A State of Affairs

Do you often think of the world? Of the human race? What of life? More specifically, how do all of these things collude in the modern context?

Modernity, with all its power and majesty, is – to use a modern term – plastic. I do not know for sure if it is this way because it might be that we have simply jumped on an exponentially large number of times in the past 1000 years (and especially the last 100 years) in all physical terms; we might have simply not had the ample time to evolve into accepting all our progress as a race.

That being said, however, the emptiness of life as we know it is astounding once we take a moment to absorb our actions and the mentalities behind them. It is the very fact that we have accustomed our being such that we do not examine our activities that prevent the majority of us from seeing the very depressing situation we are in.

Think of your daily routine and what makes you do it, right from the simple act of waking up at a particular time down to our extremely complex human interaction protocols and you will understand that almost everything we do, we have no real reason to do; we just do things because that’s how things are done and because things ‘need’ to be done.

The Imam, al-Ghazali – possibly the most influential figure on Islam since the Prophet Muhammad himself – realized this around the age of 30, when he was already one of the most important scholars in the Islamic world, and his thoughts and doubts regarding the purity of his deeds climaxed to a point where he walked out in the middle of a class he was teaching, not returning until some 10 years later after spending a tremendous amount of time in the vast deserts in seclusion from his 11^th century world.

What took a spiritual expert 10 years, 1000 years ago, to grapple with would take the average person of today an eternity. The dilution and desensitization of the entire spectrum of the human experience into a mainstream monoculture, as well as its condensation – in terms of relative importance and purpose, through popular and social media – into a couple of  minutes long sexual experience in itself is a dilemma beyond what most of us care to comprehend. When we add to this the modern perception of success – that of belonging to an elite, international and wealthy culture – we see the extent and seriousness of this crisis.

It should be noted, at this point, that by referring to ‘modern’ or ‘modernity’, I do not mean to contrast this with some sort of nostalgic classic age where all was well with humankind. It is, in fact, my understanding that the extension of time did not corrupt us, so much as it peeled off many layers of life that kept us busy. In a sense, the advent of today’s science and technology is that which gave us the luxury of enough spare time to further scrutinize our basic human instincts and their relevance to our intelligence.

Our experience with our advance so far is akin to that person who climbed the tallest of mountains only to discover that he is blind and incapable of witnessing the view from the top. The only reasons possible for this is because we either climbed the mountain in the wrong way, or we have simply climbed the wrong mountain altogether.

In the first case, the solution is facile, even though it is demanding. That is to say, all our knowledge and experience can be looked at or utilized in a way that changes us from the state we are in into something more favorable. The simplest example of this type of a solution is what is known as a ‘motivational speech’, where a charismatic person delivers a hearty speech which invigorates us for (usually) a short period of time. This is generally accompanied with audio and visual effects, to boost effectiveness, then disseminated on popular video-hosting sites like Youtube, much like mass-produced drugs.

The second case is a much hairier state of affairs, primarily as it involves understanding which theories are, at their core, incompatible with a meaningful life that is more ‘organic’ than ‘plastic’. Examples of such a case would include capitalism, consumerism and other ideas that measure positivity based on ‘physical’ values like money which contribute to ‘outer’ wealth that does not intrinsically change our value in terms of ‘morality’.

After the identification comes the far more challenging aspect: finding a real alternative; that is, one that contributes to our ‘inner’ wealth without sacrificing our ‘outer’ wealth. Generally, such solutions are attempted by religions and spiritual movements and have historically had an entire spectrum of results with, unfortunately, no honorable mentions of success in our modern times.

All this said, we must understand that, as the great Arab poet, al-Mutanabbi, once said, “Matching the fortitude of the people, crises befall them.” In other words, our problems are only as big as our ability is powerful or shrewd enough to solve them.

-Abdul Rahman Dabbour

Big dreams, toughest path and best burger cook in history

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