November 12th, 2007
One of the things that bothers me the most about animation is that, at least in America, people have a strong tendency to dismiss anything animated as Cartoons, as no more than entertainment for children. It makes it hard to discuss anime when people immediately write you off for watching cartoons, not to mention thinking less of you (Dork, loser, etc). We're not going to get into the sections of anime fandom about which they, you know, have a point (Naruto); this is about the art form in general.
So, if I'm going to be writing about things like animation, I might as well start off by talking about why animation is worth talking about.
First off, I've repeatedly encountered a few popular false assumptions about animation:
1. Animation is somehow less viable as a form of artistic expression than any other medium.
2. Animation is a genre, not a medium.
3. Animation is for children.
All we have to do to see why these are untrue is to break down animation as an art form. Animation is created by stringing together images at a certain high number of images per second (24-30 depending on whether the work in question is cinema or television). Using persistence of vision, these independent images appear to move (or are animated, as in, still images are given life or spirit). On top of this, there are usually sounds added to this - music and often voices.
If this sounds familiar, you know something about cinema. Indeed, animation is part of cinema. The technical aspects of any given movie or television show are identical between animation and live-action, save for one point: the nature of the images. In one, the images are hand-drawn, whereas in the other, they are photographic. That's it. Technically speaking, that's the difference between The Lion King and The Godfather.
So the issue of live-action vs. animation is, when boiled down, one of photography vs. drawing. Now, I don't think anyone would credit either of those two art forms as being more or less artistic than the other - and if they did, I can see more arguments for drawing or painting being more artistic than photography. So why is that when you take the two of them, and bring them to life in the same manner, them put them back next to each other, one is suddenly worth less than the other?
The answer, of course, is that it's not. Animation is not a subset of cinema: Cinema is animation. Animation of drawings or animation of photography, but animation all the same. They are part and parcel part of the same medium, and you cannot discard one and keep the other. For both Animated and Live-action films, what you have is a conglomeration of classical art forms, including literature, drama, music, drawing, even architecture, sculpture, and dance to certain degrees.
And let's not forget the increasing presence of computer animation in films - live-action and animated alike. Films like the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars trilogies are as much or more animation than live-action film - the battle scenes and armies, all the CG effects and characters. What about Beowulf, a fully computer-animated movie animated around real performances? Where does one draw the line? Who can even say when that line is only going to become more and more blurry as technology gets better and better?
At any rate, let me skip to the third point for a moment: Animation is for children. If we follow the previous discussion, it should be easy to see that there is nothing inherent in the medium of animation that makes it more fit for consumption by children than adults. No more than live-action movies are for adults moreso than children. And yet, most of the animation in America is indeed for children. What gives?
The problem is not in the medium itself, but in how we use it. Here is the second point: as far as American culture is concerned, animation is a genre, not a medium. Movie studios actually have "animation" on their lists of film genres alongside things like "comedy," "romance," "thriller," and "Michael Bay." That's how narrow-minded they are about it. Let's take a look at how American culture uses animation:
Television animation: 2 categories
Children's cartoons (Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network)
Adult comedy (Family Guy, Simpsons, etc.)
Animated Feature Films: 1.5 categories (at best)
Children's / Family movies
A subest thereof: Children's / Family movies that adults can actually tolerate.
(I'm being kind by keeping this separate. The only thing that actually separates these two is quality - the movies that are so bad that only a child could appreciate it vs. the movies that are actually good enough to be appreciated as movies regardless of their being aimed at children. e.g. most Pixar movies.)
This is an astonishingly narrow utilization of a full-fledged artistic medium. When was the last time you saw a piece of American animation aimed at adults that wasn't a zany comedy? A family drama, or an action-adventure, or a serious romance?
When almost all of the mainstream animation in America consists of children's shows (itself a sticky genre to define, these mostly characterized by being vapid culture commercials) or "edgy" / "satirical" comedy like South Park or Family Guy, can the consumers really be blamed for having formed such a narrow opinion thereof?
Now, a little disclaimer: Animation is indeed very well-suited to children's movies. Talking animals, bright colors, and so on are easier to do (well) in animation. Babe is a good example of how it could be done in live-action, but if you look through Disney's animated feature catalogue, you can see that they were using unique capabilities of the medium of animation to tell their stories in a way that would have been impossible in live-action. This is, in itself, a good thing.
Animation is also well-suited to zany comedies - by not having to work with live actors, you can set up a joke however you want. Comedic timing, physical comedy, cut-aways and over-the-top setups like are much easier to manipulate when animated. Futurama, I think, is the best example of an animated comedy that would be the most difficult to reproduce faithfully as a live-action show - imagine Leela and Bender is people in costumes. It's worked before, sure, but not to the same degree, I would argue.
There's nothing wrong with using animation for some of the things it's good at. However, when you limit it to that so rigorously, you do harm to the entire art form. Cinema tends to truly excel past other media at telling realistic, personal stories, because you can portray real people. But thankfully, cinema covers far more bases than that, because people are willing to accept a whole slew of genres and styles from cinema - an artistic freedom that Americans are unwilling to grant animation.
So, how should we be using animation?
This is where I bring up Japan. Japanese culture has embraced the artistic possibilities of animation on a level unheard of by any other mainstream culture. The amount of animation produced, shown, sold and bought far and away exceed any other culture's industry. And historically there's been a lot more artistic freedom in the way they've used the medium.
Animation for children in Japan is still a large part of the market. However, there's a huge array of animation produced for teenagers and adults of all ages as well, and among any demographic, animation can be found in almost any genre. Action, adventure, comedy, romance, slice-of-life, period drama, family drama, science fiction, fantasy, crime, mystery, supernatural - the list goes on, and that's not to mention the frequent cross-pollination.
For every show like, say, Sailor Moon, you have a show like Mushishi. Mushishi would be best described as a cross between "Ghost Stories without the Ghosts" and a "Supernatural Nature show." It's beautifully drawn and animated, scored very subtly, and tells moving, human stories set in not-quite-human circumstances.
For every show like Inuyasha, you have a show like Honey and Clover - a simple, realistic, slice-of-life story about a group of friends in school. Graduating and moving on to adulthood, finding your path in life, love and friendship - a deeply human, realistic story.
The number shows with (often excessive) violence, sexual themes, complex psychological aspects, and otherwise mature content is vast. An this is without even mentioning animated pornography, as if you needed another example to prove that in Japan, animation has, by its nature, nothing to do with children.
The overall quality, the American perception, Japan's own perception, and the rampant marketing aspects of animation in Japan are topics for other posts. For now, we can look at Japan and see that just because we only use animation for children's shows and college-demo comedies in America and the west does not mean that's all it's good for. So the next time you hear someone mention that animation is fluff, or that it's for children, give 'em a good slap and tell them to sit back and think about it for five minutes. And if they can think of a single reason why animation, by its nature, is any less artistic than cinema, or literature, or painting, or why it should only be used to make children's entertainment, I would love to hear it.
Ed. Note: Originally written June 18, 2006, and posted in my original Livejournal.
I had a thought.
My twenty-first birthday is in one week. Twenty-one years... it's not that many in any cosmic scale, but no human is much in any cosmic scale. On the relative scale, though, it's one-fourth of my life, perhaps one-fifth. And yet, I'm an adult. As long as I've put off accepting that, I don't think there can be any question of it, not anymore.
People far younger than me have killed other people. Historically, and even today, there are people who were born after 1985 who have human blood on their hands. There are a lot of things, but that's sort of a big one. Many soldiers in many armies, even America's own, are younger than 21, and have been even moreso in the past. The last milestone in America is that laughable one, the drinking age, which I am poised to overcome in short time. Like all of existence, this isn't necessarily good or bad, it just is. I'm not here to talk about morals.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is no culture at any point in human history that would not consider me a grown man, not a "boy" or a "kid" or even just a "youngster". The only thing that might be yet be holding me back is being a college student, and that's just one year off. So, here I am. Adulthood. It has nothing to do with my birthday, although that probably triggered the (late) realization of the situation I'm in.
My roommate and I were talking about something, and he mentioned that nostalgia for something he used to know back years ago may be nothing more than nostalgia for, let me quote, "another existence that was a little more... dream-filled". And I thought, that's cool. But then I also thought, what the hell. Can't we have dreams anymore?
No, I decided. We can't. That's a little harsh, but let me explain. Coming into adulthood, it's time to start "acting like adults." This has various and sundry connotations, but one particular one stuck with me. Childhood, I think, is the time for dreams. We spend most of our childhoods imagining what it's going to be like when we're grown-ups, or at least trying to act more adult than we are. We keep our head in the clouds and we think, someday, someday. And now, we land at a turning point, at our first life crisis (one every twenty years as we shift personal epochs). The crisis is the transition to adulthood; we've spent our entire lives thinking "someday I'll be an adult" and suddenly, bam, smack in the face with adulthood, and we don't know what to do with it. We've been preparing for life and dreaming about it, and suddenly we're dumped overboard and we've got nothing to show but a pile of dreams and we're being told to go out and live life. This again isn't a bad thing; it just is. So, here I am, and here we are.
The age of dreams is over.
Now is the age of dreams come true.
Twenty[-one] years of dreams and nothing to show for it - except twenty-one years of dreaming. I don't have nothing to go by - I'm not lost in adulthood. I've got the dreams of my entire life up to now to guide me. I've always dreamt of writing; sitting around imagining stories won't do anyone any good now. Time to stop dreaming about writing, and time to start actually writing.
The people who know life's greatest sadness are the ones who write off their dreams. The ones who land in adulthood with nowhere to go, who face the real world and wonder what next, forgetting that they already know what they have to do. I may not find a job right off the bat, or find the best one - I'm majoring in Japanese, for God's sake - but I've got a big bag of dreaming that says I know what I've got to do with my life.
Not that I'm going to stop dreaming - I consider myself a professional dreamer. But my dreams are no longer just dreams - they are the prelude to an acuality that will be.
I'm twenty-one years old. It's one more week until I mark the anniversary, but that's not the important part. The important part is that I'm wrapping up the prologue.
Remember my entry, some time ago, about stories and life? I was looking at myself wrong. It's true that the story of my life is heretofore rather dull - but that's all right. You see, I've been writing the prologue. It's the background, the introduction to my life. And it's been dreadfully long and slow, with some interesting points along the way. But Act I isn't the part of the movie we pay to see. The roman-numeral pages are the ones we skip over to get to the real meat of the work. Yes, I'm already twenty-one. But then again, I'm only twenty-one. I've lived 22.5% of my life - but I have 78.5% of it left to live.
It's time to make some dreams come true.
The word above reads "Natsukashii". It's an adjective, an expression that details a specific kind of feeling of fond remembrance. Walking past a playground and remembering the days you played there as a child, walking into a store and smelling the air conditioning and remembering your freshman year dorm, a song that played on the radio on the bus to and from school in 7th grade. Takes you back, doesn't it? That's Natsukashii.
The most commonly suggested English translation is "nostalgic" but it doesn't quite capture the same feeling. The root of nostalgia comes from the Greek nostos (to return home) and algos (pain) - it was a psychological disorder which basically encompassed intense homesickness, pain from being separated from your homeland. In modern parlance it's used far more fondly than that, but depending on the circles you converse in, it may still encompass a negative energy. Nostalgia indicates a kind of dissatisfaction with the present condition when compared to the past, which is what gives the remembrance its fond light; this feeling, in theory, is not part of Natsukashii.
But here's the rub. Natsukashii, I propose, contains just as much pain and longing in its fond remembrance as nostalgia - but that's why the remembrance is so fond. As a Japanese "version" of nostalgia, I believe it is processed and received differently, and acts as a core feeling that ties directly into mono no aware (物の哀れ), the pathos of things, the bittersweet, heartbreaking beauty found in the ephemerality of life and the world.
For a crash course on mono no aware, Let's go back to the oldest, most rehashed example in the book - the sakura (桜), or cherry blossom. Every Spring, Japan turns bright pink as cherry trees blossom all across the country. And within a week, the blossoms fall, scatter and die. Hanami (花見), flower-viewing, going with a picnic basket to watch the flowers and watch them fall, is probably among most tenacious traditions in Japan, at least among holidays. The flowers themselves, while beautiful, aren't particularly moreso than other flowers. It's their brevity that makes them beautiful, that something so beautiful lasts for so little time. The flowers are beautiful, but the most beautiful part about them is their act of falling.
Seasons, weather, nature are ever-changing and so are the most frequently cited examples, but Japan has many cases of ephemerality within its history. Prone as it is to earthquakes, typhoons, tsunami and more, Japan has historically been in a constant state of flux, of destruction and rebuilding, as nature and man alike seem determined to destroy the island somehow or other. When the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 destroyed Tokyo entirely, it was rebuilt, only to be bombed back into oblivion in 1945. Not to mention the times it has been torn down and rebuilt on purpose - the entire city went through a massive renovation for the 1960 Olympics. Many Japanese shrines and historical sites are actually reconstructions rather than preservations - and often not forced due to circumstance, but acted on consciously.
And so, to someone from Japan, it may seem that the world in is a constant state of change. What's here today can be, will be gone tomorrow. Though the country is largely non-religious (or more accurately, religiously apathetic), the presence of philosophies like Buddhism reminds us that we are mortal, that life is just a cycle that ends in death, that as all things are created, so too shall they be destroyed. This is, of course, not unique to Buddhism, as it's pretty much the core problem in any and all religion. But this is an important tenet in classical Japanese aesthetics.
The Tale of Genji (源氏物語, Genji Monogatari) is THE work of Japanese Literature, their Oddysey. Not surprisingly, it more or less encompasses the idea of mono no aware as its central theme. A brief moment of heartbreaking beauty as a crisp moon shines over a quiet pond and a frog croaks twice in the distance. In Genji, people are (repeatedly) moved to weep by the beauty of some instant, usually tragic. The entire book is tragedy, and portrayal of that tragedy as beautiful. A striking reminder of mortality.
The entire core of the beauty in mono no aware, I think, stems from the feeling of Natsukashii. It's a remembrance of things past, and a fond recollection of them. Instead of remembering how things were better (nostalgia), it simply recalls how they were - which is also how they can never be again. When the flowers fall, you know they can never again be back on their tree - and that's why they're beautiful. When you remember how you were once young, you are necessarily reminded of the fact that you have aged, and will continue to. Remembering the past is remembering the future. The recognition of the passage of your life heretofore includes the recognition of passage forthwith and its ultimate, inevitable conclusion.
But the embrace of death and dying is not necessarily an embrace of depression. It's not necessarily a philosophy or an aesthetic of sadness. As I said, "Natsukashii" doesn't involve the negative energy of nostalgia. It evokes the same pain; however, the pain is manifest in different ways. In the West, it is merely that, but in Japan, the pain becomes manifest as a kind of beauty to be treasured. Life is short and ultimately ends, but to feel that is beautiful because that is life. Natsukashii encompasses all the pain of nostalgia, but twists it into beauty as part of the mono no aware aesthetic.
My favorite quote actually heralds from an anime, but it encompasses the philosophy pretty fantastically: "Ten billion years' time is so fleeting, so ephemeral, it arouses such a bittersweet, almost heartbreaking fondness." That feeling is the feeling of mono no aware as best as I've found it explained. And even a span of ten billion years is exactly as guaranteed to end as any one of us, or our bookcases or dogs or flowers or the guys we buy our beer from.
Heartbreaking fondness - the reaction to pain is not simply to hurt, but to embrace it. It's an extremely keen, sharp feeling, a precise needlepoint in the brain. For me, it is accompanied by a welling of emotion, a vast longing, the desire to reach out and feel. Feel more, feel fully, submerge in emotion. To embrace the entire world with all its infinite and infinitesimal moments of humanity and otherwise, and feel it all, experience it in its entirety. To basically hug and be hugged by the whole of existence and say, there there, it's all right, for you see, I'm dying too.
When my mother was passing, there were moments where we'd sit around and cry. And usually, crying ended with smiling. It was utterly heart- and gut-wrenching, but to feel communally, whatever that feeling is, is innately pleasing. Misery loves company - it's true, as do all emotions, because to feel anything alongside another, to connect to a human being, amplifies emotion, and to emote in synchronicity is the highest amplification possible. My entire family hurt, but we were able to hurt together, and that's the small happiness that makes the hurt more bearable.
You remark to your coworker or friend, "hey, this is that song. I heard this on the bus every day in seventh grade." And they perk their ears, and you watch them recognize it too, and you realize you have that shared experience, that common history, and you feel that Natsukashimi all the more.
Natsukashii is a remembrance of the past, which is necessarily a remembrance of reality's state of eternal flux, constantly changing, birth and death and birth and death. The candle will burn out, but its life will be so bright and warm. Let it burn twice as bright, or fifty times as bright, even if it winks out in an instant, because in another instant we'll wink out ourselves. The more intense the flame, the more beautiful; that it will soon be gone only makes it all the more beautiful again. If it burned forever, it'd be nice, but it would grow boring in its unchanging, eternal state. Separation makes the heart grow fonder - your memory of your childhood home is as fond as it is exactly because you're not there anymore, and if you were you wouldn't be nearly so fond of it. Our memories make us happy because we've changed.
To embrace the changes you've experience and those you will, to recognize the tragic beauty in the inevitable doom of existence, to allow the feeling of the inherent sadness of the world playing at your heart to make you happy, fill you with emotion. Don't ignore your doom, don't try to flee or to deny it. Acknowledge it and continue on, because the end result is the same no matter what, and we might as well make the most of it.
When people talk about censorship, they usually talk about the two great offenders: Sex and Violence. The phrase you've heard a million times to describe the utter moral decrepitude of, for one instance, television these days or Hollywood or Youth! Too much sex and too much violence. But why are people so quick to suppress these things? Why do people struggle so hard to conceal extremely basic facts that every human understands by the very nature of their being? Why is it that humans fear so strongly their very existence?
Yes, their very existence. Sex and Violence are human life. No human - nor animal of any sort - has ever spontaneously generated in the absence of sex (except for a sheep once, and a couple fish or something). For every living creature, from the most high-minded of animals, Man, to the grass you walk on, is driven to reproduce through a system of sexuality. Consciously pursued or no, it is sex whence life is sprung. But why do we - and by "we" I mean "existence" - feel so driven to reproduce, to create new life? Only as replacements.
Death, in short. Sex is the necessary battle we fight against the death that exists by its nature, because sex is life.
A story, from the hallowed depths of Western Civilization: the Greeks and their mythology. Pandora's box. We all know the story. Zeus ordered Hephaestus to create Pandora ("All Gifted"), the first woman, as part of mankind's punishment for receiving fire from Prometheus. Every Olympian gave her their most prized gifts (beauty, cunning, charm, healing, music, et al) and she was sent to earth with a large Jar. Not a box, but a jar, a pithos, a very common style of earthenware storage unit, with instructions that it must never be opened. However, Pandora's curiosity (a gift given her by Zeus, not accidentally) drove her to open the jar, whence all the misfortunes and sorrows of mankind came. The gods had filled the jar with their worst gifts, curses as terrible as the ones Pandora received were wonderful, and they came swarming out all at once - suffering, hatred, jealousy, greed, and so on - things which, as Hesiod says, bring on old age and death. This marked the end of the Golden Age. In that time, there had been no such ills upon Man. Free from worries, from old age and death, they had suddenly been exposed to all the negatives, and their age of Paradise came to an end. Aging, death, sadness, misery, suffering upon the human race. And in the jar, there at the bottom, their only means to combat it - hope.
A curiosity is that the pithos, the jar which Pandora opened, was often used - when flipped upside-down - as a representation of the uterus. Which is, of course, the female reproductive system. See where this is going? To make a somewhat crude joke, perhaps "Box" is not such a mistranslation after all. (I'm talking about the jar being a metaphor for her vagina, or as I'll explain, sexual reproduction. Note well: even as I write about sex as the basis for human life and death, my natural inclination which I caught then preserved was to talk about it in euphemisms, to address it as indirectly as possible, or with humor to make light of it.)
In summary, Mankind existed in a state of paradise, until woman was introduced. Suddenly, gender existed. And with it, mortality. When Pandora opened her box, when the other half of the sexual binary was introduced, man became mortal. And yet, within the selfsame jar that brought them a race's worth of malady was hope, the very means to combat the new plague. While the introduction of women to humanity had brought death, it also brought a new kind of life.
Let's go back to high school biology. Kinds of reproduction: Mitosis and Meiosis. Meiosis is the process of cell division that lies at the heart of sexual reproduction, i.e. cell reproduction from differing cells. Mitosis is the process by which a cell reproduces by itself, i.e. popping out a clone now and then. The first forms of life reproduced by mitosis, by making copies of themselves. Now to combine the amateur science with amateur philosophy. If a being reproduces by simply creating copies of itself - does it die? If we take Bob, then make him into two Bobs, then one dies, we've still got Bob. By transplanting the issue to humanity we run into all sorts of conflicts like "what is the self" or consciousness or whatnot, but on a strictly biological level, asexual reproduction is akin to immortality. If an entity preserves itself by duplicating itself, then in essence it is always alive until it fails to copy itself.
But with sexual reproduction, the whole system goes for a loop. Since life is brought about by the combination of two distinct entities, the final product is not a copy of the original, but a new being. Thus, when Bob dies, there's no more Bob - just half of Bob in his daughter, Katie, along with half of her mother Sonya.
Now, I'm not saying that in the Golden Age, dudes were walking around undergoing asexual reproduction all the time. But, through this life-creation myth we can see the Greeks trying to address the core of life and death. Beings strive to reproduce as a way to stave off death. While it's not so clear as it was for the prokaryotes back in the day, to reproduce is to live. Preserving your genetic information is how we mediate the inevitability of death, which is how evolution got us to where we are in the first place, after all. With complex things like consciousness thrown into the mix the issue becomes muddled, but when you get down to the nuts and bolts of existence, that's what it comes down to. Sex is the fight against death - sex is life.
Please note the life-creation myth of Adam and Eve (which was ripped off from inspired by the Zoroastrian life-creation myth). Adam and Eve live in paradise (note that here, too, man came first and woman followed) until they eat from the tree of knowledge and become aware that they're naked and become ashamed of the fact. (By the way, the big deal with being naked is that your sex-parts are visible. If you actually require evidence of this, please hang out at a beach for ten seconds. That Adam and Eve became ashamed of being naked means they became aware of the sexual differences they had, which are of course at the core of sexual reproduction.) God proceeds to boot their asses out. Once again, an age of paradise and immortality brought to a screeching halt by the introduction of sexuality into the mix.
And what is love? A drive to mate, really. Sorry romantics. It's the drive when your head takes over and says "For the love of God, LIVE!" which will, if everything goes all right, eventually lead to some whoopie. When we got crazy shit like sentience, will, consciousness, etc., this too was complicated, because not everyone in love always wants to have sex, and not everyone who has sex wants to have babies, and so on. But there it is, at its base. Love is the brain's reaction to making the body want to have sex so that it will live. It's programmed into us, deep down. So, really, it could be said that love is sex (or vice versa), and therefore through the transitive property, love is life.
So, sex is our animal mediation between life and death. It is at the core of so many of our instincts because it's the gate to our own existence. And as such, it's become one of the most focal points of humanity. Having developed consciousness, we need something to think about, and since life -> reproduction -> sex -> love is so vitally important (pun intended), we go around thinking about it a whole hell of a lot.
Let me come back to this. I mentioned violence as well. This one I don't have nearly so many fancy words or recognized sources to back up, but bear with me here. To get this out in the open from the start, Sex and Violence are both parts of the same coin - the mediation of life and death. Violence in the classical sense of the word usually takes place in someone physically attacking each other, and in the senses that it is most reviled, results in death. So violence is, in a sense, the end of life - a degree of murder that does not always end in death.
But violence is also life. Again taking us back to a pre-civilized animal state, violence is the key to survival. The act of killing is utterly inescapable in living. From hunting another animal to kill and eat it, to eating a plant (which also exists in a cycle of life and death and reproduction, much like our own, just very different so we don't feel nearly as bad), the end of life begets further life. Part of a tree dies that a giraffe may live long enough to reproduce, several times ideally. Many plants have worked out ways to work this in their advantage (bees spreading pollen, seeds in animal droppings, etc. - ways they may be killed but live through the act of their death). But specifically from a human standpoint, something has to die that we may live. Even the vegetables we grow, we work together with - we don't spread them through waste, but we do plant a shitload of them, so biologically they're getting a really good deal, being eaten.
Violence is also life in its survival. The fear of death is ubiquitous in animal existence, and we shy from violence for that same reason. The flinch reaction that insecure high-schoolers so love to evoke in their peers is an example of this. We see something that may be construed as having violent intent, it's programmed into us to get the hell away (so that we do not die -> so that we can live -> so that we can reproduce). And when push comes to shove, many animals are bred to fight back. Someone protecting themselves so they can live - generally speaking, the only thing someone would protect more strongly is their children, the already-present incarnation (literally) of their drive for survival. Their loved ones as well, but we know what I've said about love fitting into all this.
Sex and Violence are also rather similar as actions and effects. A rush of blood to your head, altered perceptions and an associated "high", faces turning red, short of breath, panting hard, adrenaline pumping, muscles contracting, a great expenditure of physical energy... is it any wonder that, on the more extreme ends of sexuality, we see it begin to merge with violence - or vice-versa? Even in completely "normal" sex, the introduction of violence - not in the sense of striking, but in increasing the intensity of the experience to nearly that point - is not so commonplace. Fuck me harder, harder.
Sex and violence also represent together the peaks of human interaction. Having sex with someone is the obvious here, as the ultimate end of love and the endgame of human reproduction and life. Violence, however, is similarly primal. The engagement with someone else in an act of violence is triggering all sorts of primal responses for survival, to combat a threat and protect yourself and your progeny, preserving your life. Both sex and violence (can) also create rather intense emotional bonds between participants. The bond of two lovers is heightened by sex, having taken a "step" on that path that (like any other act, to be fair) you can never un-act. Even if a relationship ends, there's always that bond between two people who have taken such steps. The bond between fighters may be one of hatred, but even so the mere presence of the other can trigger as volatile an emotional reaction as the presence of a lover. And how often these wires cross - an ex-lover that one comes to hate, or the classic romantic comedy archetype of two people who cannot stand each other falling in love. Or how about this one - becoming close friends with someone you fight? It's far rarer, but there are occasions where friction builds and builds until the two just have it out and throw hands out behind the gym - and after that they're cool, they become friends, and laugh about it. (This was more common in the past, I'm fairly certain, but so was fighting, to a degree). I am sorry to report that, having been in but one fight in my life (and never having seen my opponent since) I must go on hearsay for this part, but go I will nonetheless.
Regardless, violence and sex differently trigger almost identical/opposite emotional, physical, physiological and psychological reactions, and construe opposite ends of emotional spectrums in interpersonal relations. This is because, of course, we're instinctually linked to sex and violence as means of sheer survival, and so we're driven to react to them more strongly than anything else.
So, Violence and Sex are both part of the singular cycle that is Life and Death, working together and opposing each other. So, I return to the original question... what's the big idea? Why does human society attempt to shy away from the very facts of their existence? Consciousness is to blame, here, of course, but that goes without saying.
Perhaps it's an attempt to distance ourselves from animalism. As I mentioned, all of this rests on the biological, instinctual, primal urges of humanity. Very little violence exists in our lives compared to that of prehistoric man/animals. And really, sex is also much more limited while simultaneously being far freer - people have a few kids and call it quits, usually, whereas many animals mate regularly - yearly or more - partially because the utter lack of technology leads to high mortality rates and partially because there's not a whole lot else to do (zing). Of course, having kids isn't the end of sex, no matter what hordes of smarmy comedians would have you believe. The development of technologies and societies that we have absolutely nothing outside ourselves to to compare against (and hence no good guide by which to truly study them) have made humans into a unique entity in our world, and perhaps the consciousness that sets us apart wants us to be more and more different. We don't have to abide by these basic, animalistic urges (note the negative connotations)! We're humans, we can go farther than the apes whence we came! This also leads into Transhumanistic urges, to altogether succeed ourselves as humans and become something greater.
Perhaps it's a straight-up fear of death. The acknowledgement of the cycle of life and death, even in its life phase, is a recognition - acceptance, even - that death, too, will come to us eventually. This borders on my Japanese aesthetics ramblings, mono no aware and whatnot, about life and death and transience and beauty. But in that case it's not fear, but a somber acceptance thereof, and a celebration of the beauty of the interim.
Perhaps it's a way to socially control people - after all, the hangups on sex, violence, life and death tend to spring directly from religion. Even atheists' views of sexual morality can be influenced by the religions around them. It was varying religions over time, after all, that equated sex with the fall of man, the expulsion from paradise, the end of the golden ages... Christianity carries with it the concept of Original Sin. What's that sin? Adam (and Eve)'s sin! What was Adam's sin? They figured out sex! St. Augustine even stated in no uncertain terms that original sin is transmitted sexually generation to generation. Let's re-illustrate this: In classical Christian doctrine (to be fair, extremely classical, like way way long ago), the very act of human procreation was the continuation of a sin that was transmitted to the child-product of that act, to be cleansed only through Jesus and the Church. Holy shit.
Coming along with American puritanical values and good old-fashioned down-home American insanity, this may go a long way towards explaining the situation of sex and violence in American culture. It is repeatedly noted that we are particularly conservative about these things. People mention Islam, but they fail to realize that much of Mohammed's inception of Islam came from the fact that Mecca (I think) at the time was a hotbed of utter sin and depravity - conceived as a panacea to moral collapse and corruption of the time, it makes sense that Islam was and continues to be very socially conservative about such things.
But then, all of religion as social institution is a culturally subconscious way to control people, in the end. Marriage, for instance, is a way for religion to control human sexuality by limiting it to a setting that is moderated/conferred/granted by the Church. You've tied the knot, Jesus says you can have sex now. I hope you didn't have sex before you got married because we're talking some pretty nasty sins there. Of course, religion is also a distinct creation of humanity, a separation from the animals, and a TON of religion focuses on the fear of death - what do you think the afterlife was made up for?
Being necessarily the central problem of life and death, and therefore lying at the heart of our very existence, this is sort of a big topic to cover, and especially once we factor in history, sociology, art, psychology... it's monstrous. I don't want to come off as saying our feelings and such are meaningless just because they were born of animal biological urges, either. There's a lot to be said for sentience, as evidenced by, well, the entirety of human civilization, including this essay, and I will be the last to dismiss something like Love as meaning nothing because it comes about from a purely biological reaction. It can be said that things like love and hatred and the rest of emotions are adaptations of instinct for sentience. Sex is an instinct, Love is the form of sex in a sentient being. Romantic love anyway, but that's a whole different can of worms.
Regardless, the next time someone complains about how much sex and violence are in the movies or on that Music Television the kids are watching these days, step back and wonder why. Not necessarily from American cultural values, or even the history of western civilization. No, step farther back and wonder why it's such a big deal to them - and how it really is a big deal to all of us.
(Reposted from my original Livejournal)
Yes, I am an atheist. I don't know any of you who would find this info surprising, but this isn't necessarily a coming-out or any such thing. After all, anyone who had the slightest curiosity could have asked me and I would have told them for a stretch of years. But I figure I want to write about this a bit.
~There is no God. As simple as that. God or gods or ancestral spirits or earth spirits (Hereafter referred to by the term Gods)or what have you are bronze-age mythology. Gods were invented for as many different reasons as there are supernatural beliefs, including but not limited to Social, Moral, or Political control, a sense of validation or belonging - personal or cosmic, fear of death, and explanations of anything that human society could not understand from lightning to the shape of the world to where we came from. They were likely not created consciously or purposely, but merely loudly espoused by some guy crazy enough to liken thunder to the voice of Gods, and everyone else thought it was a good idea because Hey, What IS Thunder, Really.
~Gods has persisted because children are indoctrinated at a very young age, told in song and story and aquatic immersions, before they can even form a word much less an opinion, that God Is. This is treated as Truth by them on the same level as Wash your hands after you go to the bathroom. Even later in life, when they reach the age of reason and convince themselves that they actually do believe in the fairy tales they were told as a child, their reasoning has been so shaped by the presence of Gods as Truth
~Gods has persisted because for thousands of years in spite of itself. While people have been noticing that when you take an actual good long look at religion it doesn't make the least bit of sense, nor is it the least bit believable on its own. In the meantime, People who have convinced themselves otherwise have been working like mad at Theology, which is the practice of making things up and stretching the basis of your religion until you can answer all of the logical questions that one might have about said religion. They also came up with Faith, which is the intellectually bankrupt tenet that though you have no actual reason to believe something, you choose to believe it anyway.
~Gods has persisted for so long because for thousands of years, people who did believe in Gods would silence or kill (or worse) anyone who chose not to believe in Gods, and when someone decided not to believe in Gods they were immediately considered as looney as all the people who DID believe in Gods actually were. Even if someone did not, has not, does not believe in God, they did risk and still do risk the ire of their peers for merely stating so. To this day, More than half of Americans would not consider electing an Atheist as President. The public opinion of Atheists is below even Muslims among the American population. George Herbert Walker Bush, when he was Vice President to Ronald Reagan, is quoted as saying "No, I don't know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God."
~Religious fear that without their code of morals handed down from on High, there would be no morals or good in the world. For one, that's a despicable reason to act morally, simply through the fear of Gods. Second off, there are statistics show that in America, Atheists have far lower crime rates and even lower divorce rates than Religious. So somehow, on a large scale, the ones without divinely inspired morals are more moral than those who believe in Gods, even by their own standards. Good and Evil (which are in themselves false terms, but that is for later) have naught to do with religious influence when it comes to a person by person basis. Steven Weinberg, a Physicist of the middle twentieth century, said: "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil -- that takes religion." I, as an atheist, wish no harm upon others, and would commit no act considered as immoral by collective religions. Many of the Immoral acts I do commit - drinking, swearing, having impure thoughts and coveting, etc. are, I and many others believe, not actually bad things - and judging by how popular they are even among the Gods-fearing, we're not alone on that.
~There is no evidence of Gods' existence. This is not to say that Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence, per se, or that there is any evidence AGAINST Gods' existence. No one (who is intelligent) will say that science or anything can disprove Gods' existence. However, as Sam Harris writes, one who does believe in God "should be obliged to present evidence for his existence-and, indeed, for his BENEVOLENCE, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day." Atheists aren't the ones who should be beholden to prove that there is no supernatural being in the sky; that just does not make sense. The ones making what is, by any logical account, a rather extraordinary claim (the existence of a supernatural, benevolent creator being) should be the ones who have to prove that. When someone claims that Sasquatch exists, or the Loch Ness Monster, or Gray Aliens, or Invisible Pink Unicorns, or any such thing exists, they are asked to present proof - but when someone claims that a sky daddy who watches you when you sleep and keeps track of all the bad things you've done in a book but loves you very much doesn't exist, they're the ones asked to bring proof to the table. This is simply ass-backwards.
~The term Atheist, itself, should not exist, any more than non-racist or non-Elvis-Believer should exist. Partially because it only lends credence to those who believe that Atheism is a religion. Odd that labeling something as a religion is a way for religious people to discredit an opposing view. Also odd that they profess religious equality in places like America (see especially the U.S. Military), and also label Atheism as a religion, and yet in the same breath deny that Atheists should have an equal say in any religious matter. The other reason that Atheism as a term should not exist is self-evident. Again, Sam Harris: "Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, "atheist" is a term that should not ever exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non astrologer" or a "non-alchemist". We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs."
~Going with the above and the problem with the term Atheist, any given Gods-believer is mostly atheist. They're Thor-Atheist, Buddha-Atheist, Christ-Atheist, etc. except for the one they choose to believe in. An Atheist agrees with your average religious person on 90% or more of religions, i.e. that they're wrong and more or less kind of ridiculous. It's just that last one that becomes a sticking point.
~And so on, and so forth.
Then, THEN, there's religion itself. Not the belief in Gods, but the actual social force of religion which is where 99% of the bullshit comes from.
~Major religions have survived so long because they were founded in times when there was no formal process of inquiry, no formal historical record, no way to hold humanity accountable for itself. You will notice that religions founded in the past 200 years or so are generally looked down upon - Mormonism, Scientology, etc. This is because at the times they were founded, people had historical perspective and a general sense of what was and wasn't going on in the world thanks to science and the scientific method and mass communication. A man in 1800 translating the word of God from a golden plate is largely considered Hooey at the kindest and Malicious Fraud at the worst. However, a man wandering into the desert and coming back with a book dictated to him by God in the year 600 is generally thought of as Maybe This One's All Right. A Jew 2000 years ago who starts talking about God and how he loves different people now than he did before is considered Pretty Much Totally Believable because at the time human society at large didn't have the means by which to compare notes and say "Hey, wait a minute. Hold up. This is a little fishy, eh?" And 2000 years later, few people have bothered going back over the notes from before and re-checking up on things. The difference between cults and religions isn't one of belief or practice, it's simply a divide of a thousand years or so.
~So much "evil," i.e. murder, exile, fanaticism has been done in the name of religion. In the world of Today, Islam has become a powerhouse of bronze-age brainwashing. Surprising numbers of Muslims in countries like England and Sweden are refusing to take medical exams because they have to treat a female patient, vowing that they will slit the throat of a cartoonist for drawing a picture, agreeing that suicide bombings are often acceptable ways to perpetuate beliefs, stating that they would prefer to live under Sharia law made actual law by a government, and more. Human rights as Europe and America have fought for many recent decades to define them are being discarded by the truckload by a large and growing population of Muslims the world over. If you will note, this is all very similar to boatloads of destruction and situation was very largely similar with Christianity about 600 years ago; note also that Islam is about 600 years older than Christianity. Coincidence, perhaps.
~Religion has also perpetrated a large amount of what, in any non-religious context, would be considered anywhere from useless to despicable, but as it hides under the skirts of religion, is either written off as merely unfortunate or praised. Take Mother Theresa for example. Mother Theresa is famed for "helping the sick and poor and destitute" the world across. However, the "help" she offered them was little help at all. In her "hospitals," there was little if any pain medication offered, extremely unsanitary and undignified conditions such as everyone bathing in the same cold water, small cramped cots, no visiting or even getting up to walk around allowed. She believed that Pain was a beautiful message from God, so that we could share in the suffering of Jesus, and would, on principle, not ease the pain of those she "helped." The extent of her aid was to give them a tiny cramped cot to die in instead of letting them die on the streets. Which is not to say she could not have done more - having raised millions and millions of dollars worldwide through charities and appearances, she spent most of that on building convents to train more nuns to not help people, instead of building a worthy hospital or two. Were she not religious, she would be considered an extremely inept social worker at best, based on her actual track record; however, allied with the Church, she is on the fast track to Sainthood. Let's not mention her crisis of faith, wherein she had not once "felt the presence of God or Jesus in her life" for the last 45 years of it, which calls into question why she was doing all of her crap in the first place. Let's also not mention her crusades against contraception and abortion as "the great destroyer of peace in the world today."
~Speaking of contraception, how about all the people in Africa who are getting and spreading AIDS because they've been told that condom use is immoral, to the point of a Catholic Archbishop stating that countries in Europe manufacture condoms with the AIDS virus to try and kill Africans (This is not even possible, by the way). How about all the people who endanger their own health and drive themselves into poverty the world over by having unplanned children because they believe contraception is immoral? One of the biggest and most despicable of successes of religion has been the control it has exerted over sexuality, historically. Sexuality is an innate part of human nature - as in IT IS HOW WE ALL EXIST - and yet religion has done wonders by convincing people that it is evil under all circumstances except those which they approve of (which is what traditional marriage is, by the way - a religion telling you that you're allowed to have sex now). Suddenly, an intrinsic part of human nature, under Christianity, is now intrinsic sin. Did you realize that? That the original sin you're born with according to pastor Bob is that you were created sexually? Yeah. For more on this one, see my Sex and Violence essay from, I dunno, like a year ago? In this journal.
~Religion also actively thwarts progress when it treads on their millennia-old moral toes. Stem Cell research could be leading to who knows how many medical breakthroughs, but it's been banned by religious fundamentalists. The Theory of Evolution has to fight just to be taught as part of science, and could be much farther than it is, except for those trying to push their thinly-veiled theology through to our children, retarding (look it up in the dictionary) their education about the natural world in favor of fairy tales. P.S. Evolution is a scientific theory, but so is Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Scientific Theory does not mean what fundamentalists think the word Theory means. There is plenty of fact to support it, and we're finding out more about it all the time. Or we would be if scientists weren't so busy trying to get work done over the racket of protest being made by Fundamentalists too, what, too arrogant, or insecure, or frightened to admit that maybe we aren't all special lambs of God? That maybe we're just the most advanced animal species on the planet? I personally don't find that too particularly disappointing. Or maybe they just don't understand physics or statistics - when you think about the billions and billions of galaxies which each contain billions and billions of stars it's not actually a very long reach at all to guess that one of them might have a rock just the right distance away that life could start there from a conflation of large amounts of energy and organic materials. And this is within our already-limited view of the universe.
~Let us not forget the likes of Jerry Falwell and the other fundamentalist nutcases in America. The kind who preach that, because of abortionists, homosexuals, and other such dregs of humanity, a few Muslims flew a plane into a tower killing a bunch of secretaries and businessmen. The kinds who preach about the evils of homosexuality and deviant sexual morality (and get elected to public office by decrying the same) and then are convicted of soliciting homosexual prostitution or found dead in rubber suits with gas masks and dildos crammed up their asses.
And the lists go on.
Basically, when you come down to it, to any logical, rational person who looks at the world from outside of a religion-infected society, the existence of Gods is very far from self-evident, and any description of Gods would sound downright looney. That Gods doesn't exist should be common sense in a world where logic, reason, sociology, history, psychology, biology, physics, geology, paleontology, and more have come as far as they have. But we're stuck in the throes of millennia-old mythologies that won't go away - Religion is constipation, and God is the compacted feces jammed in the anus of human civilization.
Even given the existence of Gods of some sort (here is where agnostics tend to cop out of the discussion), religion has proven to be such an astonishingly and ridiculously harmful social force that its continued existence in an age of reason is preposterous. Nothing has done more to hinder progress and happiness in human history than religion, and I don't care if Gods is real or not, but that shit a) has little to do with Them, whoever They may be, and b) is inexcusable either way.
However, tides are changing. Many surveys show that more and more people are speaking out against religion, standing up for their warranted disbeliefs, showing more and more negative opinions about religion, even within the religions themselves - and these surveys are run by the religious themselves, so no worries about the godless liberals twisting the numbers here. It's about time that humanity took back their planet, their societies, their civilization from the rigor mortised grasp of old, dead and dying mythological constructs; it's about time that people not be afraid to admit that they don't believe in invisible sky daddies who watch us masturbate and hold it against us unless we apologize profusely to our walls; it's about time that someone stands up and says it's simply not acceptable that you kill someone because your imaginary friend can beat up their imaginary friend. It's about time for me to stand up and say, Hey, I don't believe in God, I don't believe in Religion, and if I want to exercise my prerogative to believe in the existence of the world as we know it, well, that's my Goddamn prerogative.
(Reposted from my original Livejournal)
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