Andy Warhol’s prediction now seems accurate in its projection that every one of us would seek fame (of course we would, the fame of others took the attention of our parents and friends away from us in childhood) – but it doesn’t extend to the fact that the elevation of mass produced attention over intimacy has led to quite another phenomenon altogether – our attempts in completely the WRONG direction for what was once commonplace – 15 minutes of love. 15 minutes of being known and being truly accepted. Will everybody get that? Almost certainly not – in part because they won’t have the luxury of knowing themselves.
Just as fame was the new love, love will become the new fame… Something reserved for the few...
But this future interest in love - that will be wholly commercial - will only create a crude adumbration of love's true, former glory.
Our capacity for amnesia can’t be easily measured because its history is necessarily obscured but I hope I’m wrong when I predict that the spiritual aspect of love – the human instinct towards romance, the rare feelings that separate physical attraction from a deeper affection – will be forgotten by a culture trained in sexual attraction alone. The idea that people paired up instinctively, pulled by an unknown force that contained complex but invisible information, will seem utterly absurd!
Though love has been pored over by literature and art and music for millenia, the future will say of it – “That’s how they understood what we can explain through science now. Sex is for fun and then pairing up with a person that’s a smart statistical match to you, delivers the healthiest baby along with the feel good chemicals that everyone’s entitled to. They had to guess at it in those days, and made up all these crazy superstitions because they wanted so badly to believe they understood… but luckily we have technology now to ensure we get it right.” And so it’ll be. Because when all babies are born of this computerised method, there won’t be an adaptive advantage to an emotional body that’s a good judge of potential partners.
And as with other aspects of human behaviour – we’ll completely forget – because of our arrogance and the tightening range of human perception that has to believe it’s accurate to operate. I mean this is how we view the Ancients’ apprehension of the now invisible subtle world. We don’t think it’s suspicious that without obvious evolutionary cause, God is all these people ever went on about! No, they were all spontaneously making the same stories up at every point in recorded human history in every inhabited area… They must have done – because if they didn’t, then we’d have to admit that our model of reality, just doesn’t quite fit… Then we’d have to admit – it doesn’t even really fit our experience…