Random ruminations

Everyone knows what the Enlightenment is. I mean, we’re all supposed to be living it, aren’t we? Free from our so-called “self-imposed immaturity” (at least according to the philosopher Immanuel Kant); giving rationality a chance, flaunting our social progress and all that jazz. Thus, it stands to reason that enlightenment would be considered a good thing, marked by the purposeful evolution of our advanced weapons technology and medical cures, instead of an irrational, backwards lifestyle devoid of iPods, cell phones, and the like. I am a fan of the Enlightenment. Or at least I used to be — until I was assigned to write a book report for my sociology class. The text was called The Dialectic of Enlightenment, written by the awesome twosome of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.

The background is this. During the inglorious heydays of World War II, prominent Jewish intellectuals were forced to flee Germany and build a new life elsewhere. It was in this exile where Horkheimer and Adorno (probably while discussing over coffee), came upon a most spine-tingling thought. If the Enlightenment is so great — supposedly leading people to knowledge and freeing them from ignorance — how is it that the liberating promises of modern science and industry is giving birth to a world where people willingly partake in genocide, absorb fascism, and engage in a race to see who can build the most destructive toys? Ah, they said: Reason has become unreason.

So like the good savants that they were, the two decided to publish a book about it. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The book is a mind-numbing work of incomprehensible language, allusions and metaphors — but it’s an extremely fulfilling text to finish. As one of my professors so aptly put it, “Para silang mga ulol mag-sulat.” Horkheimer and Adorno used the figures of Odysseus (you might know him from the Odyssey… or from reruns of Troy) and Juliette (arguably the Marquis de Sade’s most infamous character; if you want to know what sadism is all about you must read up on this girl) to draw a parallelism between their actions and the Enlightenment’s goal. Apparently, Odysseus’ trickery and Juliette’s, er, “sadomasochism” are what makes them the ideal heirs of the Enlightenment. No, really. In fact, Horkheimer and Adorno even went so far as to proclaim Hitler as the embodiment of Enlightenment; something to do with the man’s über-rational, systematic way of burning Jews in the ovens of Auschwitz. Read the book to find out why. Moving on, they also used the concept of the culture industry (their term for the mass media) and Anti-Semitism (a.k.a. the “We-don’t-know-why-but-we-abhor-Jews-and-want-to-kill-them Club”) to further their point about how the Enlightenment is slowly doing a 360 on us. Again, read the book to find out why. 

In the end, though, these two abnormally over-analytic scholars had to conclude by saying that they did not reject the Enlightenment outright. Rather, they saw their task as one of furthering the Enlightenment science project by enlightening the Enlightenment about itself. Neat, huh? If you need a buffet of food for thought, again I say to you: Read this book. (Available at all notable university libraries near you.)

On mixing it all together (and you know that it’s the best of both worlds)

My feeble attempt at stealing from Miley Cyrus aside, this song of hers actually makes a lot of sense when relating it to the beautiful medium of the graphic novel. I only wish that I’d jumped on the comic-book/graphic novel bandwagon sooner. Truth be told, I used to think that these “books” were only for kiddies… and for the occasional adult too lazy to pick up a real piece of literature. Now I bite my tongue in distressing embarrassment. Die-hard aficionados might hate me, for the first graphic novel that completely fueled my interest was procured via a free-host website on the Internet. In short, I didn’t go out of my way to actually buy one. It was a lovely experience, however, and I take back what I said about Neil Gaiman being overrated (yes, yes, it was The Sandman that I read. Who hasn’t?) Anyway, going back to my point about the “best of both worlds” bit, I was just thinking about how great it is that people can veritably have their cake and eat it, too. Kids who get cross-eyed at the sight of a whole page of text or older people who still can’t stomach a book without pictures can just go and gobble up a comic book or graphic novel. And the best part is, in this day and age, these books make for so much more than mere “light reading” now. To the parents who refuse to indulge their child in a comic book for fear of it polluting his/her intellectual faculties, I say, let them eat cake! Or just indulge them, whichever works. There are a lot of surprisingly good reads nowadays that don’t just center on famous caped crusaders in tights (but even then, these stories are good), and they sure as hell are more brain-stretching and mentality-appealing than the #@*! of today’s children’s/young adult literature. (Twilight, anyone?)

Of course, I can’t say that all comic books/graphic novels are great — one must still filter the good from the bad… but yeah, you get my point. I don’t have an extensive reading list available for the kiddies, but I can say with utmost certainty that Bones by Jeff Smith is (at least for me) a god among children’s graphic novels. For the older readers, there’s just so much to recommend… but to my bosom I ardently clasped the following: Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware, Maus I & II: A Survival’s Tale by: Art Spiegelman, The Arrival by Shaun Tan, anything from Neil Gaiman (notably The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes and The Sandman: Fables and Reflections), anything from Grant Morrison (notably Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth and any volume from The Invisibles), Bill Willingham’s Fables, Marvels by Alex Ross, and the Akira series by Katsuhiro Otomo.

Sorry for the mouthful; just had to recommend.

In any case, thank you for tuning in. I hope this was time meaningfully squandered.