Women Examine an Oddity (2022) Drawing by Edwin Loftus

One of the recurring themes in my work is the nonsensical nature of our understandings of reality. As a student of history and psychology, I have had particular interest in trying to understand how people in whatever time or region perceived reality and struggled to explain it.
Operating from that interest, I looked at random squiggles on a piece of Bristol Board and they suggested these two figures examining this unusual thing, this "oddity." in my personal iconography nudity tends to suggest Nature or something natural to human experience. Women tend to suggest universal humanity, (and they are more fun to draw because of their odd curviness).
As a student of history and psychology ... I have observed times and places where humanity tended to have more or less realistic views about existence, (understanding that something so vast cannot be comprehended by something as simple as a human brain with its mere trillion or so neurons.
By and large, I'm not at all confident that there is such a thing as "general progress." There is progress on something specific, but most specific progress requires an approximately equal sacrifice. Progress tends to be balanced by regression in some other aspect of life.
It may seem odd to suggest that we today are no more "generally advanced" than our paleolithic ancestors, but one needs to calculate in not just the benefits of civilization but its deficits as well, not just its physical effects, but its psychological ones as well.
Fortunately for what's left of my credibility, (if anything is left), I do believe some progress has been made, just nowhere near as much as we think.
The easiest way to explain this is that for a million years our ancestors evolved to live short but relatively unconflicted lives as a part of the natural world. We didn't erase those million years of evolution in just 8 to 10,000 years of civilization. For every advancement civilization has made, there are things it cost us, things that may have made us happier.
We have made real progress. But to demonstrate that, we need to cite a specific example ... like learning to make and use fire, tools, the wheel, medicine and surgery, spoken and written language, agriculture and animal husbandry.
Each of us should decide for ourselves how successful progress has been.
But there's another way to look at this. In some ways we are more advanced than ever. But in some others, we are more unhappy than ever. And this is but one of the oddities we study.

Related themes

OdditiesHistoryProgressNatureCivilization