Emotional Growth

As I had said the last time, the 'need' to create something is as primal as hunger. But man as the zenith for evolution till now, has a lot more of complexity in him than all other animals put together. Besides the biological complexity, there is a lot of mental and spiritual complexity ingrained in man. Religion and the definition of a God has come only with man, and I think this has played a great role in man's evolution and civilization. So has his emotional growth. Man's emotions are now a complex maze unlike those of other primates.

Ofcourse for all this, man needed to develop language. And with communication, he could express complex ideas to his fellow species and so together man worked to improve his life and soceity. All this resulted in making things more and more complicated as he wanted to simplify his work. Thats the irony of civilization.

Along with civilization, and technology I think another aspect of humans did grow, namely art. I dont claim that it grew proportionately and at the same time as technology. But it did evolve nonetheless. We can see the great works of art from the past in the form of painting and sculpture. But the forms of dance, music, theatre and literature have come down the generations through the people without any sort of medium. We find perfect examples of this is in India. The Mahabharata and Ramayana are epics that have come down by word of mouth and so has the dance forms of Bharatanatyam, Kathakali, Kuchpidi and the music forms of Hindutani and Carnatic music. Folk music and folk dances have withstood the ravages of time and remain one of the purest forms of human expression.

The traditional and historical forms of art of Bethoven or Da Vinci or Thyagaraja or Vyasa are definitely beacons for all budding artists even now. But I think the current generation of artistes are still able to express a lot more of complexity than their predecessors. It does takes a few generations to accept the greatness of the current day art, because not all innovative artistes who make pathbreaking contributions to the field of art are recognized in their life time. I feel that the current day theatre, literature, music and dance are able to express more complex emotions and feelings as compared to some generations back.

I must take an example to prove my point. Lets take literature as an example. Everyone swears by the works of Shakespeare. And great he was no doubt. But do his works have the intricate emotional and complex feelings that are ingrained in today's life. Everything in Shakespearian works was a great idea of Tragedy, Comedy, Pathos or Frolic. Those shades of grey that we see in todays life are definitely not explored. And surely the number of shades have increased a multifold (like defining a 256 bit colour rather than a 16 bit colour ;-))

Its quite similar in music. The older forms of music though complex in musical content are rather simple in emotional content. Most of the music was an expression of a lover's love or that of a devotee's devotion. On the other hand I feel that present day compositions do bring across more shades of grey than were brought a few generations ago.

I may be wrong in classifying so severely, I dont intend to do so. But I do want make this as a general observation of increasing complexity.

Lastly I want to compare the progress in science and art. The industrial revolution and the renaissance took place around the same time in europe. Similarly music, dance and painting are receiving a totally different feel in the forms of fusion and modern art today. So these changes in art do co-incide with the technological advancement happening today. Infact technology has boosted art to a great extent. All these help in the emotional growth of the human civilization as a whole.