The Matrix of Want

A mother robin and the Dead Man at Lascaux prompt reflections on need, desire, freedom, and how we realize humanity.

This reflection was originally one of two essays I wrote in 2017, during the first-drafting of Quibble, to append to the novel as back matter. The other essay appears on Singular Dream as “A Mere Icon.”

If you’ve read the reflection “Singularity and Its Malcontents,” you’ll doubtless recognize its thinking here in the paragraph following the quote from Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, which I adapted while writing that reflection. I’ve decided to leave this material as-is because it bridges my ideas well.

Moving into this house, I noticed a scrawl of chalk at chest height on the brick of the wall by the front door. Something was written there, but it was faded, illegible.

One day, I walked out the door to find detritus — straw, ribbon, a strip from a plastic bag — lying in the crook above the security lights on the wall just above the scrawl. Perplexed, I tossed it in the trash. I came home that evening to find more detritus in the same place. The roof over the stoop offered shelter from the rain, so a bird was trying to build a nest in the crook above the lights. I left it alone. Within two days, the nest was built.

Now, every time I walk out my door, the robin living there emits an alarmed eep! and flits off into a tree in the yard. If I stand on the porch, it dives from the tree at my face, veering away almost within arm’s reach. It’s trying to frighten me away from the nest.

Foolish thing! I think. It never considered what a busy neighborhood it was moving into.

But then I wonder whose fault it really is — the robin’s or mine?

The robin was only looking for a dry place to build a nest and lay eggs, a place where its young had a chance of survival. It can’t help its habitat being overrun with human beings who don’t give much thought, if any, to its struggle to foster offspring.

Human beings are the worst invasive species to be found anywhere. We take up much more than our fair share of space. Thanks to our intelligence, we consume resources at a breathtaking rate. (Isn’t that ironic?) As if our mastery over nature plagues us with guilt, we’ve canonized a myth to justify it: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” (Genesis 1:28 NIV)

Even atheists accept this ethic at face value. Many people assume it’s our evolutionary birthright. We commonly ignore a widespread selfishness that in almost all cases puts humans first out of carelessness, not necessity. Precious few people seriously contend that a human being is simply an animal.

Almost all the figures in the Lascaux cave paintings are animals. Early humans put animals at the center of their lives and revered them. Whatever else animals might have meant to humans, they were sources of food, clothing, and tools. They fulfilled needs. Thus, animals represented subsistence, survival.

So, it’s enigmatic that the only human figure at Lascaux is a corpse. The Dead Man isn’t really dead. Paintings inscribe timelessness: like all creatures and objects found in art, the Dead Man is merely resting. Transcending from death to rest, he is the first known instance of religious mystery, of the yearning for a life beyond the grave.

The Dead Man is an embodiment of desire.

Need. Desire. Coexisting in our earliest art just as they do in every human heart, need and desire form the Janus face of want — our most definitive trait, outstripping our linguistic abilities and even our other great religious mystery, love.

Like our forebears, we are caught in the matrix of want.

Civilization enabled us to answer want with ever greater facility and freedom. But, ironically, too much ease and too much freedom turn out to be prisons. Finding our needs easily met, we’re free to leapfrog to fulfilling our desires, then to fulfilling even more desires.

The impact of this ease and freedom on our sense of self can’t be exaggerated. It’s the primary source of our ideology of ownership and dominion, which upsets any balance we might hope to strike between need and desire. Indeed, we intimately tie freedom, in particular, to this ideology.

Freedom and desire form a positive feedback loop. One amplifies the other and is also amplified by it. Fulfilled desire begets more desire — that’s how we know, or how we should know, a desire is not a need. In turn, more desire creates a greater demand for the freedom to follow it. Attaining that measure of freedom, we fulfill the desire and encounter the next, the desire it leads to. We then seek more freedom, and so forth.

But we also understand freedom to be a human need. Quite often, and seldom with any qualification, we inculcate freedom-as-need as humanity’s highest aspiration and our noblest value — as a cornerstone for our morals and ethics. As we do so, the effect of the positive feedback between freedom and desire is that our desires begin to look like needs. What we want seems to be what we want for.