postmaster@museumofanthropocenetechnology.org, via Leggiuno 32
Laveno Mombello
21014
Italia
Why a Festival of Wonder?
The museum is involved in the organisation of the Festival of Wonder, which takes place in Laveno-Mombello (IT) since 2023. (www.festivaldellameraviglia.org). What follows is a reflection (!) about the reason why the festival came into existence.
Why a festival in the first place?
We believe that, as long as commercial centers keep popping up, also festivals can pop up; we even believe that each commercial center should have a theater or an arena within its premises and that it should devolve a few percentages of its profit to organise an annual festival to think critically about all aspects of our consumer society. Elsewhere we already wrote that every supermarket could organise one of its many alleys as a little museum to make people think about the broader consequences of consumption, or that every hotel could set up one of its rooms as a “Wunderkammer” to have frequent flyers reflect about the broader consequences of their travels. Such proposals are not far-fetched; it is like with cigarette packages that, by law (!), must carry a message about the consequences of smoking.
A festival creates a space to talk and listen, to have conversations about issues that concern us all, because they are important or dear to us all. With “all” we mean: people, animals, flowers, mountains, water, air … because we are in this World all together, depending on one another.
We like to think of this space as a physical place where every-one and every-thing can meet in person, face to face, and turn their noise into a voice (De Cauter): individuals, families, business people, politicians - who all are decision makers of some sort, and who with their decisions do affect the lives of one another - but also scientists, artists, philosophers who can best represent animals, flowers, mountains, water and air… and people (!), who do not have a voice.
The place can be the piazza of a village, around a table in a bar, or on a podium, … but also and foremost places that are already foreseen by society to discuss the things that concern us all: schools, churches, libraries, commercial centres, … In any case, we prefer such physical places way more than the virtual platforms of social media, be it only because the latter are one-sidedly set up, organised and run by only one of the players in society: business.
We think of a festival as a safe place, where conversations can be held freely, not necessarily following the logic of supply and demand, the market, politics (with a minor p) and lobbies of all sorts; not following this one logic: "buy this and you will be happy", or this other one: “don’t worry and you’ll be fine”, which we are nearly obliged to take for granted, to the point that no conversations would need to be held at all. A festival as a “heterotopia” , a place of “otherness” (Foucault, De Cauter), a piece of civil society, outside and in between the areas of individuals and families, companies and politics, where people dialogue based on tolerance and respect and where another logic, implying tolerance, respect and sharing might emerge.
Why a Festival of Wonder?
An answer is the one already given by GK Chesterton: “because the World will not perish because of lack of wonders but by lack of Wonder”. We initially thought that this would explain it, but we quickly realized that we needed a full festival to understand and make understood what Chesterton actually meant.
The world is full of good and bad things, beautiful and ugly ones, and we people want - not to say: need - guidance to navigate between them. When the old Greeks talked about “Wonder” as the origin of philosophy, Wonder was understood as the amazement in front of the good and the bad, the beauty and the beast; Wonder meant also puzzlement in front of the world we live in and even terror, which all needs to be resolved by critical thinking.
The issues that concern us all, what we mentioned in the beginning, concern good and bad things. For instance: a good thing to wonder about is that, indeed, we are all in this together, that we all live on that one pale blue dot in space, "on that very small stage in a cosmic arena (Sagan)". From satellites and space stations we can now zoom into this dot and watch it in all its amazing detail: its thin atmosphere, celestial against the dark blue of emtpy space, and in that atmosphere everything else: bright twisting clouds, glittering oceans, ice caps and snowy mountain ranges, deserts and forests teaming with life, cities connected with thin threads of highways. The beautiful thing is the feeling of together-ness and interdependent-ness which has been known since ever, which has been expressed as the compassion of Budha or the creation by a single God, and which has been confirmed - others would say replaced - by modern earth system science. Our World has everything to support an ever evolving Life system, which complexity is truely mind blowing. As far as we know (I am using Word in Microsoft 365, which gives me suggestions on how to write while I am writing. It suggests that I should not be using the expression “as far as we know” because “words expressing uncertainty lessen your impact” ... in any case: ) as far as we know, our world is unique and therefore precious: it would be a shame to loose it.
“We really did have everything, didn’t we?” Leonardo Di Caprio says in “Don’t’ look up”, the moment before a meteorite, metaphor for climate change, smashes into the Earth.
Among the issues that concern us all, we most often wonder about bad things, about issues that are threatening the good and safe and peaceful feeling we want to have about our World. There is climate change, migration, artificial intelligence, war, over-consumption, solitude, …. and all these issues somehow hang together; you cannot talk about migration without talking about wars or even climate change, you cannot talk about war without dealing with inequality, you cannot talk about climate change without saying that only "57 companies are responsible 80% carbon dioxide emissions in the world. (The Carbon Majors, 2024)"
There are good and bad things, and then there is us, humans, with our capacity to tell stories, which are lenses through which all what we can experience with our senses gets interpreted, for better or worse. The amalgam of stories, theories, opinions, beliefs, data … is what we call culture, if it is shared by a group of people, or identity, if it belongs to a single person. Culture or identity is the collection of narratives that explains and justifies and reassures how we, as a group or as an individual, live in this World.
We necessarily need rich narratives to capture the richness of our World, and such rich and complex narratives can best emerge when all players in our World are able to talk and listen to one another. This is what we strive for in a festival of Wonder: to contribute to a narrative about how this wondrous World can be a good place for all, humans and non-humans, which is the most Political of questions: Political with capital P.
Progress of humankind is based on understanding and embracing complexities, and we might be making progress, slowly, over thousands of years, with ups and downs, developing towards tolerance for diversity, towards freedom and responsibility which is the basis of peace among us all, or so we hope. But, at times - short times compared to the thousands of years of cultural evolution, times within a person's lifetime - all that richness can be a bit too much for our small brain; we start to see complexity as something that is unnecessarily complicated, we long for a simpler story that we can understand, and we often prefer to listen to people who claim that such a simple story does exist. Such people either genuinely believe in their simple story, or they don't but make huge profits and obtain power by promoting it.
The simple story very often goes as follows: “there is indeed a problem (migrants, for instance), but you can be sure that I will fix it for you”, or: “listen, there is no problem (climate change, for instance), and you can be sure that with me you can continue business as usual”
Creating fear about a single issue and playing down or even denying others, seems to be a good recipe, a sort of score for the pied piper of Hameln, to lure people into a fantasy world, where, once the piper is given the power to fix things, there are no limits whatsoever to business as usual, where a better life and more happiness is waiting, if only you follow the piper, if only you buy yet another medicine, another gadget on your smart phone, a next city trip, the next level experience: wonders every day that last for a moment and disappear quickly to be replaced by new ones.
There is indeed no lack of such wonders, but Chesterton talks about Wonder, which might take only a moment but can last forever, because in the act of wondering we tie ourselves with and within the complexities of the World.
What is "Wonder", what is it for?
Plato wrote that "Being full of Wonder is proper to the philosopher", and his student Aristotle (who disagreed with his master on key issue that have haunted western philosophy for more than 2500 years !) concurred that "Men have taken from Wonder the cue to philosophise." Their teacher Socrate had already said that to philosophise was to ask questions - to “wonder"(!) - and to think critically about things that are taken for granted or that are explained by myths, legends, or simply by imposed laws: it is the will of God!
Following these ancient Greeks for whom Wonder is at the origin of thought, Wonder can not only be that awe, that strong emotion we feel before the sublime, that which takes our breath away. Wonder is also something that concerns reason and the strive to think coherently about the World, which also means dealing with its contradictions.
We like to think that Wonder lies in that very moment when, being in the World, emotion and reason meet and dissolve in a question or an answer about something in that World, a question or an answer, that we cannot yet put into words; an awareness.
We like the idea that Wonder is in the moment when the World “speaks” to us without words and we “hear” what it says; it is an aesthetic experience, a fulfilment, a moment of happiness maybe - or of revulsion.
Wonder is in the moment before we put things into words; it is at the beginning of thought, of literature, of art and science ...
For Italo Calvino, however, Wonder – although he doesn’t call it like this - comes at the end of literature. After a long reflection about the purpose of putting things into words he concluded that “ ... the right use of language, for me, is that which allows one to approach things (...) with discretion and care and caution, with respect for what things (...) communicate without words (American Lectures)"
Also for zen buddhists, the whole of our endeavour to know the things of the World ends in this communicating without words. Things obviously don’t speak , if you ask them something they remain silent, but it is in this silence, which also becomes our silence, that the zen buddhist becomes united with everything else. He is united in silence and nothing-ness, a “friendly nothing-ness" (Han), and what else is friendliness than the gentlest form of respect.
But we are not buddhists, we are firmly raised, for better or worse, in our western culture and so we keep insisting and ask: what is this speaking without words? Most things of the World obviously do not use a language with words and grammar like we humans do, but they are anyway able to communicate something, to pass a message. We humans, although we do communicate using language, we also communicate with a smile, with a movement of our hands, by the way we dress, by the kind of objects we own. From there it is a small step to say that it is these objects or cloths that are the ones that do communicate, and that, in fact all things, human or not, living or not, can communicate and speak by themselves.
Wonder is in the first place “hearing” what is being “said” by things that we thought were not able to say anything. We understand that these things include animals, plants, mountains, etc. and by now it might be necessary to recall that they also include humans. Even if humans do speak with words, we do not always hear what they say. Too often, because of the way we are made or because of the context of the moment, we might think that some other human has nothing to say, and we are amazed when he anyway says something that catches our attention. There is this beautiful scene in “One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” showing Jack Nicholson’s bewilderment when he hears his friend Chief, the tall Indian who for the whole duration of the movie had done as if he was deaf and dumb, talks for the first time.
There are people who call themselves “object oriented ontologists” (OOO’s, Latour, Graham, Coccia, …) who claim that things indeed do speak by themselves and our urge to articulate things in words is only a neurotic characteristic of us humans. They rapidly add that this “speaking of things by themselves” is a vast uncharted terrain that still needs to be explored, and in the mean time they indeed explore it by beautifully writing words and sentences and books about that wordless speaking of the World. We can easily agree with them, though, that at least a selection of things, which we call “art”, does speak to us. Music clearly does speak by itself, and we do not want to explain in words why. We can only invite to listen to music and be open for the experience of joy, sadness or excitement which undoubtedly comes at some point. The visual arts produce things that are supposed to lead to similar experiences; artists and museum directors hope that artworks speak by themselves, but the reality often is that they need quite a bit of explanation in words to become heard. Artworks in general, because they are made by humans in the first place, speak to us and create awareness about what makes us human: being able to produce art. But OOO’s would go further and say that also things not created by humans, and that we too often take for granted, like good old “Nature” for instance, can be wonderous, and, in the moment we recognise this, they speak to us and create an awareness again about what makes us human: the answer, however, now is: everything non-human which sustains us (Kohn).
The urge to express this speaking of the World in our human language is very strong, because, if language is primarily there to think (Chomsky), and if Wonder is at the origin of thought, the step from the wordless experience to its description in words cannot not be made.
What happens in the moments of Wonder, when things speak to us?
After everything we have written so far, we still might want to ask: what is Wonder, what is this initial wordless speaking of the World, of art and music and all things around us; what is this speaking before we humans put it into words?
We like to see it as nothing else than a reflection, an echo, of something in our own usually confused or even unconscious or forgotten thoughts, which are lousily expressed in words and pieces of text that swirl within our head. An echo that bounces back from the things of the World and that makes our thoughts crisper, and turns them into a clearer question or answer, a clearer awareness; a bit like – this is for physicists - when un-polarised light becomes polarised when it reflects with a certain angle on a mirror. In the moment of Wonder, something of the Worlds complexity is revealed and we realise: "Ah, that's the way it works!” or: “Oh, it is not the way I always thought it was"! It is no wonder that the word “reflect” can be used as in “reflecting light” as well as in “to reflect, i.e. think about something”.
The set of stories, theories, opinions, memories, stuff in our DNA, is what we called culture or identity earlier in this text; it is the basic unstructured material that we continuously beam on the reality of the World. A unexpected reflection of something in that material, Wonder that is, contributes to a more defined narrative about the world. The richer our culture or identity the greater the chance that something unexpected will reflect back. If on the other hand the narrative we live with is narrow and simple, only that same narrow and simple story can reflect back, or not nothing at all. Hence, on the one hand: Wonder needs culture and identity to happen – apart maybe in the first years of a person’s life – and on the other hand, in an iteration that reminds of the hermeneutic circle, culture and identity become enriched and more defined through Wonder.
Another metaphor from physics: we know that the entropy of the (closed) Universe, its level of chaos - its lack of structure that is - increases overall, but that there are anyway (open) pockets in which structure is created. Our planet, open to receive energy from the sun, is such a pocket; on planet Earth, simple organisms, not more than a group of molecules, managed to capture energy from the light of the sun and used it to produce work, to create structure and a more complex forms of Life. Life is fundamentally rebellious as it goes up-hill, creating ordered complexity, against the overall tendency of the Universe that goes down-hill towards and amorphous structureless chaos. Here’s the metaphor: what light is for Life on Earth, Wonder is for creating culture and defining us as humans.
So, let's have a Festival of Wonder!
Let our thoughts echo on everything that is out there. Let's avoid that our culture reduces to a monoculture of blind consumerism. Let's take it as an occasion to remain rebellious against the general tendency towards amorphousness.
postmaster@museumofanthropocenetechnology.org, via Leggiuno 32
Laveno Mombello
21014
Italia