Lucid Green

First, I must ask for your forgiveness as this post probably should not be here. When I started this blog I committed myself to write nothing personal or outside of the “technical” realm. This post is both of those things, and yet, I hope, it is also very much on topic as well.

I often marvel at the miracle of the internet, but I cannot help wondering, is it a blessing or a curse? We can communicate instantly with each other, share ideas and information with unprecedented freedom and ease–the world has become as small as my 15 inch lcd–and yet we are more isolated then ever before. We can publish our ideas to the world without censorship on blogs or twitter feeds, and find immense communities of like-minded friends on facebook. We are experiencing unprecedented freedom of thought and self expression, and yet, I believe, we are not better or happier because of it. Why?

I found this unforgivably long quote from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov to be helpful:

The world has proclaimed freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs: only slavery and suicide! For the world says: “You have needs, therefore satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the noblest and richest men. Do not be afraid to satisfy them, but even increase them” –this is the current teaching of the world. And in this they see freedom. But what comes of this right to increase one’s needs? for the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; for the poor, envy and murder, for they have been given rights, but have not yet been shown any way of satisfying their needs. We are assured that the world is becoming more and more united, is being formed into brotherly communion, by the shortening of distances, by the transmitting of thoughts through the air. Alas do not believe in such a union of people. Taking freedom to mean the increase and prompt satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they generate many meaningless and foolish desires, habits, and the most absurd fancies in themselves. They live only for mutual envy, for pleasure-seeking and self-display. To have dinners, horses carriages, rank and slaves to serve them is now considered such a necessity that for the sake of it, to satisfy it, they will sacrifice life, honor, the love of mankind, and will even kill themselves if they are unable to satisfy it. We see the same thing in those who are not rich, while the poor, so far, simply drown their unsatisfied needs and envy in drink. But soon they will get drunk on blood instead of wine, they are being lead to that. …instead of serving brotherly love and human unity, they have fallen, on the contrary, into disunity and isolation…. They have succeeded in amassing more and more things, but they have less and less joy.

– Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) pg 313-314.

Freedom can be a curse as easily as it can be a blessing. Give me unrestrained freedom of self-expression and the world for an audience, and suddenly I become the only player in the play that matters (at least IMHO). I become all important, and even if I appear to care for others, it is merely an act as they are merely foils for my own magnanimity.

All is not lost, but the answer is perhaps not what we want to hear. Again from The Brothers K:

Obedience, fasting, and prayer are laughed at, yet they alone constitute the way to real and true freedom: I cut away my superfluous and unnecessary needs, through obedience I humble and chasten my vain and proud will, and thereby, with God’s help, attain freedom of spirit, and with that, spiritual rejoicing! Which of the two is more capable of upholding and serving a great idea–the isolated rich man or one who is liberated from the tyranny of things and habits?

– Ibid, pg 313.

And so, as I have long suspected (and as I have long rebelled against), freedom is found in submission, and happiness is found in self-denial. “A loving humility is the most powerful of all, nothing compares with it” (pg 319). And “Equality is only in man’s spiritual dignity, and only among us [monks] will that be understood. Where there are brothers, there will be brotherhood; but before brotherhood they will never share among themselves. Let us preserve the image of Christ, that it may shine forth like a precious diamond to the whole world. . . So be it, so be it” (pg 316).