The Big Picture

Hello faithful readers. I took last week off for Christmas, but here is something new that I hope you'll enjoy:

There is a particular style of painting and literature which was popular during the enlightenment that I really enjoy. It only lasted for a few years, but it was popular with philosophers because of it's subject matter. Essentially, painters in this style would attempt to recreate the feeling experienced when witnessing an act of nature so big that it completely dwarfs all human perspective. This feeling was called "The Sublime." For an example, you might have this sensation when looking at a stormy ocean, or the grand canyon, or looking down from a mountaintop or an erupting volcano.  It's something between what we might call "awe", "wonder", and "fear". These paintings were often frightening, as they demonstrated the awesome power of nature to destroy, in dynamic and forceful action. This particular sensation is something like the "fear of God" talked about in religious circles, to which the only reasonable response is to watch in silence, mouth agape. A painting in this style intended to get the following points across:

1. Nature is powerful

2. People are small

3. Nature is BIG. Too big to be able to wrap your head around in fact. 

Philosophers like Kant appreciated this style specifically for this third point; seeing sublime paintings forced a person to stretch their brain. If you've ever tried to wrap your head around the idea of infinity you get close to what we're talking about here. Trying to get the right perspective regarding our own size in a massive universe is incredibly difficult even for us today. Interestingly, most thinkers didn't respond to sublime paintings with the kind of humility and helplessness that you and I might associate with being small people in a big world. In fact, while sublime paintings did focus on how small people were in comparison to nature, they also focus on how impressive it was that such small people could navigate, survive, and even conquer such massive displays of natural force. During the enlightenment, many such paintings highlighted and emphasized man's ability to conquer any horizon and reach any goal. 

This idea of the sublime is now more important and present than ever before. Because we're assaulted with it everyday. 

You and I live in the rarest and most unique part of human history to date. Advances in science and technology have come upon us so incredibly quickly that life as a human being is fundamentally different than it was for our great grandparents. The past hundred years has yielded an explosion in growth and understanding that has changed the way humans look and interact with the world. For the first time in our history as a species, we have the ability to affect the weather, which has always been for us a source of this sublime intuition - something incomprehensibly big, and beyond our control or influence. We have the ability to destroy cities, if not nations, in a single moment. The technology the average American carries around in their pocket every day is a thousand times more complex than the technology they used to send people to space over forty years ago. 

There is a new sense of the Sublime in the postmodern world. Instead of experiencing this awe at witnessing acts of nature, we get this sensation when we try and comprehend the complexity and magnitude of human society and institutions. The scope of the human race, government, technology, art, science, and the massive infrastructure we've built to support ourselves has become so sprawling, vast, and labyrinthine that it is impossible for a single human mind to comprehend it all at once. Just try and imagine all that goes into running a single large city, in a single day. What it takes to produce the electricity, water, fuel, waste disposal, building material necessary to run New York, or London, not to mention all of the governance required, traffic laws, safety codes, measurement standards, health codes, shipping, imports, exports, money, food etc. Or the computers that have become such a fundamental part of the functioning of the human race, computers that even very intelligent and educated individuals aren't entirely sure how they work at a very basic level. The complex organism of a human city is seemingly held together by magic. And that's just a single city on a single day! The reality is that society operates at this level of complexity everywhere, all the time. 

Here is a great example of this new sublime we get from looking at the human race as whole. It's a graph of all of the existent wealth in the world. The sheer size of the graph itself is enough to produce the same feeling we get from looking at pictures of Niagara Falls or Yosemite. 

Not to mention the ever accelerating progress of science, technology, and computers. Gene therapy, particle accelerators, human and technological interface, cloning, the Internet, artificial intelligence. Some scientists even believe that human beings will achieve practical immortality within our lifetimes. 

We live in a big world. 

A world unlike any experienced by our ancestors since the dawn of man. We live in a scary world as well. A world in which everything that we've come to know and depend on for millenia hangs by a thread. A world where EVERYTHING could change in a single day. EVERYTHING is complicated. EVERYTHING is crazy. EVERYTHING is going faster and faster and faster. 

Ok. Take a breath. Let's bring this back to Earth. What does this have to do with gratitude? Well, in pursuit of our goal of daily, active, practical gratitude, I find that it helps me to always keep one eye on the big picture. To look at the world we live in, our place and time, and recognize how inconceivably lucky we are to live in such a strange and unique period. The opportunities and challenges that we face now are some of the biggest our race has ever seen, and are completely different from the problems we've seen before this point. Anything can happen. It's a new world and we, some seven billion people out of presumably fifty billion that have ever lived on Earth, are the ones that get to see it. It becomes hard to complain about Starbucks being out of that one latte flavor you like when you consider that, for the first time, nearly the whole of human knowledge is available, anywhere, anytime, for free, at your fingertips. Like I've mentioned before here, gratitude is all about having the right perspective. Being able to sit down and recognize your piece of the incomprehensibly huge puzzle is part of it.

Secondly, in an increasingly unreliable and foreign world, we are in desperate need of some solid psychological tools to handle the mess. It's easy to go crazy or get scared when we look at the world at large and where things are going. All humans, all seven billion of us, have one little hand on one little ear of a mammoth beast called society - not one of us knows where it's going or what to do with it. But one thing we can do, one thing that has been proven to increase our ability to cope with change, is practice gratitude. Gratitude is an extremely practical and dependable tool in an undependable world. Things may get crazier and crazier, but at least we get to watch the show. That's no small blessing if you can get your head around it. It's hard to see it without getting knocked over, but being grateful for the big picture is the first step toward being able to cope with it.