as frustrating to them as it is to us - one need merely read Shakespeare or Malory or Coleridge to have that amply demonstrated - but there were nevertheless codified rules and standards of behaviour which we lack.

A perfect example, I believe, is the word "fair." To a feudal lord, "fair" as applied to a lady would have had a very specific meaning, which is difficult to translate into modern terms. It certainly included physical attractiveness, but it also had other qualities associated with it. Education, nobility, grace and poise and a sense of loveliness - things which don't really enter into modern conceptions of romance, being either too quaint or too misogynistic. I think the closest we come to being able to express what they were talking about is the word "pretty," but of course that falls desperately short. There are no rules for love, no codification, and so the terms in which to express it are dying or have died.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, of course. Chivalric love, although it makes wonderful stories, cannot really exist in a society of equals. Inherent to the idea of chivalry is the idea of love as a kind of religious ecstasy: women were to be worshiped, obeyed, bowed down before. Obviously, this is anathema to modern sensibilities, and no doubt rightly so. But nevertheless, the bizarre shadow-land, the strange in-between place to which we have restrained ourselves, cannot continue much longer.

Between chivalry and equality we find exploitation, objectification, and degradation. Between chivalry and equality we find self-hate, harassment, and abuse. Between chivalry and equality we find pornography and beer commercials. Congratulations, my friends - we broke love. That, right there, is why we are a culture of excess and corruption. This, I would contend, is why the world hates us - and why they may well be right to do so.

So, if chivalry is dead, and the strange bastardization we have created cannot last, that leaves us with only one real direction to go: towards equality. And perhaps I am merely too much of a romantic of the old school, perhaps I err too heavily towards viewing love as something somehow holy, but I think we can manage it. I think we can fix love, if we give it a try. I think we can perfect it. A ridiculous utopian vision, perhaps. But how far-fetched is it, really, to love as equals?

We preach incessantly about how we are a society of freedom and equality, and those goals are wonderful and admirable. But if we can't uphold them in the most important thing we will ever do... well, when can we? And ask yourselves: would it even be worth trying?