Community and Individual Humanities
I've been thinking about community lately. They say Singapore is a city state, because it really is. We have no conception of how it is to live with nature, rather than with modernity. Everything here is touched with modernity.
Modernity empowers us in so many ways. For example, we have the capacity to withdraw into comfort behind walls, into our houses and then into our respective rooms. It is only seeing pictures of countries with a lone house on the horizon that it becomes so obvious how these walls are so artificial, and how they lock you up from the vastness of the world around you. We're empowered in being able to access what we want in many ways. We can easily buy a meal cooked by someone specialised in it to suit our exact tastes, and we can easily escape into a cold room because technology allows us to do so. As we sit in our cars racing on smooth Singapore roads, we don't even realise how different and tamed our surroundings are compared to what there was only a generation ago.
I think I have become too used to modernity to want to give up its spoils. But I'd like to put forth the point that the choice it gives us isn't always good. Because we all, being humans, go for options that incur less friction at the start. In our city lives, with our focused days, we see someone who brushes us up the wrong way, and avoid them because there are so many other people we could theoretically hang out with. We encounter an experience that we hate, and we isolate ourselves from it entirely. We must maximise our opportunities, and all too often those people and experiences are deemed not worth it.
But then everything becomes about yourself and your likings. And one by one, it becomes like that for each person in a society. When many people are physically close together but all looking for what flows easiest for them, then how much real care do they have for each other? How much love do they have based on the essentiality of personhood? How much is it simply manifested care because of the similarity of two people's own experiences and viewpoints? And what then of our continued and narrow bias to have the other remain in that shared mentality so that we can reap of it all the things we like?
I think we have to learn how not to be so consumerist with people. Not to restrict our ideas of neighbours, whom we exercise the neighbour principle with, to someone who was born less than five years older or younger, for example. Not to restrict our community to people we meet at school or in curricular clubs, while we so artificially draw lines of pretend-unknowingness where we are.
Let's learn how to love. Let's learn how to say: Hello, my name is ____, and you are ____, and I am going to know you. And we're going to be friends. To be so simple is not common, and may stand out, but to be that is to have a really beautiful life.
It is sad that we're allowed to be let go so often. We have other priorities, and we just slip - slip away. So sometimes though it's counter-cultural, it's good to impose, and to be imposed on, and to know that no matter what, we both have each other's back. We're there for each other, and not just because we're interested in each other to make use of each other, and not just because we are extraordinarily complementary, but because we all are relational and we want to give and receive love.
An inspiration a while back about living in the Suburbs and Christian community.
*
I do realise this reflects my overall preference for introversion somewhat, as well as my preference for values (feeling) over objective criteria (thinking). Maybe it's not like that for some of you at all. Still, I do feel this.
*
And another thing. All humans have only one life that we know of. And we all have a yearning for transcendence (do tell me if you haven't felt it). It would be immeasurably sad if we all have this mark of yearning in us, but if there is no cure. What if God created us such, but we could not reach him? Or what if this was all an accident, as some of you believe, and if there is no God there to quench us at all?
Because we all only have this one life that we know of for sure (because we are in it right now; and if it is a dream, we have not woken up yet), we feel pressured to make the most out of it. We are all, every second that it lasts, bound to this life. The only thing we know for certain is the thoughts in our head. The only thing we can't divorce ourselves from is the wonderful, or awful, reality of living as ourselves. We must be the heroes or villains to write our own stories.
So I have felt that it is sad that there are many scenes in which one might pity another; but for the other, that is all they possess. And because of that limitation, yet because life has to have meaning somehow, the other person paints a glorious picture of their life. A great hurt inflicted becomes the great obstacle they must overcome to conquer life, and oppression something they combat, the struggle itself giving that life worth. It's what happens when one says, you have wounded me, but I would not have it any other way. Or, even though you pity me, this is all I've got and I am proud of it. In spite of all our imperfections and the imperfections in our own life stories, we make this life beautiful, because we must have it so.
None of this was really his. If there had been a smaller room, he would have been shoved into it. There were two guest bedrooms on this floor, and another above, and they almost never had guests. The clothes he wore weren’t his; they were concessions to something Armand had called "my position in this town"; rags would have done if it weren’t for that.
He rose, the act making him conscious of the clutter he still clutched in his arms. He put it down on the bed. The mitt was his, though. He’d bought it for seventy-five cents from the Salvation Army store. He got the money by hanging around Dempledorff’s market and carrying packages for people, a dime a trip. He had thought Armand would be pleased; he was always talking about resourcefulness and earning ability. But he had forbidden Horty ever to do that again. "My god! People will think we are paupers." So the mitt was all he had to show for the episode.
- The Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon
Posted this on tumblr recently. Haven't read the book itself; only came across it randomly. But it stood out to me that for that adopted boy, that mitt becomes his treasure because he has nothing else, and because he must have something to treasure. It breaks your heart; but it is also truly beautiful.
P.s. But I have thought about it, and realised that there may be another conclusion than pity and sadness. If we manage to find beauty in the person's resolution to make of their situation something great, and the actual physical things or events causing harm can be erased in the light of that bright light that shines on, does this inspire us to declare for ourselves that those intangible and undefinable qualities are the most valuable in the world? Could it inspire us to intentionally place ourselves in situations where we give away all we have, and expose ourselves to possible negativity, in search of that fierce ideal? If we put ourselves on that road, we make ourselves fragile, you see.
The idea I am trying to elucidate is so hard for me to define. It may be accused of being mere determination to succeed against the odds, and selfish in that way. But to look at it differently, it is a tragic tale of each person's desire to find their own beauty; beauty or value that they can have in spite of being in an imperfect world. That raison d'être (and never have I used that phrase more appropriately, for this need for transcendent happiness is on the scale of that) should not be a reason to condemn, when instead it should be something invoking empathy. Yet it seems that some make of their stories something cruelly tragic, when they proceed in their quest to trample on everyone else's quests and make themselves oblivious to the need of each human to have this desire.
Modernity empowers us in so many ways. For example, we have the capacity to withdraw into comfort behind walls, into our houses and then into our respective rooms. It is only seeing pictures of countries with a lone house on the horizon that it becomes so obvious how these walls are so artificial, and how they lock you up from the vastness of the world around you. We're empowered in being able to access what we want in many ways. We can easily buy a meal cooked by someone specialised in it to suit our exact tastes, and we can easily escape into a cold room because technology allows us to do so. As we sit in our cars racing on smooth Singapore roads, we don't even realise how different and tamed our surroundings are compared to what there was only a generation ago.
I think I have become too used to modernity to want to give up its spoils. But I'd like to put forth the point that the choice it gives us isn't always good. Because we all, being humans, go for options that incur less friction at the start. In our city lives, with our focused days, we see someone who brushes us up the wrong way, and avoid them because there are so many other people we could theoretically hang out with. We encounter an experience that we hate, and we isolate ourselves from it entirely. We must maximise our opportunities, and all too often those people and experiences are deemed not worth it.
But then everything becomes about yourself and your likings. And one by one, it becomes like that for each person in a society. When many people are physically close together but all looking for what flows easiest for them, then how much real care do they have for each other? How much love do they have based on the essentiality of personhood? How much is it simply manifested care because of the similarity of two people's own experiences and viewpoints? And what then of our continued and narrow bias to have the other remain in that shared mentality so that we can reap of it all the things we like?
I think we have to learn how not to be so consumerist with people. Not to restrict our ideas of neighbours, whom we exercise the neighbour principle with, to someone who was born less than five years older or younger, for example. Not to restrict our community to people we meet at school or in curricular clubs, while we so artificially draw lines of pretend-unknowingness where we are.
Let's learn how to love. Let's learn how to say: Hello, my name is ____, and you are ____, and I am going to know you. And we're going to be friends. To be so simple is not common, and may stand out, but to be that is to have a really beautiful life.
It is sad that we're allowed to be let go so often. We have other priorities, and we just slip - slip away. So sometimes though it's counter-cultural, it's good to impose, and to be imposed on, and to know that no matter what, we both have each other's back. We're there for each other, and not just because we're interested in each other to make use of each other, and not just because we are extraordinarily complementary, but because we all are relational and we want to give and receive love.
An inspiration a while back about living in the Suburbs and Christian community.
*
I do realise this reflects my overall preference for introversion somewhat, as well as my preference for values (feeling) over objective criteria (thinking). Maybe it's not like that for some of you at all. Still, I do feel this.
*
And another thing. All humans have only one life that we know of. And we all have a yearning for transcendence (do tell me if you haven't felt it). It would be immeasurably sad if we all have this mark of yearning in us, but if there is no cure. What if God created us such, but we could not reach him? Or what if this was all an accident, as some of you believe, and if there is no God there to quench us at all?
Because we all only have this one life that we know of for sure (because we are in it right now; and if it is a dream, we have not woken up yet), we feel pressured to make the most out of it. We are all, every second that it lasts, bound to this life. The only thing we know for certain is the thoughts in our head. The only thing we can't divorce ourselves from is the wonderful, or awful, reality of living as ourselves. We must be the heroes or villains to write our own stories.
So I have felt that it is sad that there are many scenes in which one might pity another; but for the other, that is all they possess. And because of that limitation, yet because life has to have meaning somehow, the other person paints a glorious picture of their life. A great hurt inflicted becomes the great obstacle they must overcome to conquer life, and oppression something they combat, the struggle itself giving that life worth. It's what happens when one says, you have wounded me, but I would not have it any other way. Or, even though you pity me, this is all I've got and I am proud of it. In spite of all our imperfections and the imperfections in our own life stories, we make this life beautiful, because we must have it so.
None of this was really his. If there had been a smaller room, he would have been shoved into it. There were two guest bedrooms on this floor, and another above, and they almost never had guests. The clothes he wore weren’t his; they were concessions to something Armand had called "my position in this town"; rags would have done if it weren’t for that.
He rose, the act making him conscious of the clutter he still clutched in his arms. He put it down on the bed. The mitt was his, though. He’d bought it for seventy-five cents from the Salvation Army store. He got the money by hanging around Dempledorff’s market and carrying packages for people, a dime a trip. He had thought Armand would be pleased; he was always talking about resourcefulness and earning ability. But he had forbidden Horty ever to do that again. "My god! People will think we are paupers." So the mitt was all he had to show for the episode.
- The Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon
Posted this on tumblr recently. Haven't read the book itself; only came across it randomly. But it stood out to me that for that adopted boy, that mitt becomes his treasure because he has nothing else, and because he must have something to treasure. It breaks your heart; but it is also truly beautiful.
P.s. But I have thought about it, and realised that there may be another conclusion than pity and sadness. If we manage to find beauty in the person's resolution to make of their situation something great, and the actual physical things or events causing harm can be erased in the light of that bright light that shines on, does this inspire us to declare for ourselves that those intangible and undefinable qualities are the most valuable in the world? Could it inspire us to intentionally place ourselves in situations where we give away all we have, and expose ourselves to possible negativity, in search of that fierce ideal? If we put ourselves on that road, we make ourselves fragile, you see.
The idea I am trying to elucidate is so hard for me to define. It may be accused of being mere determination to succeed against the odds, and selfish in that way. But to look at it differently, it is a tragic tale of each person's desire to find their own beauty; beauty or value that they can have in spite of being in an imperfect world. That raison d'être (and never have I used that phrase more appropriately, for this need for transcendent happiness is on the scale of that) should not be a reason to condemn, when instead it should be something invoking empathy. Yet it seems that some make of their stories something cruelly tragic, when they proceed in their quest to trample on everyone else's quests and make themselves oblivious to the need of each human to have this desire.
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