EVILS OF SUPERFICIALITY

Oppenheimer:

“This is a world in which each of us, knowing his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality, will have to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, to what he can do, to his friends and his tradition and his love, lest he be dissolved in a universal confusion and know nothing and love nothing…”  p557.

This is Robert Oppenheimer discussing the world post (his) atomic bomb.  The internet did not exist.  This is right after the McCarthyite excess.

It is the phrase evils of superficiality which haunts me.  Put that into our current context, I extrapolate the superficiality of social media, the superficialty of Pinterest.  The increasing and ubiquitous phenomenon in our society of not knowing.  Of not knowing, really, what you are doing.

The concern with superficiality in our western culture has been with us since the Greeks.  There has always been a cultural push for depth rather than surface.  Some of the modernist movements which push for depth include the Marxist, psychoanalytic, existential and the semiotic.  So many of the great modernist movements can be seen as a reaction against superficiality.

Oppenheimer’s words, spoken 60 years ago, remain relevant to us today.  We have previously bemoaned the self reinforcing effect of a social media.  We have spoken about the unstoppable onslaught of the machine.

It is the evils of superficiality that are most applicable to us reading Transparent Drawing.  Transparent Drawing is about knowing.  It is a bulwark against superficiality.  Here, we authenticate authenticity.  Here, we pay attention to the provenance of the design.  Here, we are aware of what we know, because we draw everything.

Superficiality has a hard time surviving when everything is revealed.

1. Bird, Kai and Martin Sherwin. American Prometheus. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 2005.