A Utopian Vision

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A few weeks ago, I finished Peter Dickinson's children's trilogy The Changes in which the inhabitants of the British Isles are one day without obvious cause overcome with a revulsion for technology. People flee the cities but what follows is not the establishment of an agrarian utopia because, with the people's disdain for machines, comes superstition, suspicion and cruelty. What has stuck with me about the story is its fairness in casting medieval provincialism and contemporary machine-dependence as equally symptomatic of deadened minds. It is unwise to relax too completely into the corporate mind of any era. Our relationships with nature, with each other and with the artifacts of our culture require our vigilance to remain healthy relationships.

Particularly in Heartsease, the second of the three novels, it is clear that some characters have an affinity with animals and some with machines and, while Dickinson seems saddened that it is not common for people to be able to commune with both flesh and blood and metal and gears, he suggests that the feelings are not that different in either case. Almost every few pages into Heartsease and the final novel, The Weathermonger, one encounters a fascinated description of the personality of either a horse or an engine. In The Weathermonger, a young woman who fears technology more because of socialization than internal inclination realizes that the marvelous antique car on which she had come to rely has become to her more like an animal than a lifeless machine. The implication is that the vitality in our relationship with technology depends on us, on how well we make things and how well we care for them, in how we respect the life of the world that we have harnessed to make them go. This caused me to wonder what a society would look like if we all had minds like those of certain medieval Islamic scientists who thought of themselves as midwives when they were mining metals from the earth. How would we live, learn and work? What would our professional lives look like when our idea of knowing something is more like conaîttre (to be familiar with) than savoir (to know as a fact)?

To begin with, I think our first task as children would be to learn to submit to the guidance of love, to find our kindred entities, to commune with that with which we most desire to commune. In this, there would be tremendous power to live the lives of our choosing. More obstacles are overcome by passion than technology. Goethe, for example, was in love enough with plants to travel everywhere he could to see the different conditions under which they grew, to keep endless journals, make endless drawings, to animate endless pictures of vegetable life in his mind.  He was in love enough with rocks and with animals to make the same kinds of efforts on their behalf and go to great trouble and expense to procure specimens because he, being who he was, could not do otherwise.

There is a reason that, even now, people talk about being "moved" by something.  We recognize the power of receptivity.  When we love something enough to surrender ourselves to it (or, to use my new favorite phrase, to see it "for itself" instead of "for ourselves") then its fullest nature opens up in our imaginations and we know just what to do with it, while the thought of doing something to it never occurs.  Kandinsky loved circles and saw them everywhere in nature.  Seurat saw points of light.  Nabokov saw shadows and mirrors.  They only had to grow confident enough in their relationships with these qualities to look as deeply as they could into what was already presenting itself to their minds.  The result was a collaboration, between themselves and their non-human partners, that stretched rather than violated the boundaries of nature.

If, as Rudolf Steiner believed, part of the evolution of a phenomenon is our concept of it—because it comes into being as the phenomenon we know through our knowing it—then our knowledge of a phenomenon is an essential part of the thing itself.  We and the world complete each other while, at the same time, we each have our very own world to bring into being, guided by our own particular love.  In a society that takes this fact as fundamental, doctors would never talk about diseases but would use their imaginations to sense the arc of their patients' whole being and help them to discover what they need to thrive.  Carpenters and mechanics would work with their materials in the way that Michelangelo produced sculpture, chipping away the stone to find the statue already inside of it.  They would love their materials enough to bring them to new life and the objects we "use" every day would be alive to us because of it. They would be our companions. 

Scientists in this society would be like artists whose job it is to help us see their vision of the world.  We would all be artists.  Teachers would exist to help us surrender ourselves to our art but without telling us what to see.  We would understand the world like we understand music.  Without stopping to consider what it means, our only care would be to sing our world for others.  Maybe we could think about our task as human beings as the creation of a kind of universal harmony of all our songs—because it is our job to express, not to explain—or maybe another analogy would be to imagine each of us bringing our own world into being through our own expression so that all of those worlds would come together as distinctive facets of a complicated crystal.  As we advanced in our love, becoming more and more sensitized, more and more at one with our own kind of knowing, we would be able to use our sensitivity to open up more and more to the knowing of others so that our world and The World would just grow and grow forever and ever.