Finding My Bass Notes

Living in a technological world it is easy to adopt a technological philosophy of life. We are inundated everyday through the media with techniques for living a better life. If it’s not a diet that if followed religiously will change our life, it’s a seven, eight, or nine step process to be a better person, pick up women, look better, have more sex, have more rewarding sex, be more successful, get the job you want. If only you follow the rules and apply them to your life, your life is certain to be a better one. 

The way to a better you, as defined by either you or society, is achievable by following a technological process that has been determined through the research of experts. It is irrelevant that every set of experts seems to reference a different set of research data that makes their diet, process, technique better than all of the other ones. Given the amount of techniques out there to turn ourselves into more beautiful, healthier, smarter human beings, it is somewhat surprising that we have not all become Nietzchean god men. 

A classic example of this is The Secret, that book that was all the rage a few years ago, that promised to reveal to all of readers the technique of highly successful and creative people. Given the number of copies that book sold, we should be in the midst of an era of unprecedented greatness. If only we know the secret we too could be achieving world peace, finding the cure for cancer all the while learning to dance tango and cook Cambodian cuisine and raise perfectly adjusted children. It’s just a matter of following the rules for successful living. 

The truth is if I had a dollar for every piece of technique I have followed over the years (and all the money I spent on stupid books with a 10 step process or new technique to get what I want out of life), I’m not sure I would be a better person, but I would sure be a hell of a lot richer, and a whole lot happier. The problem with living technologically is that when it works it is nearly impossible to sustain, and when it fails you are left feeling like a failure, since surely in some way you failed to follow the technique exactly which must represent a failure of character, a lack of discipline and frankly rationally, intellectually it does. 

When a technological process fails, the engineers come in and reassess the process to fix it and find where it is broken. In our world we rush to the doctor and get antidepressants or some other sort of behavioural drug to help us fix what is broken with  us. But maybe nothing is wrong, maybe it’s impossible to live technologically. Perhaps it is our humanity that ultimately gets the better of us. 

The thing about applying rules and techniques to our personal condition is that it speaks to only one part of our personality, the head part; the part that is able to follow the logical progression of rules and techniques and while a particular technique might seem to make sense it ignores the heart part.  What I am talking about is that part of being human that is involved in emotion and passion. (Ironically I’m sure there is a technique for finding more passion in your life).


The movie Black Swan tells this tale better than I ever could. Nina (Natalie Portman's character) is perfect in her technique as a dancer but struggles to find the emotion and the passion in her performance. In spite of her near perfection she is frigid and wooden in her performance and her co-dancers can not relate to her. To truly give the performance of her life she had to find her spirit and ultimately her humanity. 


It is the same for all of us, except the performance is our life and if we are to give the best performance possible we must find our passion and learn to relate. There is no technique that can help us to find our passion, we can be good but we can never be great unless we learn how to relate. We can do everything right but without the relatedness that comes from our humanity we can never truly achieve success. 

I play classical guitar and am very good at reading music or following the rules that are laid out in the notes but I am struggling with two things; firstly with my rhythm and secondly my bass notes. my bass notes are quiet and don’t ring out and I am good with the rhythm as long as I count it out or have a metronome but it does not come naturally.  I struggle with the reality that my technique no matter how good is not enough to produce great music. It is not enough to find my rhythm, I must dig deeper and go beyond following the notes on the page if I am to relate to my music. 

In a recent consultation with a voice therapist I spent some time trying to improve my voice for presentations. Aside from a few exercises that we did he pointed out that the reason that my voice sounded high was that my voice was coming mostly from my mouth. I wasn't speaking from my gut where my bass notes are. Perhaps I am stretching the analogy a bit here, but I can't help but think that my inability to find my bass notes on my guitar and my bass notes in my voice is related to my inability to let go of my technological attitude and live as a human. 


Every great musician knows how to lose himself emotionally in his music. If we are to pursue the moral life then we must abandon the technological life, break the rules for better living and find our bass notes. If we are to be good we must lose ourselves emotionally in our lives as digital and technological as those lives have become. It's a struggle but one that seems worth fighting, the stakes are nothing less than our humanity. 

The Great Reveal or Whither the Shadow?

Relationships are about revelation. We build relationship by what we reveal to one another. In the case of intimate friends, and partners this can be what has been revealed over years. It can also be the forced intimacy of strangers caught in unusual situations where their true character is revealed by their circumstances. Now, granted, relationships are about a whole lot more than just telling our secrets to one another; and the revelation that goes on to form relationship is not always a conscious act; it is the day by day way in which our characters reveal themselves to those around us through our words and actions.  It is the slow unpeeling of the onion of our persona to find the person within.

I believe that at the core every person is good, but I also believe that we also all have a shadow or dark side, and while it is easy to reveal one's better side, (everyone likes a good person) the shadow is usually something that reveals itself in spite of ourselves. It is our shadow that makes us human.

Someone once said to me, and they may have been quoting Jung, but real relationship is formed in the shadow. It is in our darkest hours that our characters are revealed and in those times that our relationships are forged stronger or fall apart. It's a bit like that silly show the Bachelor and the Bachelorette; I mean how easy would it be to fall in love when you are provided a bevy of beautiful people of the opposite sex, in a tropical paradise, who seem to have all the money in world to wine and dine you and play the sentimental romantic, but as we have seen the minute the dead weight of ordinary existence falls upon them and they are removed from their paradise their relationships don't last. How easy is it to fall in love, how much more difficult it is to stay there. If your relationship can withstand the petty squabbles of the everyday and the more serious disagreements as well as the more serious character flaws of your partner, then you at least might say you are on the way to real relationship. (n.b. While my example speaks to romantic partners, it holds true of any and all of our relationships/friendships/acquaintanceship)

So all of this brings me around to revelation in the technological world and my alternate title for today's post, Whither the shadow? Mass media has deified image and the Internet has both allowed us to create alternate personas and to carefully craft the image that the world sees about it. It is a dangerous mix, for we have all become spin doctors of our own image. Image; however, is not reality.

If we look at the example of Tiger Woods, who crafted a image of himself as, quite frankly just about the most perfect man to ever live, aside from Jesus Christ; the moment it was revealed that he was in fact human after all, that he indeed had a shadow, he was finished, even Gillette has now dropped him from their ads, as if a man with a shadow can't sell razor blades, or be the world's best golfer (note to self, switch to Wilkinson Sword or a straight razor). If I was Tiger I would feel an immense amount of relief at my fall, for now he can start being a real man, instead of a caricature of one.

I wish I could say that this obsession with image is reserved for celebrities, but the evidence seems quite contrary, reality TV is but one example of this societal obsession with image. Not to say that image control is a totally modern phenomena, we don't call it narcissism for nothing, only to say that technology has amplified the effects and changed the dynamic.

It is one thing to point to mass media as a basis for an image based culture, and then to say, not I; but if you are reading this blog you probably got here via Facebook, and what is Facebook but a self-narrated tale of our own lives as we see them. A carefully controlled outward facing view of ourselves to the world. I have yet to see an example of someone posting something on their Facebook that they really don't like about themselves. Sure people make self-deprecating remarks, and may reveal unfortunate, even truly sad things, that have happened to them, but Facebook does not the shadow out.

Another example is online dating. There are some great stats on how many people lie on their Internet dating profile. People are online creating images of themselves that don't reflect who they are, even more importantly though from my own Internet dating experience (I've long since given up) it's not just the lies that bother me it's the would be truths. I mean if the number of women who claimed poetry as an interest was true, every poet in the world would be on the best seller list. Now maybe I'm wrong and they are all checking out volumes of Keats or Browning from the library but something tells me that most of these women like the idea of poetry more than they really genuinely like poetry. And therein lies my point, the Internet world allows us to create an idea of ourselves and publish it to the world, that idea may be more or less true.

None of this is meant to trash Facebook or the Internet or even online dating, it is only to say that technology has made it easier to hide from our shadows, and unless we are willing to confront them in other parts of our lives it can be a dangerous path to be on. I also don't think that is possible to be moral without knowing our shadow, to the extent that we allow technology to prevent that we are hindering our own moral development.

So now the great reveal of my title, which is where I reveal my hopes for this blog and the struggles I've had with taking on this task. I am determined that this blog not end up neurotic as so many blogs do, but a certain amount of revelation seems required if I am to continue to blog away with integrity and true to the purpose I have set up.  When I started this blog I was unsure whether I would tell anybody I was writing a blog, I thought I would wait until I had several hundred, maybe even a thousand, anonymous or unknown, followers, then I would thrust it upon my friends and family and say, "see I do have something important to say" and then with a solid repertoire behind me I would continue to write assured of the nobility of my purpose and of the fact that I actually had something to say.

In reflection though on my purpose I realized that I was playing the same game that I am criticizing in this post, failing to reveal my shadow to anyone. Hiding out in the anonymity of the internet until I have achieved the image that I have crafted for myself and until the ideas that I want to write about are complete. For some of my ideas will come from the shadow, and some of them will seem odd now, and some of them odder, in the future, I can not say that these ideas are complete or even worthy of discussion for anyone but me and so I have posted my blog on Facebook, told my friends and opened up my world whatever I might find there.

Perhaps not such a great reveal, but if you think about it maybe it's bigger than it seems.

Next post: What do we mean by technology, followed by the value of experience.

Why the Modern Renaissance Man?

The term renaissance man was much easier to define during the age of Leonardo Da Vinci, the archetypal renaissance man, when the scope of human knowledge was narrower and the accessibility to that knowledge was limited. Having expertise in the various areas of science, music, art, history and philosophy was easier to contain and manage; we now manage to live in a world where information is available at our fingertips, the internet has exceeded the great project of the encyclopedia by more than a thousandfold and the age of hyperspecialization has meant that it is nearly impossible to have expert knowledge about several fields of endeavor.  All due respect to Mr. Da Vinci, but he had it easier than modern man.

The media has labelled James Franco the modern renaissance man, (apologies if you got to this blog by searching for him, this is neither a blog by him or about him) because he acts, writes, paints, reads poetry,  and now apparently directs and of course he plays gay in the movies . Now I don't want to take anything away from James, I've never met him nor am I likely to, so I can not speak to his character (although celebrities these days in general don't seem to have a whole lot of character), or even to whether he is indeed a renaissance man or not, but I think there is a bit more to being a renaissance man than having a series of artistic interests. A thespian yes, an artist yes, a renaissance man I am not sure. 

There are lots of people in the world with multiple interests and lots of artists who are multi-talented, what defines the renaissance man is his character, it is not his treasure trove of information, his library or his self-reflective poetry. The renaissance man when striped of his interests is something more; and that more I would argue is based on moral view of the world.  That moral view is built, created and influenced by his multitude of interests but is not defined by it. 

Wikipedia defines the Renaissance man as having a universal knowledge and that the attainment of such knowledge was to develop one's full potential. But within that definition there is a moral imperative; that developing one's full potential is a good thing to do and ought to be the goal of man. By implication other moral theories are excluded. On the extreme, hedonism, or living for pleasure, is excluded, and more mainstream utilitarianism and materialism are given the same treatment.

To be a renaissance man is not just about being able to paint and write poetry (not that I have anything against either, I may start a second blog on my own interest in poetry) but it implies a moral view of the world. This is the first part of the question I am exploring. The second part is how this has changed in the modern world, Da Vinci had it easier not only in the limitation of the transfer of knowledge and information but also in the world view of the time that was deeply concerned with the moral state of man. These days to be a true modern renaissance man is challenging not only because of the wealth of information in the world but because of the antipathy towards moral advancement that results from a technological view of the world. 

 Next Post on "The Great Reveal" followed by a broader interpretation of technology 

On Religion

One irritant that I wish to put aside before proceeding is the common error of mistaking religion and morality as if they are near synonyms. While I may touch or comment on religion, as it is relevant to the discussion, we must dispense immediately with the confusion of the two. Morality is not the exclusive domain of religion, and if we must depend on religious feeling to lead a moral life then we are deeply in trouble in this age of secularism. This is not meant to be a religious blog, but rather to undertake the classic debate between Socrates and Thrasymachus on what it means to lead a good life and furthermore to ask further how, or if, this question has changed in the modern and technological world.

We would however be remiss to sweep religion so quickly under the carpet for its role in the formation and preservation of morality has been paramount. And I have heard too many people abandon religion because they disagree with the moral position of religion as if its domain is purely the moral care of the soul. The proper domain of religion, in my view, is the spiritual care of the soul and to abandon it for moral reasons seems to be throwing the baby out with the bath water. To reject religion on spiritual grounds may be valid, everyone must decide this for themselves, but for moral reasons alone it seems absurd. To abandon the care of one's soul in order to make a moral point seems foolhardy. To abandon belief in one's soul is something I can not speak to.

So why then has religion become so tied up with moral questions if as I suggest it ought to be concerned with only the spirit. I think there are a many reasons for this, including its role in the past as the centre or hub of communities, since morality is highly concerned with how we treat one another it was logical for these questions to be asked and answered by the local church. Another reason which concerns me more here, is that while it is possible to lead a moral life with out a spiritual one, it is not possible to lead a spiritual life without leading a moral life. A moral life is a precursor to a spiritual one. But that does mean that religion must be the arbiter of the moral life.

I recently read Tess of the D'Urbervilles and in the note at the beginning of my edition it describes the backdrop in which the book was written and the description that has stood out for me was how Thomas Hardy was considered dangerous for his religious views mostly because he was a highly virtuous and moral man who attended church for spiritual and emotional reasons. I think this captures well the view I have tried to describe here. And while I could probably write a blog on religion I hope I have sufficiently  been able to set aside the issue for now to continue on my original question.

In my next post I will describe why I have chosen the title for this blog.

The First Post

We are in need of a renaissance, no less than medieval man needed to be lifted from the dark ages into the light of the modern period, so do we need to be awoken from the slumber of the scientific and digital tyranny to which we have descended.  But this is not a blog for luddites or it would be more aptly named, it is not to shun the progress that science and technology have brought us, for their bounties are legion, the purpose of this blog is to examine and put to scrutiny the moral existence of man in his new advanced surroundings.

So we are clear from the start by moral I do not mean or wish to have it inferred that I am referring to sexual morality, which is what seems to pass for moral discussion in the modern age, and is the only thing that seems to divide us morally, as in the case of gay rights, or on which we unanimously agree, as in the case of infidelity. I grant that sexual morality is a subset of a broader moral view but it is not the one I wish to dwell on here. I am concerned with the more classical question of what does it mean to be a good person and what does it mean to live a good life.

I hope to accomplish a few things with this blog which is to discuss random thoughts that come to me about art, film, poetry, travel, literature, philosophy, psychology, politics, and any other subject that appeals to me. But the thread that will bind it all together is the pursuit of a morally good life, something to which I aspire. Some of what I write will be personal, some of it will be academic, and some of it undoubtedly will not be worth its digital ink, but nevertheless, at the risk of being cliche, the unexamined life is not worth living.

So why then do I say that we are in need of a renaissance? I don't think I can answer that in one single post but the answer will undoubtedly reveal itself over the course of this blog. But if I can summarize it is this; that we have become slaves to our technology, our media and to a formulaic way of living. We have effectively  ceded control over any moral discussion of how we want to live as individuals or as a community to  technology. To question technology or to ask how do we want technology to be a part of our lives and our societies is akin to medieval heresy.  Our politics and politicians have been reduced to ministers of an economic system, where the primary function is to ensure the well functioning of the economy. No one is asking the question what kind of a world do we want to live and what kind of a people do we want to be.

It is said that we get the leaders that we deserve, and our leaders today are caricatures of ourselves. They are one-dimensional and creations of a technological media. If I am a reactionary it is in this, I long for the days when politicians were humans, they drank to much, smoked cigars and were ruthless and relentless in their pursuits. Today they are vegetarians who attend church appropriately, they where sweater vests and or suits when it is relevant, of course they exercise and have read all the right books and generally are bland and boring but certainly not offensive to anyone.

The reasons for all of this are many and I would not put the burden on technology alone, I can only hope that this blog will somehow contribute to a dialogue on who we are going to be as technology advances faster and faster and the whirlwind of media fails to provide us a rock on which we can stand. We are morally adrift and the time, as always, is now to begin questioning our moral purpose.