Idle Thoughts on the St. Matthew Passion and Millennial Software -- 4/2/24 (Pt. V)
Continued from:
Social media is another experience without an import. In my youth I had more money than I necessarily knew where or how it should be spent. As such, I had experiences which strayed along the border area between earned and unearned. Writing is an ur-mechanism for deriving value from and metering experience, or, in the words of my thesis, earning it. It is a mechanism for building up the retaining wall of experience, so that it does not pass in raging torrents, impressive to behold, but ruinous to the ecosystem. In time, this process of earning experience can invert itself, whereupon the actual experience of the writer becomes generalized, or subservient to an invention, and the writer’s audience can become immersed in an experience that is unfamiliar to them while drinking simultaneously of its valuable insights.
Our town, village, nation, or religion is built upon these insights when they are secured in one transmissible form or another. These insights cross into other arts, as the passion did for Bach’s music, inspiring in the man faith, and in the music gravity. As we can see, however, man, his works, and the organs of society, need to organize themselves with an eye toward an esoteric and abstract goal at the pinnacle of all doing. The device and software that I use to listen to Bach has no such motivation. Without being cynically invented, it is insidious in its plastic indifference. The jump from merely entertaining technology, like the PlayStation, to today’s technology of engineered engagement is a leap from meaninglessness to outright cruelty. In either case, the scale of the degradation of our society due to the inducement to think that unearned experiences are distinctly worthwhile is nearly impossible to understand. It is a headless process, influenced by highly motivated actors and large institutions, but, depressingly, it cannot be controlled entirely and is largely done by us to ourselves to our intellectual and spiritual detriment. To what extent the church was a headless process, and to what extent narrow earthly interest conflated potently with ideals, is a question I lack the historical knowledge to assess.