Estrangement
by Jay Paul
Estrangement is neither good nor bad. It is a position I find myself in many times a day. It occurs when I need to step out of my most intimate involvements with people and things, to see as a stranger, one who is not so involved. I do this to understand conceptually what is going on. When I am clear, I go back into the involvements, having reoriented myself. This is the role of conceptualization: to solve estrangement and allow me back into my involvements, to help me be intimate in my world once again.
When I am driving, I usually do not rely on concepts. Oh, I rely on training and experience, but these have become habituated into my very muscles, well below the level of conceptualization. I don’t think when I drive, unless I have to. When driving I make sense of little around me. Other cars are blurs of color, as are pedestrians. Sounds come from them, too. Not thought, but habituation marks my considering the lines on the road, the road signs, the cars around me, the bicycles, the people. As long as they behave in expectable ways, I do not notice them beyond as a blur of color and sound. I am at one with my involvements, intimate with myself and the things and people around me. We work together.
When the expectable is broken, estrangement happens. This occurs when, for example, I see pedestrians at the side of the road appear as if they are going to dart in front of me. I notice them because they violate the expectable. They come to my attention because they are no longer part of the blur of sound and color. I am now estranged from my most intimate involvements because I wonder what they are going to do. I take my foot off the gas, hold it above the brake, and watch them for clues as to what they are going to do. Will they indicate to me by some motion, lack of motion, or sign what they are meaning to do?
In estrangement, I begin thinking. Habits break down. This occurs seamlessly. I go from a world of blurred lines and colors and sounds to a definite, demarcated world of people at the curb perhaps moving in front of me. All else is background. I notice the people stop at the curb and pull their bodies up. I conceptualize this as them noticing me and waiting for me to pass. I put my foot back on the gas, and the world seamlessly becomes intimate again, and the cars go back to being blurs of color and sound and the pedestrians and bicyclists, too, become blurs of color and sound. I am no longer estranged.
This estrangement is the origin of thought. I think when things go amiss. Concepts exist to put things back together, into the whole of blurred colors and sounds. They solve and salve our hurts, when what we take as a whole is severed and demarcated into a problem. In this case, the problem was the intention of the pedestrians at the curb. But this is a simple example. Things get much more complicated. For instance, Isaac Newton, according to the story, was hit on the head by a falling apple while sitting under a tree. He defined this falling apple as a problem to be solved. He was estranged from his intimate involvements, from his back leaning against the tree, from his aching head, from his desire, perhaps, for some shade. This estrangement entailed thinking. Newton’s unusually creative mind came up with gravity.
Newton’s estrangement has become institutionalized in a culture in the form of the discipline of classical physics. Estrangement can be celebrated. A culture can notice a problem, say, economics, and hire people to be professionally estranged from the economy in order to solve, conceptually, its problems. These professionals, to justify their existence, would have to view the economy as always in a low-level crisis. They would be permanently estranged in their professional capacity. The pain of estrangement would even become something they enjoy—an acquired taste, like coffee.
To be a permanent thinker is to be permanently estranged from the subject of the thinking. An economist views the economy as something to be thought about and solved, not as the blur of sight and sound that characterizes involvement in the whole. A physicist sees the physical world as a problem and is professionally estranged from it. The discipline is forever in a state of crisis, usually small scale but sometimes not. All disciplines are permanently in a state of crisis. We have professionalized estrangement.
This creates distortions. Estrangement and conceptualization are a step in becoming intimate again with the world. They are not about a permanent state of ambiguity and thought and defending thought. Our current culture is one where estrangement has run amok. People get paid to be consultants and thinkers. They are always trying to heal wounds which would not have existed if not for professional estrangement.
This situation appears less than ideal to me. But I don’t know what to do about it. Estrangement tends to breed estrangement, conceptualization breeds more conceptualization. We spend time, energy, and money solving problems that did not even appear as problems in centuries past. This is not to say the problems are not real. It is to say the problems are our creation: we define them as problems. For instance, in most parts of the USA, driving 80 miles per hour on the freeway is defined as a problem. It is not part of our habituated world of intimacy. Yet, driving 55 is not. We have decided that the considerable danger of driving 55 is tolerable, but the added danger of driving 80 is not. How did we get to this issue? Some people in the early 20th century decided that horse-driven travel was too slow. This was defined as a problem. The inventors became estranged from the intimate involvements of horse travel. So they set to work creating a horse-less carriage. And succeeded. Now, we need to decide how fast to allow these horse-less carriages to move.
“Necessity is the mother of invention” the saying goes. It’s equally true that estrangement is the mother of invention. Our usual, habituated world must become strange for any of us to conceptualize another way. There are obvious political implications for this. Certainly, we don’t want things to remain the way they are right now with massive wealth differences between the rich and poor and people being discriminated against because of race and religion. Certainly, we want to define these issues as problems that estrange us and cause us to conceptualize solutions. But the estrangement that creates conceptualization is not pleasant, and it makes for a society in perpetual crisis. As a man with a disabling mental condition, I have my personal investment in this society becoming more accepting of people like me. My very position as a person with severe mental health issues makes me estranged. And I want things to get better, and I think about it and work for it.
So I have a personal investment in the political uses of estrangement. Perhaps this is just our historical position, to be estranged in a conceptual world outside the habituated whole of color and sound. But something is not right about it. It means the alarm bells are always going off. It means there are always problems. It leads to exhaustion and alienation. Something is running down. We can’t go on like this forever. On the one hand, the problems we define are real, and we get estranged because of their reality. We find ourselves estranged, especially people outside the mainstream of the society.
Perhaps nature will have the final word. Our estrangement and conceptions have allowed us to exploit nature like no other civilization in history. Yet the aquifers are running dry, the topsoil is wearing out, and it is heating up. Nature will hurt us for being too estranged and conceptual. We have used natural science and technology to estrange us from the natural world. We are not in touch with trees and rocks and birds and other animals as blurs of color and sound that we interact with. Nature has become a problem. And because it is a problem, we conceptualize it and try to make sense of it. In doing so, we have created industrial farming and massive transportation and so on. Estrangement, it is true, has made society fairer in some respects. But it may also have unleashed the forces that will lead to civilization’s end because of its estrangement from nature.
Estrangement has become so prevalent, and we have gotten so accustomed to it, that we may not even know it. In some strange ways, it has become something we are quite intimate with, particularly the better educated among us. It could be the defining quality of our historical era. It may be our fate, as a species, to ride it until it runs aground. And that may be happening in the coming century as we run up against the limits of the application of estrangement and its concepts.
Comments
Post a Comment