Hobbit-Sense at OneFreeGarden.com

I’ve been trying to write this post since last week and late Saturday night I simply got out an old notebook and started writing again from scratch.  As I sit here typing, I have a lot more than I expected, and what was intended to be an exploration of why people like scifi and fantasy so much (responding to a deep human need) has turned into a exploration of rationalism, the problems it poses, and how scifi and fantasy stories attempt to answer the issues it creates.  But I want to get this out there, so I’m going to have to divide it into two shorter posts somewhere.  If the ending seems incomplete, just know that there’s more coming.

Scifi and fantasy have “taken off” in the modern era.  I would even suggest that as genres, they are decidedly modern inventions.  That is, they arose, however ironically, only after the advent of the so-called Age of Reason (I guess we just weren’t thinking until then, lol).  While many works prior to this point may have had fantastical elements, they were written in periods where such events were generally considered more likely and believable, when humanity was much more inclined towards the supernatural as a whole. 

When it comes to scifi and fantasy, I consider them to be almost (but not quite) two sides of the same coin.  That is, while there are significant differences between the two, I think they are both responses, and related ones, to the same thing, which is rationalism.

I should, before continuing, clarify my use of terms.  By “rationalism,” I refer not to the use of reason, nor do I wish to criticise reason in the slightest.  What I do mean to criticise, however, is the idea that knowledge is the answer to all questions.  We may call that knowledge science, or reason, or fact, but the problem is that in our day and age, we mostly call it truth.  I do not mean to say that scientific discoveries are not true;  I am by no means in “Darwin denial.”  But that a thing may be true does not make it truth.

I have brought up this idea of there being a difference between fact and truth a number of times in conversations I’ve had.  I have never yet felt that I have explained it particularly well, but I hope I have found a way to now.  As with all those things which are somewhat mystical, the best I can do is explore the idea by proxy.  It is true that I have hazel eyes.  It is likewise true that I fancy myself a writer.  These statements are equally true, but not equally important, nor are they relevant to the same parts of myself.  My eye color is an immutable element of my physical body;  that I am a writer is (I hope) an immutable part of my soul, the intangible me.  One is extant;  the other is purposeful.

The Age of Enlightenment has had some incredibly far-reaching effects.  I don’t doubt that medical science, for one, would not have made all the advances it has in this last century without the century prior to it.  But it got a few important things wrong.  One was assuming that the times before it were dark.  Naturally, the medieval period was not all sweetness and light, but neither was it all dungeons and misery.  And it was most assuredly not backwards.  For what the medievals had to work with, they were incredibly resourceful and made a good many advances of their own.  And while they had nowhere near the scientific knowledge we do, a good many modern discoveries rest on foundations they laid.  They also were very sophisticated thinkers, and wildly talented artists.

The second mistake is a confusion of questions.  Enlightenment thinkers became excellent seekers of knowledge and understanding (which is a good thing).  They queried, explored, dissected and discovered how things worked.  They looked at the whole world like a giant clock with gears which they could examine to know the inner workings of everything that was.  And that’s when it happened.  They began to answer every question with these sorts of answers but these sorts of answers were the exact wrong kind for the sorts of questions humanity really needs answers to.  The rationalists answered every question as if it began with “how,” and yet when Man is really searching for an answer, he begins his question with “why.”  

A doctor may be able to tell someone that his loved one died because a blood clot travelled to his heart, but that doesn’t answer the fundamentally human question of why it happened:  why then;  why it “had to”;  why that person;  and so forth — even if the knowledge of how it happened is accurate and useful. 

Before the Enlightenment, there were supersticions which now we would find silly.  But there was a truthfulness to them that rationalism has not been able to match.  And that is that humanity is where the physical reality and the intangible reality (which is just as real) meet and intersect.  Animals do not ponder right and wrong, or agonise over their purpose in life.  But we humans do.  Plants don’t feel happier on a sunny day, or fuller on a rainy one.  But we have deep emotions and intuitions.  And perhaps most of all, despite our tendency not to use it, human beings are the only beings that can and do refuse to sate our every desire because we see a value in self-denial and recognise that wanting something does not make it good or necessary.  Reason is a fantastic thing, about as close to magic as a human being can get on his own.  But even at its heights, it has nothing to add to our lives when we are at the highest peaks and deepest valleys of our very existence.  It may be able to explain why a sunset is beautiful, but it cannot add to its beauty.  It may be able to explain a loss, but it cannot heal the pain.  It’s an important part of our lives, but it was never to be the only part, or even necessarily the most important one.  

Answering “why” questions with “how” answers has left a lot of people feeling rather unfulfilled, as anyone does when they don’t get a real answer to a question, especially one they consider important.  In this respect, rationalism has become decidedly irrational.  It has grounded us so firmly in the scientific method that it has most unscientifically excluded other means of knowing things, such as deep reflection, or revelation.  It has decided that some things are always irrational, and thus irrationally concludes that reason and religion are, for instance, incompatible.  And ironically, it has in fact given rise to some of the least rational responses to our existance.  So dissatisfied are people now with this way that denies everything beyond factual knowledge that many have leapt whole heartedly into the New Age, which offers a broad pool of shallow help, borrowing scientific concepts of energy and magnetism and the like and diving in a puddle they have mistaken for an ocean — but perhaps that will be another post.  The long and short of it is, Reason rightly has a place at the table;  but it is does not sit there alone, nor is it itself the table.  And when we sit down at the table with all the dishes and silverware, and no food, we starve for something more than the tangible.