-The Mating Game-

You may note that there is some shared sentiment between Ford and Abrahamic religious traditions in observing the depravity of humans. The Bible is imbued with people who have a wicked nature, and who need to be saved from their own wickedness: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” Psalms 51:5. These religious texts perhaps betray a particular brand of misanthropy in the philosophy of their own creators.

The Abrahamic institutions generally coped with this reality by constructing a world where external good and evil forces exist and which each person could exhibit. The religion would then appeal to the goodness of people and punish the evil. In retrospect, these systems revealed that good and evil can be rather arbitrary. The church which sought to ennoble humanity, much like Ford did, proved to be composed deficient humans, and in turn inflicted unnecessary suffering on apostates, scientists, and homosexuals.

“I read the theory once that the human intellect was like peacock feathers. Just an extravagant display intended to attract a mate. All of art, literature, bit of Mozart, William Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and the Empire State building – just an elaborate mating ritual. Maybe it doesn’t matter that we have accomplished so much for the basest of reasons, but of course the peacock can barely fly. It lives in the dirt, pecking insects out of the muck, consoling itself with its great beauty.” -Dr. Ford, Trompe De L’Oiel

In this quote Dr. Ford, the god-like figure in Westworld, strips down the basis of human advancement, the human intellect, to an elaborate mating ritual. It is phrased cleverly: Ford explains that “he read the theory” once, not that he composed the theory. He might not agree with the theory in it’s entirety, but he certainly found it interesting enough to mention it. It must have at least influenced him, as he expresses the theory during an important event in the series. To compare the whole of the human intellect to an elaborate mating ritual, though compelling to the cynic in us, must still come into examination.

It would be helpful to first clarify what he means by intellect. Does he mean strictly an academic intellect, or anything that drives humans to create something of note? When he describes the works of human intellect, Ford mentions famous artists, writers, and works of engineering. Intellect, then, in this context could be anything that is produced that we humans consider to be worth something beyond its material value. It could be described as something that best addresses a need, connects to us personally, or leaves us in awe. Importantly, these things are also popularly appreciated – they have recognition from a critical mass of people. Though we could argue that some of these intellectual works have inherent value, if there was an intellectual work that had inherent value but wasn’t recognized by a large number of people, it’s author wouldn’t be included into the pantheon of human intellects.

If we consider what is popularly exalted in contemporary culture, Ford’s claim actually seems well founded. If one measures an culture’s intellectual capacity on popularity alone, the products of the United States and other Western nations have flopped.

Let us first examine the art in the context of modern cinema. Notice that the themes of love and sex are inserted into each film no matter how necessary to it’s message as a whole. The themes of romance and sex are so ubiquitous that we as consumers have come to expect it to encompass at least a small piece of each film, and a simple conclusion to draw is that some film consumers are simply unable to enjoy a story without these expectations fulfilled.

One could find countless examples of unnecessary romantic subplots in modern film: in Pearl Harbor (2001), Gangs of New York (2002), The Last Samurai (2004), or in The Hobbit Trilogy (2012-2014). Each of these examples depicted a historical period or an acclaimed work of fiction in which romance was unnecessarily included, and in some cases detracted from the story. There were no romances in the book The Hobbit, yet the film industry envisioned a new lead female role to make this possible. Other films described historical events little involved with human sexuality; this therefore leads to the assumption that romance was included only to appeal to the audience’s sexual desire. There are, of course, myriad other films in which could be mentioned, but many of these suffer from banality in ways far exceeding their unnecessary romantic subplot.

In popular music, the theme of love and desire are so omnipresent and integral into the culture that one is hard pressed escape the mating message in public spaces where music is played. Observing the top music billboards at any given point, we will find that the popular listener’s ear will be totally consumed with the theme of mating. Among the community of popular musicians lies a relatively new class of celebrities that experience an apotheosis of image, and become sexualized objects. A prerequisite for a modern music celebrity is their ability to lure and attract the opposite sex, even though some marginal musical talent (always singing) must also be present. These are the closest incarnations of the peacocks, consoling themselves with their great beauty while they peck through the muck.

In measuring an intellectual work by its popularity alone, we can acknowledge the validity of Ford’s theory, but what of inherent value? The greater question left unexamined is: does the best of human accomplishment still owe it’s origin to the basest of reasons? One stalwart way to measure inherent value is with time – the longer lasting a work, the more it proves its inherent value. While many works are popular today, most will not stand the test of time and will be heavily scrutinized for one reason or another.

I would, however, question the assertion that even those works which have stood the test of time can be explained as an elaborate mating ritual. If we consider first, as Ford did, all of human literature, then we should note the multifarious selection of writers to account for. For example, I imagine that John Milton and Allen Ginsberg had neither similar sex lives nor similar sexual motivations.

Admittedly, sex is rarely entirely absent from the life of each person: the film Amadeus accurately depicts Mozart as someone who enjoyed socializing, and did enjoy drinking and social relations. Yet Requiem (1791), one of Mozart’s best known works, was done in elegy to his deceased father. Michelangelo painted the Sistine chapel as a commission by the church, as were many great works of art and engineering accomplished in the age of the papacy.

This doesn’t completely disprove that the work of all great intellects couldn’t be boiled down to some sort of elaborate mating ritual. Famous artists in Renaissance Italy would no doubt have the attention of many women, as would the rich entrepreneur who took part in engineering large edifices, and the acclaim no doubt likely motivated many great works. Our pursuits have always been mixed in one degree or another with our basic humanity – including our desire to attract one or many mates.

We may need to look no further than the works themselves. For what reason would Leonardo Da Vinci be so motivated to depict the undignified mess of war in the Battle of Anghiari (1505)? Why would Dostoyevsky describe the thoughts and life of a murderer so sympathetically in Crime and Punishment (1866)? The works that stand the test of time seem to do so because they escape this unidirectional form of thought, and therefore allow us to escape the diurnal experience of inhabiting a sex. Ironically, these works that waddle through and examine the muck we humans live in ascend beyond it, and through them we find that sort of reflection which only our species is capable of.

As far as we can see presently, these themes of desire will be perpetuated as long as we are. It is done quite superficially in modern popular culture and in the guise of some freedom, but time has tended to weed out those who have composed these ignoble works.