YET ANOTHER ILLUSION
JUNE 26, 2011. It was suggested that the composer, Maurice Ravel, was writing “artificial music.”
To which is he replied, “But do these people never come up with the idea that I might be artificial by nature?”
A beautiful joke.
A person lives according to his nature. He can do no more than discover his true nature and follow it. Nature dictates; we fall into line—such facile ideas presume that every individual has some rock-bottom IS he has to conform to, whether he knows it or not. He is predisposed, by forces greater than he will ever understand, to be a certain kind of person.
Well, people try to defy and ignore and sideline and minimize the notion of freedom every way they can. And if they need to posit some sort of overriding chain-link principle, they will. Whatever it takes.
Face it, people love slavery. They’ll grow that garden in the strangest places.
And one of them is NATURE. As in the natural world, or a person’s underlying nature.
Meanwhile the truth is there is absolutely no limit or boundary on imagination. What a person creates isn’t determined by anything other than his own choices. And those choices can be changed or scrubbed at the drop of a hat.
“Your underlying nature” is a psychological spin on a religious concept. It’s yet another thing to bow down to and worship. It’s yet another false trail.
I’ve mentioned before that many teachers of writing bray to their students, “Write about what you know.”
This is like saying, “My son loves candy. So we’re pointing him in the direction of growing up to be a candy salesman.”
Whereas I would tell students, “By all means, write about what you don’t know.”
If you don’t know it, INVENT IT.
Stop praying at the altar of the inevitable. “The inevitable” is just another con.
WELCOME TO THE CHURCH OF NATURE. WE MEET EVERY SUNDAY TO DISCOVER WHAT IS INEVITABLE, SO WE CAN FOLLOW IT TO THE SHORE OF SALVATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT. DROP SOME MONEY IN THE PLATE.
This lunacy has an analogue in anthropology. Imagine this—a group of researchers comes back from a distant planet with the following report:
“Well, we investigated the XYZ people on Ty-1-B, and we found they were free. Each person was intensely creative and imagined and invented what he wanted to.”
No, no, no, no. That’s not going to fly. An anthropologist is supposed to discover the binding customs and traditions and rituals and practices of the tribe or clan. He’s supposed to articulate these behaviors as if they are THE NATURE of the people being studied. He may not say that, but that’s the implication. Otherwise, he’s screwed. Otherwise, he just says, “Well, they CHOOSE. They’re FREE. They CREATE.”
And that would destroy the profession of anthropology.
I’d much rather launch a social science called un-anthropology. Its single tenet is:
YOU HAVE NO UNDERLYING NATURE.
Goodbye. That’s the end of un-anthropology. It lasted three seconds, but in those three seconds it did more good than all the studies and expeditions of all the nosy anthros in the world.
JON RAPPOPORT