Hylas and the Nymphs

Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) by John William Waterhouse

Micah White - www.adbusters.org/blogs - writes:

Our collective mental environment is in a pitiful shape. Bombarded with advertisements, jolted by commercial breaks and distracted by multitasking, our spirit is under constant assault by capitalism. And at a time when we face the confluence of unparalleled global crises — climate change, financial collapse, war and widespread foreclosures — we do not have the mental clarity to act. We do, of course, respond and react but that is precisely the problem. In our reactions we betray our inability to propose a fundamentally different course of history. We still believe that there will be a technological solution to the problems we face and by accepting this basic premise we insure that the corporations will continue to dominate the horizon. What we need is a movement of spiritual rebirth that rejects the capitalist-materialist disenchantment of the world and instead proposes a vision in which mystery has a place.

All that is wild about the world has been systematically penetrated, catalogued and destroyed. The explicit intention of the scientific mindset, to pierce the mysteries of Being, has led to a world empty of excitement in which not even endless consumption can fill the void. We are both cut off from the natural environment, enclosed in sprawling concrete cities, and cut off from any previous philosophical or religious conception of the world that celebrated possibility, contingency and mystery. How would it change things if we rallied in support of nature not because of climate change (an abstraction identified by science and therefore conceivably able to be "fixed" by science) but instead because the nymphs Socrates felt at the river are no longer with us.