By Wayne Allensworth
A French TV documentary from the 2000s showed Amazonian rainforest tribesmen reacting to images of the modern world. Their eyes were wide with amazement — and, I think, some sense of sadness, even of foreboding. Their reaction to astronauts on the Moon was one of dismay, much, as I recall, like that of my great grandmother, who viewed the landings as somehow blasphemous. The tribal elders said there was no reason for this. The Moon was our source of light in the nighttime. It was not meant to be disturbed. The images of modern war, of artillery and aerial bombing obliterating entire cities, of mass casualties, appalled them. These people have no heart, the tribesmen said. They did not deny tribal warfare, but noted that the targets of their warfare were specific, usually as retaliation for previous attacks. They acknowledged that cannibals were far more brutal, and would attack anyone, but the sheer scale of the destruction of modern warfare was hard for them to fathom. How would they have reacted to images of Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki? Of concentration camps?
In another segment, pictures of carefully manicured and sculpted gardens puzzled them. Why did the people cut and shape the plants to their own liking? They were hurting them. I think they saw this manner of gardening as controlling, an unhealthy manipulation of plant life. Yet the most striking segment was when the tribesmen were shown images of old people in “elder care” facilities. One tribesman said that they revered old people and were obliged to care for them. It was shocking to see the elderly left to the tender mercies — or not — of strangers. The scenes saddened them. Yet they reacted with rapt attention to the singing of Maria Callas. It’s not our culture, said one man, but it is very touching. It takes courage to sing alone in front of others. They could not understand what she said, but it was moving. An elder said that they sensed that they were hearing something sacred. That sense of the sacred was overwhelming. Some of them were concerned that they were being filmed, and the outside world would know they were there. They would resist the encroachment of the modern world. They were anxious for the future of their children.
I thought, so am I, for many of the same reasons. I don’t wish to revert to a common leftist trope to discredit the best things we have achieved by pretending that the tribesmen were Stone Age flower children. They were not. At their worst, they have behaved as humans often have, in the case of the cannibals, for instance, seeing anyone outside their tribe as less than fully human, wantonly capturing, torturing, and consuming outsiders. They were certainly capable of acts of domination, control, an assertion of the all-the-too familiar will to power. Though skeptical of modern medical practices, they occasionally used plants to induce abortions in early pregnancy. But the tribesmen hardly seemed like “toxic” males. They spoke of how a woman would signal that she was not interested in their advances, for instance. They were fallen beings. I recognized that they were not completely innocent “noble savages.” Then again, their lives were more Edenic than many of us would admit.
Westerners have sometimes escaped the modern world by joining tribal societies or simply leaving city centers, maybe even trying to go “off the grid.” Kids of my age reacted viscerally to the Tarzan movies we saw on Saturday morning TV, or admired the ideal of the free and independent frontiersman of our national myth. Huck Finn’s way of living appealed to us. When I have heard of moderns contacting the small remaining number of remote tribes, my first reaction has usually been, “Leave them alone.” Despite the enormous cultural gap, the tribesmen recognized beautiful music when they heard it. Or better to say, they experienced beauty in much the same way we would. Standards of beauty can vary, depending on context, but Beauty, Truth, and Goodness are foundational. Fundamental moral codes are not vastly different across cultures. Christ’s message extended the Golden Rule to all human beings. It did not deny the clan or tribe, but in a certain sense transcended it. It transcended tribal codes by fulfilling them. For all the distance between us, I could easily recognize the Amazonian tribesmen as fellow travelers in this world. I sympathized with their plight.
What were the key events that spurred on the creation of a modern mechanical cacophony? The mass society that so fragmented us and so repelled the tribesmen? Something that facilitated a scale of human activity beyond anything that our ancestors could have imagined. The sheer scale itself ground old moral codes into dust. What gave moderns the illusion of total control and mastery over nature, so much so that they dispensed with God altogether, along with any purpose beyond their own narrow aims?
Single events are rarely the whole of causation, but I’ll focus on one event that was a major step on the path to modernity, materialism, and the mechanical view of humanity and society. An event that reduced human activity to utilitarian aims, undermining what conservatives used to call “the permanent things” that provided meaning, direction, and purpose far beyond mere utility. An invention that spurred on urbanization on a vast scale, spawning the megapolis, destroying traditional ways of life, and sharply reducing opportunities for genuine interactions with others on a face-to-face scale? What was the basis for mass society and mass industrialization, for assembly lines and war machines that could destroy thousands at one blow? All of that diminishing our capacity for human empathy as others grew more distant, more like swarms of ants, faceless, the will to power unleashed by technology? What did so much to diminish our appreciation for the permanent things? For Truth, Beauty, and Goodness? I give you a key invention on the road to dehumanization and the regimentation of our lives: the mechanical clock and precision timekeeping.
The old world had been regulated and experienced as seasons in agricultural societies with small-scale industry, craftsmen instead of assembly line workers. Time was imprecise, a flow rather than a series of sharp, segmented, and measured intervals. It was judged by the position of the sun, the phase of the moon, the night sky’s constellations, the sundial’s shadow, the hourglass’ grains of sand. The world operated by imprecise periods of seasonal work— planting time, the harvest. There were a surprising number of rest periods, of festivals, the sabbath, saints’ days, and the Church calendar. A more natural rhythm attuned to a wider view of life, of purpose, of the immaterial and divine. One more attuned to the way the right brain (RH) hemisphere perceives the world.
The left brain (LH) hemisphere is for focus, manipulation, control of specific narrow situations, applying rules and procedures to further immediate aims. Both are necessary and beneficial so long as the very narrow take of the left hemisphere serves the right, which can incorporate what the left sees narrowly into a broader view of the world. Not surprisingly, the LH is more prone to valuing efficiency, utility, and control of the environment and of others at the expense of troublesome moral considerations. Rationalism overtakes intuition, theory is valued over experience, and discounts that which cannot in itself be rationalized in narrow utilitarian terms — like Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. The LH denies ambiguity or the coexistence of complementary opposites, which means its thirst for certainty and control will attempt to deny the intuitions of the RH. Without the RH providing experiential context and wisdom, the LH’s theories and abstractions tend to ideological rigidity, and reject that which cannot be measured, pinned down precisely, or explained in utilitarian terms.
The LH can’t really appreciate Beauty, thinks Truth means the answer to an equation. And Goodness? Whatever serves our interests. The machine view of a clockwork universe is made up of spinning atoms, material “things” each wholly separate from one another, in which consciousness is either an illusion or an epiphenomenon of evolution. Newton’s classical physics were deterministic and demanded a watchmaker Deity. But materialist determinism ruled out choice and traditional morality — and God, even the Engineering Watchmaker. Our dominant paradigm in a materialist milieu is professional atheist Richard Dawkins’ “Blind Watchmaker,” a set of laws that deterministically shape a material universe without meaning or purpose.
I’ve posed this question before: What is it we wish to preserve, or invigorate? Answers vary, but thoughtful conservatives, as nostalgic as we are, and nothing is wrong with nostalgia, are not so much wishing to “turn the clock back”—there is that mechanistic view again—as wanting to preserve, protect, and defend Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. The permanent things. The world has never been a wholly hospitable, pleasant place. All societies are deeply flawed, which is no surprise to conservatives. But aspects of a good life have been far more pronounced in some eras than in others, despite the material benefits of a more mechanized society. It is late in the day for America — the United States as a polity, to be sure, but more importantly, for America the nation, society, people, and historical culture. Our goal must be seizing whatever opportunities arise to revitalize the permanent things to create a new home for ourselves. That first of all means arranging our lives in a way that is conducive to nurturing them and breaking the hold of the clock on our being.
Step off the rat’s spinning wheel — that rat race so many people wish to escape — and open your eyes.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
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