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In the disillusioned 20th century there are not many elves left in the woods. The great mysteries of the universe are being broken down and solved and the progress of science has left us little food for fantasy. Darwin and Gagarin have demolished religion. God's Truth has dwindled and died out along with the fading prestige of the church. Einstein has destroyed the idea of a universe that could be understood by using empirical fact as a measuring stick. Science has disillusioned us, but has not been able to provide us with answers, only new questions and endless theories, leaving us little to believe in. With the aid of fact and rationality, science has shown us how, but not why .
The primitive people usually explained the phenomena they encountered as the handiwork of some supernatural being, or made up a story about the phenomenon's beginning, a story that made sense to their idea of reality. This would seem to be same kind of "rationalisation" that our scientists use in their efforts to describe the universe, at least the principle is the same. For, aren't quarks and photons very mysterious entities to most of us? However, there is one great difference between these interpretations of the world and that is the difference of the aesthetic. Our view of the world, be it as it may "more correct", is certainly a lot duller .
If, for example, three hundred years ago a Finnish hunter would have come across a lake or a pond on his rounds, he would have seen the pond as the home of a spirit or some other supernatural being: the keeper and master of the pond. The hunter would have avoided doing anything that would - according to folklore, his view of the world - upset the spirit and bring a punishment on him for breaking the taboo .
However, if we came upon the same pond today, we could (perhaps) appreciate its beauty, but, we would also, consciously or unconsciously, see it as an ecosystem, as a biological environment etc. We would not believe in spirits, for us they do not exist. We would know that the water might be polluted, we might restrain ourselves from drinking the water in deference to our own chemical bogeymen .
Imagination and inventiveness have always been man's keenest weapons in the struggle for survival. In fact the way I see it is that imagination and dreaming, two aspects of man's gift for abstract thought, are mental extensions of the survival instinct. The wish for miracles, resorting to magic when all else fails is basically very rational. How could things be better? How could things be better for me? The history of technology is a good example of this: gadgets that to us are everyday objects (cars, electric razors, microwave ovens etc.) would have seemed magical to our 16th century hunter. He would have thought that such things existed only in dreams. These thoughts and wishes must surely be the result of the will to survive, to assert oneself, to change the world, in other words, the result of ambition. These thoughts and dreams ideologies and inventions are what has shaped our world into its present form: the dream of being able to fly, dreams of "greatness" (usually "dreams of conquest"), the dream of living in a society in which everything would be shared, the dream of living in a world without jewish people. No dreams, no imagination, no desire: no ambition, no progress, no change .
Western man has certainly never lacked ambition. It would, however, seem to me that that ambition has always centered on material things and that such pursuits as the search for spiritual enlightenment and codes of ethics have been left to be other people's problem .
It would also seem to me that the western culture has always been more bent on rationality than emotion. This ruthlessness, if you will, is probably not the least of the factors that have allowed the western culture to spread out across the world and dominate other cultures. This could, however, be an unnecessarily harsh judgement. If looked at from an evolutionary angle, how can we blame the Europeans for succeeding in the "battle between cultures"? Would the other cultures have slaughtered the Incas if they had had the means for it? The question is impossible to answer since different cultures place emphasis on different values. The cold fact is that our culture, based on logic and rationality, has prevailed in the race for the sunny spot. However, there are signs that the western culture is walking towards its doom: the fruits of science have turned out to be a mixed blessing at best. Nuclear weapons have the potential to destroy us all several times over, the principles of unlimited economical growth and consumption combined with technology and industry are turning the planet into a giant garbage dump. The greatest tragedy and perhaps the only meaning of our existence is being conscious of ourselves, of our physical and mental limitations, of death, of being "only human". Want for a better life, for more money, more friends, more power, for whatever it is that we miss in our lives, compels us to dream. In this violent and incomprehensible world, distraction and dreaming seem to be our only hope. Some find the distraction in other people, some find it in books, some in sports, some in drugs. We all need magic, whether we find it in a love affair or in the movies. Sometimes every one of us wishes for a miracle, for something that can't be, in order to escape the stranglehold of the rules that we have created for place and time. Everyone needs dreams. Everyone needs hope .
