fake sun and artificial community

Wednesday morning the sun raced ahead of my alarm clock, beat down my curtain of darkness, and shook me awake. Instead of responding grumpily (do you have any idea what time it is?), I leapt out of bed. Well, ok. I have a bum knee, so really I hobbled out of bed. With a burst of energy, I quickly dressed for the day, left the apartment an hour earlier than usual, and tackled some business. This is typical summer for me: boundless energy, bright spirits, big plans.

I blame the sun.

Nothing compares

with solar energy. We have tried, for thousands of years, to reproduce the positive effects of sunlight on the human body and psyche. Artificial light dates back almost as far as the human race, and as technology advances so does our efforts at reproducing sunlight. We have electric lights that contain every wavelength as sunlight, lights so intense they are blinding, lights that bake our skin just like the sun. We’ve isolated and replicated vitamin D, one of the vitamins that our bodies produce when exposed to sunlight.

And yet, and yet. None of it can replace good old natural sunlight. Fakies may keep us limping along, but we have yet to create light that can energize and sustain us as well as the sun can. After tens of thousands of years of human evolution, we can’t replicate something as simple as this. (Maybe not so simple- is it a particle, or is it a wave? Yes!)

What is truly remarkable about humans is that, even though we can’t even reproduce the first day of creation, we go on to try to reproduce even more complex phenomena. We discover, though, that just like sunlight, our desperate efforts fall miserably short. Such as…

Desire. I can’t create for my students the desire to learn. I can help them direct it, focus it, channel it. I can even help them amplify it. But it can not be created, though believe me I have tried. It must already exist on its own somewhere within their hearts.

Community. What great irony there is in the idea of creating community. We build towns, erect housing additions, establish organizations, even birth families. But the truest, deepest communities are organic and natural. Artificial community, like artificial sunlight, lacks something essential.

It may contain all the necessary wavelengths and all the identifiable ingredients. It may work in a pinch to see a person through the winter. But at the end of the day, it is fake.

Why do we continue pouring resources into replication?

From the desk in my classroom I can look through glass doors to the outside. Out there is all this beautiful sunshine, but we have built opaque walls around ourselves to shut it out, and then installed artificial lights. Why so counterproductive?

It’s about control. The sunlight comes and goes at its leisure. It is not scheduled, is not reliable. And so, though it offers great joy and happiness, we opt for something thousands of times less effective and less true so that we can gain control over it.

You can not schedule and regulate real community. It has a mind all its own, and may grow, shrink, love, and play at its own leisure. And so we shy away from it, abandon it, even despise it, in favor of a knock-off of our own creation that will follow our bidding.

My students read Plato’s allegory of the cave yesterday and they agreed. No matter what others may say, the fire and its shadows in the cave just can’t compete with the warmth and brightness of the sun.