Wise Words? Art vs Science

I guess for once Im going to do a bit of a continuation from my last piece, even though at this point that was almost two months ago.

Last time on this weird smattering of thoughts that strains the limit of a coherent body of work, I talked about moving forward in my post college life and making decisions in a new way. I came away from that wanting to choose hope, to trust myself to have learned effectively from my past mistakes and to try concentrate less on them and more on the things that bring me hope. I tried to take my time with that one, but all the same I published it feeling like I had mostly dismantled my own and some media derived views of dwelling on regrets and dashing hope, but at the time I found it difficult to articulate what path forward might provide me with the most hope. In short, I didn’t know how to live my life in a hopeful way.
The wondering about what to do with your own existence is known even colloquially these days as an existential crisis. Existentialism was more or less defined and invented by a theologian (of all things) called Kierkegaard in the mid 1800s, but the word entered more public use following the second world war, most notably in France via the minds and writings of John-Paul Sartre and Simon De Beauvoir. It is described by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  as a panic relating to the certainty of death and a feeling of crushing uncertainty about how much time we have left. Not a surprising turn of events, when you consider that the atomic bomb had just been invented. From that moment on, the destruction of the world was realistically in reach and a constant threat to everyone. So even though the word existential is fairly recent

the question is as old as life itself. Or more accurately, as old as consciousness. As time has gone on, the world around us appears to be getting more and more fragile. Even as the Cold War moved away from nuclear arms races and more into proxy wars such as the current one in the Ukraine, the increased awareness and understanding of climate change means that those who follow the news still have lots of reasons to see the world around them as perpetually impermanent.

Fear over end of the world (isn’t philosophy so much fun) feeds on the same fear of mortality as individual death, but on a much larger scale and with more consequences. In one sense if the world ended we would all just die much in the same way we were going to anyway, but in another sense the end of the world would mean an erasure not just of our own mortal existence but also of anything and everything which we have ever built created or loved. It’s not just that we wouldn’t be able to think or feel anything new, but all possible imprints of what we have done would also be erased without a trace. So even though this is in one sense an incredible depressing problem, these fears do illuminate one thing about the human existence: that it has meaning outside of its own confines. The things which we make and produce matter, and so I think it’s worth taking some time to sit down and consider what a meaningful way of impacting the world might look and feel like.
 

Now obviously, one of the great aspects of the human experience is that we theoretically have the time and opportunity to live a varied existence. But personally, I feel a desire to have one of these things be core to the others, to have some sort of central identity which everything else builds out from. We have the opportunity to perform a lot of different actions and work on a lot of different projects, but each of them inevitably takes time. So in order to focus primarily on one, I want it to connect with an aspect of my mind or heart which is truly essential. In other words, what are the actions or feelings whose removal from my person would force me out of my current definition and into a new one? People do change, I believe, but there are some elements of a person which are foundational to their temperament. In order to fit that description, the quality would have to be present for a very long time. It doesn't necessarily have to be the focus of all your early memories, but the idea behind a person's essence is that its something which is intrinsic and not provided by the real world. In fact it's the opposite, it’s the root of the way in which you respond to the world. It's what you dream, not what happen in reality. Your essence forms the basis behind what you can do well, not just what you should do to use the terminology from my last post.

To be clear, dreams are nice and imagining them at all is an experience worth having, but I think that actually achieving a dream or goal fills a person with a different sort of feeling. Achieving a goal fills a person with the same warm glow as a dream but fuller, deeper, and more solid. Now not all goals are solid objects, true contentment is a super valid and difficult goal worth achieving, so is spiritual enlightenment. But personally, I’ve always felt a desire to create something. My earliest ambition was to be an inventor, mostly inspired by this great book I had called The Way Things Work. But for the period of human history before humans had totally conquered nature, ranging I suppose from the dawn of humanity until maybe the industrial revolution, the most important creation would be another person. Nowadays having children is a choice and this fact I think more than anything paved the ways for the modern feminist movement which has finally allowed women to be people first and women second. But before modern society, everyone was constantly in need of more people to tend the land, hunt, and simply increase the chance of any of those children making it to adulthood. I often feel like too much of my life is a numbers game of generating wealth, but for as shitty as that reality feels, it’s a lot better than the previous reality of just being another pawn which hopefully would avoid being knocked down by death disease or starvation long enough to make it to the other end of the chess board and become a real piece with more moves than just going forward.
 

In the modern world, people are people and more defined by their consciousness and what they chose to do with it. Raising children does not appeal to everyone and never did, but I suppose from one angle they are and have always been the most complicated and confusing thing you can make. New people have their own mind and heart which is different from their parents and thus they have their own hopes and dreams and lives.
 

 "Mother of the ocean, ... in your belly, you hold the treasures few have ever seen, most of them dreams"
-A Pirate looks at Forty, Jimmy Buffet I guess, I had only ever heard the version by Jack Johnson and Dave Mathews which is really good and also on Spotify

Parents do have a great deal of influence on their children, especially when they take the time to be present like my parents did, but kids are known for making decisions that frustrate their parents no matter what you do. So children are one thing other people make, well someone with a uterus make them and hopefully they don’t have to raise them alone, but children are volatile creations who are by definition more than just a sum of one person's hopes and dreams. So for people who dream, think, or feel a lot it can be appealing to bring something less chaotic into the world. Something which reflects your mind and heart instead of someone who has a mind and heart of their own. Something which is attributed to you and no one else. A sort of distillation of an individual's heart and mind. Something solid which might influence the world around you, however long that lasts.

But that brings us to the real heart and soul of this question: how do we want to influence the world? What sort of distillation is best? Is one sort better than the other? And how do we even begin to compare them?
Well, Im vain enough to have my own answers to those questions. To start from the last question and then work backwards, I think the best way to begin comparing different distillations of heart and mind and how they impact the world is to examine how we use those two forces and how they can be refined and implemented into our own world. However as Rush demonstrates in Hemispheres, both are needed in order to live an effective life at all. Living purely according to logic will leave you prepared for reality but unfulfilled whereas living purely according to the heart will leave you fulfilled but unprepared. The love of truth must be lighted and the truth of love must shine clear, but no one uses both in totally equal proportion. Rush for instance are musicians, and thus certainly lean more on the heart of their playing although their lyrics derive a lot of weight and meaning from their headiness and their music is very technically complicated. They might actually be as close to a perfect balance as it is possible to achieve, but that’s neither here nor there. 

I'm still working on my full analysis of Rush, that's going to be my first attempt at a video essay, but for now let's look at two examples from a body of work which will surely demand its own video essay sometime in the future. Studio Ghibli movies are themselves art obviously, but two of their movies make for an excellent comparison because one of their movies focuses on the tale of a blooming artist and another focuses on the forging of an engineer. For those familiar with the studio's work, I'm clearly referring to the fictional writer Shizuku from Whisper of the Heart and the real story of Jiro Horikoshi from The Wind Rises. 

Let's start with Shizuku. Shizuku's story joins her at the end of middle school, which is an especially important time in Japanese society because kids of that age are placed in a pressure cooker of exams to determine which high school they will be able to attend. And the high school someone attends determines a huge amount of their future prospects, Shizuku is even told by her older sister that whatever high school she gets into will “pretty much decide things” and that the only way to have a say in your own future is to “study hard.” This is an especially alarming detail for me because I get frustrated at American society for making me chose my path in life at 18, I can't imagine doing so at 14. Japanese society is often fetishized by westerners who grew up with Ghibli as well as Dragon Ball and Cowboy Bebop, but this detail in particular highlights how intense their culture is and the strain it puts on people who live there, which is easy to overlook as someone on the other side of the world just enjoying the art and growing frustrated at being made fun of for enjoying it. However this movie highlights how frustrating the pressures of that culture can be.

As a character, Shizuku has pretty firm interests even if she spends the movie trying to figure out what to do with her life. She spends most of her time reading and is especially fond of fairy tales and writing song lyrics. She begins referring to herself as a writer pretty early in the story but it takes her a long time to actually light a fire within herself to take writing seriously and really make something of it. In particular, she grows romantically involved (in a manner appropriate for 14 year olds) with an aspiring violin making named Seji who does not want to attend high school but instead dreams of traveling to Cermona, Italy to study his chosen craft. Seji also has a grandfather, Mr. Nishi, who serves as the guiding light in both children's artistic endeavors. He argues with Seji's parents to convince them to allow Seji to travel to Italy, and he also gives Shizuku some valuable advice on how to approach her artistic life. 

In particular, Mr. Nishi presents a valuable metaphor to Shizuku involving geodes. Geodes are pieces of rock with raw emeralds buried inside, and Mr. Nishi compares the loving labor of refining yourself as an artist to the exploratory task of extracting raw emeralds from within the geode. We all start as rocks, and we need to dig deep within ourselves in order to find the gems. This can be a frustrating process, as oftentimes we spend a lot of time on a particular piece of emerald only to discover that it is not as precious as we had once hoped. Shizuku is particularly inspired by this wisdom and chooses to write a story about a cat statue who resides in the Nishi Antiques shop, known simply as the Baron.

The Baron catches Shizuku's eye when she first enters the store simply based on his dapper attire, but she grows more interested in him when Seji shows her that the Baron's eyes were installed in such a way which causes them to refract light in dazzling patterns. Shizuku then asks Mr. Nishi about the statue and the story behind it, and he tells her that the statue is one of a set of lovers and that the other statue is named Louise. Shizuku, with Mr. Nishi’s permission, then takes these story fragments and constructs a narrative of love, fantasy, and self discovery. 

Now to Shizuku, the story is simply a fantasy tale and far less useful to the world than the things she is being made to study at school, but nevertheless she persists, motivated in no small part to prove herself as a writer. She also finds that once you begin writing it becomes exceptionally difficult to be responsible with your time, which I can relate to because it is currently way too late o clock and I need to be at work in dangerously few hours. All the same, she finishes her story and Mr. Nishi requests to be the first one to read it, and that's where the story makes its Ghibli flourish. You see, Louise was actually the name of a former love of Mr. Nishi, whom he was separated from when the second world war broke out. They had found the Baron and the Baroness together at a coffee shop in Germany, but he had returned to Japan with only the Baron in hopes of reuniting both himself and the Baron with their loves following the war. Sadly, this did not come to pass, and so the Baron becomes a sad symbol for Nishi. There’s a heartbreaking dream sequence right before Shizuku stops by to deliver her story where Louise comes back to Nishi exactly the same as he remembers her and he greets her by apologizing for growing old without her, almost as if the version of himself which will always be in love with her is struggling to escape his elderly body.

But Shizuku's story does something quite remarkable for Nishi. It provides the symbol of the Barron with new meaning, a new context, which then frees him from some past regrets concerning growing old without Louise. So despite art's outward appearance as being mostly about beauty and personal meaning and therefore "worth less" in the capitalist sense than inventions of industry, we see here that art actually does have the ability to change people's hearts, which often allows them to live more truthfully, freed from the imprisonment of their own trauma induced delusions. The impact of this sort of change on how people live and in turn how they affect the world around them cannot be overstated. When people live in truth and are more free from regret, they are more motivated and more prone to consider the long term effects of their actions because truth is after all a larger and infinitely more complex narrative than any of the lies we construct to simplify it. So yes, I think that art has tremendous value, even if we are to only consider its impact on the world at large and not the therapeutic benefits to the artist.

And yet, this story was delivered to me through the medium of film, itself an intense invention involving the display of as many as 24 different images every second for 90 minutes along with an audio recording which was itself originally produced by allowing the creation of sounds to imprint upon an impressionable medium, originally beeswax then vinyl before finally reaching digital sequences which are less romantic than their predecessors but also more technical and impressive. Furthermore the film was physically delivered to my eyes through the even more intricate and complicated technologies of computers and the internet, a vast interconnected network of infinitely reprogrammable machines. Clearly the effects of art, wonderful as they are, are signals whose strength is amplified by our current technology to the point of near ubiquity. We used to have a world where people paid for items because they always had some sort of material cost, now all pay walls are intentional barriers constructed not out of necessity but out of a desire to give some value back to the people who created the item being distributed. However, the narrative of technology is also layered and complex, as is displayed through the story of Jiro in The Wind Rises.
Jiro is the opposite of Shizuku is every way. Jiro Horiskoshi was a real airplane designer who lived and worked in Japan during the time of World War II. He's actually the man responsible for the design of the Japanese Zero, a naval based fighter which was used heavily by the Japanese throughout the second world war, notably on the brutal attack of Pearl Harbor. A surface level reading of his accomplishments might paint him as a fascist sympathizer or even a Nazi, but this is far from the truth. The man's diary and personal writings at the time make it clear that he opposed the war with every fiber of his being. Not only did he not believe in the cause for which his nation was dying, but he never believed the war could be won at all. And yet, just like Shizuku he chose to follow his dream despite the condition of the world around him, albeit facing much different challenges. 

The movie The Wind Rises tells us a huge chunk of Jiro's life story, starting from the time when he was an idealistic youth and following both his triumphs as well as his tribulations, fairly basic for storytelling and certainly something which can always be expected in exquisite detail from Miyazaki as a writer and director, but what makes this story special is the inclusions of Jiro's disillusionment. 

As a child, Jiro has a simple but cursed dream. The very first scene of the movie is a dream sequence in which he flies a nimble and fantastic plane through a quaint village before the dream ends with an encounter with some blimps and bombs bearing the Axis symbol from World War 1, which I will forever associate with the game Snoopy and the Red Baron which I was obsessed with as a kid. We begin to see some of his unique qualities when he wakes up, as he not only dreams of flight but takes the time to learn about it however he can. We see Jiro borrow an American aeronautical magazine and translate it himself in order to learn more of his passion. As this is before the war, the magazine has no trouble covering another historical figure, Giovanni Caproni, possibly the most Italian man in all of world history and an incredibly prolific and influential airplane designer. We also see Jiro fend off some bullies on his walk home from school, an action which his mother still softly reprimands because "violence is never justified," setting a clear tone of pacifism which stretches the entire movie. However, there is a problem with Jiro's dream of flying which is clear to him even now. He wears thick glasses, making his eyesight insufficient to fly airplanes. We see him doing whatever he can to correct this issue, even going up onto his roof late at night and concentrating on the stars in accordance with some folk wisdom which claims this will improve his eye sight. Funnily enough he is joined by his younger sister who can clearly see the meteor shower which is invisible to poor Jiro. Luckily though, he does still see something strange and otherworldly. 

The movie uses one of my favorite transitions in all of film to bring us into another dream sequence, this one of a totally different variety. We see Jiro wandering through a field of grass looking at a fleet of aircraft flying up above. He is then surprised to see the figure of Caproni himself, who leaps down from one of the planes and talks to him. Neither the boy nor the man is quite sure of what is happening, but it appears that their mutual love of airplanes has caused them to share a beautiful dream. Being like Jiro yet older and already immersed within the world of building planes, Caproni still dreams of planes but uses his dreams practically as a way to see his designs. He even shows Jiro a transport plane he wants to design, and we can gather from this as well as the way in which he talks of the fighter planes from earlier that he loves his fascist government no more than Jiro does. Caproni even tells Jiro that “airplanes are beautiful dreams, not tools for slaughter” and that “engineers turn dreams into reality,” a line which played no small part in motivating me through the final slog of engineering school. The dream ends when Caproni reveals to Jiro that despite his lack of glasses he has never flown a plane either, saying "many can fly airplanes, but I design them! I CREATE airplanes, and so can you!" Filled with hope, Jiro wakes up and sets his sights on becoming an aeronautical engineer, which is pacifist mother approves of, despite how his planes will one day be used. As Rush say in Natural Science, our causes can't see their effects.
Jiro then goes on to college where more than one seed of his life to come is planted. On the way to school after what may have been a vacation or visit home, he encounters a young girl on the train who catches his hat for him when it flies off his head thanks to a gust of wind. The girl then relays to him a French poem which forms the core of the movie’s ideas, one of my favorites. 

Le vent se leve, il faut t’enter de vivre!

Or

The wind is rising, we must try to live!

Jiro mediates on this until his train ride is interrupted by an earthquake. The young girl who he just met was traveling with someone else, an older women who appears to be some sort of house servant for the young girl because classism. The older women breaks her leg, and Jiro carries her to safety before going to college and helping his friend save as many library books as they can (shoutouts to books). Jiro continues on to finish his education and enter the industry, working for Mitsubishi. The movie then follows his career through some ups and downs as Jiro proves himself, even living up to his reputation as a young genius. We can see that the title is well earned, he thinks deeply about the issues he encounters on his airplanes and tries to solve the root issues, not just the ones which are in front of him. If more people within politics thought like that we would live in a much different world indeed. As Jiro’s career continues, the company becomes more and more aware of his talents, and he is even sent to Germany to study the work of one Dr. Junkers, a fellow engineer. Jiro enjoys the trip and marvels at how Junkers brings the same design sensibilities to his radiators as he does to his airplanes. Jiro is constantly nerding out about little things in the movie, much to the confusion and admonishment of his friend, who pokes fun at him as Jiro marvels how one of the bones in the mackerel he ate for lunch has the same angle as a standard wing cross section. However, all is not well in the world as anyone even vaguely aware of 20th century would guess. Jiro begins to encounter the secret police, and watches in horror as they silently control the streets of Germany and even begin to infiltrate the streets of Japan, forcing Jiro to work in secret. 

At this point, Jiro is beginning to realize that airplanes are not what the world needs right now. He encounters starving children in the street, watches banks close, and sees scores of people travel down railroad tracks traveling to the city to look for work. He talks about some of these feelings in a dream with Caproni, who is at this point mired in the same conflict of interest. Caproni ultimately answers their predicament by asking a question, like a good philosopher. 

“Which would you choose, a world with pyramids or without?”

Caproni decides to choose a world with pyramids, and Jiro cannot escape the fact that all he wants to do is build beautiful airplanes. He continues on in his quest, eventually ending his travels at a mountain hotel. Here he falls in love with the same girl whom he encountered on the train all those years ago, now fully grown into a women whose name we finally learn: Naoko. Jiro had received a letter from the women he had saved earlier, but reveals that he was unable to find the family after the earthquake as their house had burned down. But now he and Naoko are reunited, and begin a courtship as was befitting of their time which is dampened by Naoko’s mysterious illness. This forces her to stand up Jiro a time or two, but luckily he finds companionship in a German man who is staying at the hotel as well, who informs him that Junkers is now at odds with Hitler. The German guest has to leave suddenly, leaving Jiro curious as to his fate. But he has his own life to worry about, and Jiro and Naoko convince her father to approve of their marriage. Tragically though, Naoko must reveal the nature of her condition to Jiro before they marry. She has Tuberculosis, a disease which has already killed her mother and remained incurable at the time. Unfun fact, Tuberculous is still the second most deadly infectious disease in the world because access to the simple medicines which cure it is so poor. Capitalism FTW as always. 

Jiro returns home, but finds that he is being hunted by the secret police. He stays at his bosses house, who ends up marrying Jiro and Naoko so that they may spend time together as Jiro finishes his designs for the Zero. Despite the Zero being used as a tool for slaughter, it represented an important evolution in Japanese aviation. It was an all metal fighter, something which Jiro managed to make despite originally learning his craft when airplanes were made of wood and canvas and even his finished project is dragged from the factory to the airfield by oxen. Jiro finishes the designs at home with Naoko lying next to him in bed, and the completion of the aircraft is deemed a huge success. However, as everyone on the airfield celebrates, Jiro feels a shifting in the wind. He understands that Naoko has left, attempting to return to a sanatorium high up in the mountain to try and recover from her tuberculosis in order to live a life with Jiro (shut up Im not crying you’re crying). 

The movie ends in a dream sequence. Caproni congratulates Jiro on his design, and though Jiro accepts the praise he knows that none of the planes will ever return home. The movie ends as Jiro sees Naoko in his dream, and she uses the opportunity to tell him that he must live. It’s an incredibly powerful ending to what may actually by Miyazaki’s best movie, a truly remarkable piece in a truly sensational body of work.
Now it’s worth bringing up that even though this movie is based in fact, huge parts of it are fiction; for instance the whole plot with Naoko and basically everything connected to her. The visit to the hotel is complete fiction, and this and some other aspects of her life are adapted from other works of fiction, which are covered effectively by this polygon article so I won’t waste time reinventing their wheel. I guess this detail does make the movie less biographical but no less real and impactful, it does not take any of the wind out of the sails of my love for this movie but it may shift that wind’s direction. Because even though the catalyst for Jiro’s inspiration was fabricated, the moral dilemma he faced was very real and the consequences of his actions were incredible real as well. There’s nothing inherently wrong or amoral with airplanes, like Caproni says airplanes are beautiful dreams. But I could certainly see a Pearl Harbor vet getting triggered over the existence of a movie maybe not glorifying but certainly romanticizing the life of the creator of a tool used for so much slaughter. Perhaps its the same way that people in Japan feel about the creation of Oppenheimer, a movie about the people who made the atom bomb. Fun fact, those bombings were in no way justified and a land invasion of Japan was never really planned. 

So here we are: art and science. Art has incredible emotional value and can change the way a person sees the world and their own place within it, whereas science has incredible practical value and can change the way people interact with the world and the way the world interacts with them. Now its silly to try to make a binary choice between these two concepts, not only because they both rely on one another, but also because in addition to their own sets of benefits they each come with their own sets of problems.
Art is incredibly meaningful but not always practical. It’s incredibly rewarding to create art, but it can be incredible challenging to find an audience. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a Mr. Nishi in your life who appreciates your creativity and encourages it (hi mom) it can be really tough to find a wider forum in which to express your ideas. Even when you attain technical proficiency within your craft and thus the ability to state with abject clarity what is troubling or inspiring your mind or heart, it is really fucking difficult to get anyone else to pay attention. Because so much of what you’re doing is personal, you have to more or less convince either a distributor or a larger community that you are interesting and have something to offer, and this can be incredibly difficult to do especially if you’re blessed and cursed (blursed?) with a shy disposition like I am. On the other hand, it is comparatively easy to find someone willing to use your talents within the sciences, specifically within applied science or as it is more commonly known engineering. Science and engineering are much less personal, even the greats who follow curiosity into their field still have to respond to the challenges and questions posed by their field at large. And oftentimes, the people asking the questions and posing the problems have their own selfish or sometimes evil intentions. 

Science is a much larger collective with more interest in collecting new people, since there’s never a shortage of boring maintenance work which can be offloaded onto younger people with more time and energy. But especially when you’re doing maintenance work, it is incredibly difficult to feel like any part of your personhood is being used. You’re not a person, you’re a tool in someone else’s toolbox, and this is male objectification as far as binary gender roles existed prior to the 20th century. On top of this, there is no guarantee that you are part of a collective which is doing good, in fact under capitalism good is objectively less profitable than evil because evil gets to tell convenient lies to make itself more marketable whereas good has to tell truths that people don’t want to hear. Its very boring trying to be a good person, at least so I hear. 

But because evil has prospered for so long, there are real practical problems in the world which art cannot solve. Art will not create the fuel of the future, nor can it feed the hungry house the homeless or get Tuberculosis medication to those who are dying from the disease. When I consider what my life might have been like if I had pursued arts as opposed to sciences with my education, a part of me cannot help but feel that arts would have been in some ways a selfish decision. Not just because I would be using my parents money and the opportunity they provided me in order to do something whose value is mostly personal and would not lead to predictable job propositions post college (though that is a big part of it), but also because there are crippling problems in the world which need to be solved. Like yes, one response to the world being on fire and in the process of ending is to try and make a statement about how much that sucks and how we need to change and that may really inspire someone with more resources to make a change, but another perhaps more immediate and pragmatic method is to try and practically facilitate that change. This is not to say that all artists are selfish and that none of them commit to helping solve global issues, at this point Jack Johnson has done a lot more to fight climate change than I have, but we are missing huge pieces of infrastructure and technology which are necessary for the survival of the human race if we ever want to reach that Star Trek reality. I don’t care how many rockets Elon tries to launch, the simple reality of the situation is that we are never going to explore space on combustion power, it is just not nearly good enough. And we’re not going to be able to invent those better fuels if we all burn up due to our emotional and economical attachment to fossil fuels. And on a more positive note, engineering can also produce works of beauty, airplanes are an especially good example because aerodynamic objects have a natural sort of flow to them which is necessary to encourage wind to flow under them.

So both art and science have applications and they also both have problems. They can both serve to perpetuate good or evil, based on the intentions of the person performing the actions. Morality proves that we have free will, otherwise none of these questions would be things we considered they would all just be actions we took. Science (or at least scientific tools) can used to perpetuate exploitation and wage war, and art (or at least artistic mediums) can be used to peddle fascism or any other number of terrible but self serving ideas. But let’s just assume, I as a person pondering these questions and you as someone reading through this and thinking about it, that we have good intentions. This is a personal question, we’re not trying to weigh out which has done more or less for society so far because that’s impossible to define and is going to depend so much on upbringing and culture. Which of these tools shall we place first in our tool belt? Assuming we try and remain well rounded, shall we try to be artistic engineers or scientific artists?
Well, simply put, it comes down to hope and gut feelings again. I hope I proved last time that hope is worth listening to, so I suppose the question of where to apply yourself is where you see the world’s problems actually being solved. Is our current socio economic climate a crises of thought and feeling, or is it a crises of practicality as modern science tries to dissuade us from using tools which were the pinnacle of the last century’s worth of invention? Do we try and invent new and better tools or simply try and persuade people to be less attached to the ones which are destroying our planet now? Ultimately these are two sides of the same coin. A perfect technological society would not have need of destructive tools whereas a perfectly healthy society would not consider the use of destructive tools to be acceptable.
The other thing worth remembering is that a lot of this comes down to ability. I already have a degree in computer science, so at a certain point I need to stop asking if I should use it and start asking how I should use it. I also know I like to write, this is something else I am lucky enough to enjoy doing, so I need to continue trying to write about problems which trouble me and the dichotomy of possible solutions. Both things fill me with hope, but they are two different kinds of hope. Computer science gives me practical hopes like making a more sustainable tomorrow both for myself and the planet, whereas writing gives me hope that I may become less crazy at least and inspire people to live more in unison with the crazy nature of the world and less at odds with it. 

So for anyone reading this, if you’re caught between how to apply your hope, simply try to live within the answers a little bit more and set aside the problems, if only for a second. If one or the other sounds like the only way forward for you, I wish you luck. For me personally, both are important and making adequate time for both is going to be one of my major concerns going forward. Also finding an audience, right now I don’t have much of an audience for either my science or artistic skills so who knows maybe I dont actually have either and I just need to go to sleep. 

Dream on,
Sam the wise? ;-;