Neanderpundit

Dawns on me that sometime this week I crossed over to the 200,000 mark.

Thanks for reading, all of you. It’s nice to hear from you, and it’s good to be heard.

Read this. Brilliant, I tellya. Fucking briliant.

Mrs D is having a discussion about “loveliness” and I have to agree wiht her on the more salient facts- if we continue to focus our energies on only that which is utilitarian and cheap, we, as a civilization, may well be doomed.

Frojm this discussion, I am reminded of mine own theories about the progression of Man and his separation from the beasts.

It begins, as far as I’m concerned, with abstract thought.

Humans and their ability to have abstract thought- in other words, to think of something other than what they can see, and their ability to devise ways of affecting their environment that did not exist, are the origin.

When a human first thought of using a stick to extend his reach and kill an animal that might otherwise wound or kill him, he took that first step down the road to intelligence. When he managed to figure out that hide treated in a certain way would be strong and pliable and protrect him from the cold, when he learned how to make fire at will, when he learned to harness the heat of fire and the cold of water and the minerals in the ground to make ever increasingly useful metals, all those skills, born of human creativity and the uniquely human capability of sustained thought are what turned the corner for humans.

And there were always, and will always be, those whose creativity does not lead to invention. Those whose creativity leads them to paint, or write, or sculpt, or otherwise create. The people whose skills allow them to create impliments that directly affect the mind, instead of acting upon the environment.

Without tools, without the ability to sow and harvest, without the ability to hunt and preserve food, humans would sopend all day, every day, foraging for food. The technology man invented that allows him spare time is what allowed him to use his creativity in a purely creative manner- art. creativity for the sake of filling our lives with beauty. Or opening different doors of perception.

mrs D points to the Mona Lisa, and this is an incredible example, that illustrates very nicely what I mean.

Leonardo was a man who saw no distinction between art, engineering, science, and theology. His work in human anatomy shows an understanding of the engineering principles of design as surely as if God himself were looking over Leonardo’s shoulder, showing him why the muscles were attached where they are, and how.

Creativity in the arts peaked early. Painting, literature, sculpture, music all came to a technological standstill quite early on; there are only so many ways to use oil paint, so many ways to cut marble, so many ways to string words or notes together. THis does not mean nothing new gets created, far from that- the limitations of the materials means that once the basic techniques are mastered (and not all can master them, certainly) the creativity of the individual can take flight.

In engineering and science, on the other hand, the technology changes so fast you have to have wings to stay on top of it. A brilliant programmer ten years ago is a hopeless anachronism today. A machine tool five years old may still work fine, but the controls change so much that it is hopelessly obsolete.

So engineers and scientists, who are in their own right incredibly creative, can create constructs that are hundreds of orders of magnitude more complex than the greatest artistic endeavor ever undertaken- so complex, in fact, that (like the internet) it isn’t even possible for a single human to comprehend it in it’s entireity, and most of the effort is done by ever increasingly complex machinery.

This, to me, is intensely beautiful, because it means that man has risen above himself- that he can create something far and away above his ability to even comprehend. And therin lies another danger.

That creation can easily come back and bite our own asses.

One of the things that used to happen, was that artists got paid for their imagination, and a system of “pay as you play” has been instituted to allow artists the ability to make a living off their imagination. The current writer’s strike is an illustration of how important this is. Engineers, on the other hand, got paid for their ideas in a different manner, by marketing them and being paid when people use them.

Unlike Art, an engineer can make something that fills a need, patent it, and expect to sit back and rake in the cash. And then another engineer can invent ANOTHER way to fill the same need, patent it, and sell it cheaper, undercutting the originasl idea. Two pieces of software, for instance, can be written that will do exactly the same thing. You cannot, however, write a song, and someone else write almost the same song, and both be unique copyrights. (or you should not be able to do this).

So there’s a difference between art and engineering- but one would not exist without the other, and that is what makes us human, IMO.