To truly be human, and deserve distinction from others of the Hominidae family, one must utilize our god-like ability to create. If not, you are wasting the great potential that is exclusively a human gift. Man, woman, or artist, we all have something original and new to contribute. Some may argue that animals create all the time. New woven nests, new towering mounds, new tunnel systems, but unlike humans these creations have been built the same way since creation with no new innovation and therein lies the differance. A crocodile still grabs and rolls to tear limbs, a bird still uses grass, mud and spit to build a home.
Humans, however, can not stop innovating
and engineering. There are new materials, books, paintings, and words all the
time. Humans have built pyramids and palaces. We have concored not only the
land but the sky and moon as well. But in this inffinant conquest of the world
and achevement in mathmatics, science, society and the written word, have we
destroyed a part of humanity? Have we let our linear, dominent left brain
smuther our emotional, instinctual right?
Has “our insistance on cognative knowlage…robbed us of some of our
capacity for being human?”
Modern,
left brian, linear life is essential to society. It helps us communicate over
distance, record inventory, keep a
timeline and speak. the left lets us “conceptualize… abstract words”(Shlain
16) and concepts. With out it ideas like freedom, justice, and economics
society would not exist. Society is action and result oriented, but this
one lobe view of life is missing “being” and thus perhaps the meaning of life it self.
The
right has a lot to offer: the ability to apreciate beauty, authentic
feeling-states like love and estacy, even faith (Shlain). The right brain give
life depth that we, as people, ignore. The few individuals that embrace the oldest lobe, the great artists of time, have truly
experiaced humanity and thruogh there works have expressed it. The only way to
fully regain our right-brained humanity is to encourage unrestrained personal
expression in the arts. Have you ever been transported by a piece of music, cried at a movie or even noticed someone telling a lie? That is the right
brains subtle work and through those small instances humanity is slowly healing.
There are two points that you make in your post that I would like to draw attention to. The first is that we have conquered the land, sky, and moon, and the second is that without our left brain we would not have the ideas freedom and justice. I would argue that humanity has not truly conquered any land, sky or piece of the moon. We have built upon the land and flown in the sky but nature destroys land, towns, and cities every year through natural disasters as well as taking lives through sickness and disease all around the world. The best we have been able to do so far in our history is to rebuild and try to improve our barriers against nature, but I feel we will never be able to fight back nature completely. I also feel that freedom and justice involve the right brain. Justice I agree has a lot more to do with the left brain than the right but if humanity were truly just there would be a lot more punishment. Freedom on the other hand is not really left brained as it involves ideas that are opposite to justice such as mercy. The troubles caused by many humans being free shows one, through an unemotional left brained way of thinking, that one can have a lot less problems and accomplish much more with slavery. Thankfully our right brain steps in and gives us a conscience in this matter.
ReplyDeleteSarahfields-
ReplyDeleteYou say hat we can heal humaniy through art and I wholehartedly agree. If more people were in touch with their right brain, human culture would be in a very different position. Like you said, left brain thinking is necessary to further our deveopment, and in some ways, left brain technologies give us the operunity for further right brain exploration. As I see it, the solution is all about balance: letting logic influence irraional intuition, and intuition influence irraional logic. I do agree with Jamie that humanity has not truly conquered the land and sky. Because of our inellegence, we have come up with ways to protect ourselves from naure and populate the world beyond nature's intentions. But nature is the dominant force in our lives, and rather then conquering it we have "angered" it, so to speak, but pusing its limits and breaking its rules.