A One Legged Existence is no Life
Say for instance there is suddenly a degree that it has been established without doubt that using your left leg to walk is bad for you and the rest of mankind. Suppose it is suggested that people from now on hop on their right legs and don’t use their left legs at all. What would happen? You would get a reaction. People would ask many questions. Some would then oppose the suggestion blatantly. Is see these people hopping only on the left leg as an act of defiance. I see others, early adapters that immediately comply. Some of them even decide to amputate their left legs altogether, whilst others keep it as a kind of memento that they adorn like one would a Christmas tree every once in a while. I see people eventually adapting and architecture eventually catering for all right leg hoppers. I can imagine people’s right legs becoming very muscular and the left one thin and stripped of muscle. I can imagine an increasing discontent with the left leg, that it will be seen as a liability and more and more people will eventually decide to amputate.
But I can also imagine that after some time, the stronger right leg will cave in under all the extra weight and effort it has to carry. When that happens I see many people stuck in an awful situation, one in which they lack the resources and capacity to escape.
It all might sound like a macabre and highly unlikely situation to come about and it is, but something similar is transpiring. Modern mankind could be understood metaphorically as a person that walked on two legs. The one leg was the exact sciences that gave us technology and life saving as well as life- enhancing medicine. It is sciences that answer for us the “how?” question of human existence. The other leg was the humanities like phycology, philosophy, and theology. It is the sciences that navigate us as we attempt to explore that infinite inner space. It is what helps us to ask the “why?” and the “whom?” questions we face.
Because of a set of complicated reasons, society has decided that the exact science leg is the more important one. Mainly because it is measurable, concrete with more immediate and predictable effects. Gradually resources were channeled away from the humanities to the sciences. Universities, forever chasing money and investment had to adjust in this way also. Prospective students are told any degree that does not translate in huge streams of monetary income upon completion is a waste of time and talent. They are being discouraged from becoming “just” teachers, poets, writers, actors, artists, pastors, healers and helpers (unless they could do that has high earning medical doctors). Funding for arts and culture went down and it is towards money making corporates that they now turn in desperation for a continuing existence.
For long it didn’t look like a bad thing. Nobody was forced to abandon their religion or their love for art. Some chose to amputate it from their lives altogether, but it was never forced upon anyone. Others kept it for its sentimental value. It was just gently shoved to the edge of society or to the domain of the private. The right leg of sciences became strong and brought home the goods. But al the more the weight this leg now carries in responsibility for human well-being shows signs of unsustainability, weakness and caving in. Sports clubs, social clubs, churches and play is declining and under resourced and way pay the price in rising anxiety, conspiracy theories and loneliness. We have reduced the life experience to satisfying selfish needs and chasing after scientific solutions as a way to sidestep death. We have become blind to the lunacy of this narrow minded project.
We need to walk on both legs again. As it was intended. But how do we do that?
Gabriel J Snyman2 November 2020