Pardon my tardiness.
In your initial post on the subject I didn't read a longing for a better world so much as the longing for an "unspoiled" world - that is the desire to leave the complications of one's own cultural milleau (which are often perceived as used up, corrupt and/ or decadent) in favor of a pristine setting where one can start anew without any of the cultural baggage.
My mistake, perhaps, for not expressing myself more clearly--although to a certain extent, I find it difficult to do so. 'Impulse', like 'emotion', is a rather vague term, one I'm usually loath to use, but like emotion, it's something I recognize in myself and others, yet have a hard time defining it. In any case, where I'm concerned, the longing can certainly be for difference alone, although if there's longing then it pretty much implies that difference will be read positively. But it needn't be, I think, merely for an Arcadian, unspoiled, state-of-nature realm--a social Utopian realm can be longed for too.
I'm not as familiar with the tales of Rama and Gilgamesh but Odysseus wasn't mapping unknown worlds for the fun of it, or because of a longing for discovery - he hated being lost in all that unknown and longed only for home.
That tends to be the case for traveling/wandering heroes--they're in exile, or else on a quest (which their honor turns into a form of exile). Rama, too, was kicked out of his kingdom--Gilgamesh, a bit of this, a bit of that. It serves various national interests to arrange it thusly, usually so that the tale can, ultimately, extol the cultural center which spawned the story, to bring everything safely home after the risk of discovery. However, it remains such for the audience--stories like the Odyssey are a form of folk geography, and are all about the multiplicity of places and adventures that the wandering hero encounters. Getting home is just the final volet. Same thing for modern sci-fi, really--shows like Voyager or Farscape are ostensibly about getting home, but the focus of the series is the newness of the sci-fi setting/phenomena. It's about the journey, whether or not the protagonist recognizes it as such. (And, like it or not, Odysseus did get bit by the wandering bug--Tennyson might have made it famous, but references to Odysseus setting back out to sea are classical in origin.)
I'll certainly agree that migration and colonization are not exclusively Western things - the entire history of humanity is one of moving populations and conquest. But I think you have a hard case to make to associate say, Roman conquest with a desire for a "new world". Romans, or the Chin dynasty, or the Aztecs weren't hungering after a frontier or a new world - they were hungering after resources, tribute and slave labor, and they were unapologetic about it. This is not the same thing as imperialism, which carries with it a rationalization that attempts to justify conquest by way of introducing technological superiority to "primitives" who will be infinitely bettered by their conquest.
I think that's a far too narrow definition of imperialism. Why privilege a relatively modern idea of technological betterment over the far older, yet just as (if not more) abusive justification of moral betterment of the 'savages'? Nor do I think it could be said that imperialism had any one such banner; different agents, and different terrorities, all spawned their own sets of justifications ranging from, yes, ideological stuff like White Man's Burden to pragmatic matters of strategic geography and pure economic exploitation (many Europeans made no excuses for that). Do you really want to say that the Roman
Empire was not
imperialist? It's practically tautological. Imperialism is simply an expansionistic nation subjugating other peoples to its rule; its justifications are legion, always-shifting, and as such, don't make a very good criteria for definition.
You also seem to be blurring the idea of a better world from "new frontiers" to any desire for a world different from the one humans are living in. I don't think you can equate, say, the Christian desire for Heaven or the Hindu desire for Nirvana (better worlds) with the "new worlds to explore" longing.
Not the same thing, no... but allied. When I was younger, I would read compendiums of mythology alongside straight-up fantasy like Tolkien, and never made much of a distinction between them. Their performances are not equal, but they are similar.
The romantic notion of a longing to explore the unknown seems to me to only have come about in 18th-20th centuries when individuals had amassed so much wealth that they could do things like try to climb Everest or reach the North Pole just to say they had done it.
That, too, is older. You can find Renaissance accounts of people climbing mountains just to be able to brag of having done so, Early Modern travelogues that seek fame through discovery (often with the promise of material renumeration stemming from that fame, true, but there were easier ways of making money), even medieval texts have knights and the like bragging about being the first to have reached such-and-such mountain or such-and-such island, which they considered 'feats' and 'exploits'. If nothing else, the title of (successful) explorer has carried social credit in Western culture for a while now. (Don't know enough to comment about others, but I'd not be surprised to find equivalents. I seem to recall, from what I'd read of Zheng He, that he seemed to enjoy his voyages... he certainly waxed poetic about them.)
How are "discovery" and "working at" fundamentally different?
Discovery, to me, implies a rather brief timeline and the acquisition of new knowledge. What you were suggesting is more of a process, long-term, and isn't about new knowledge so much as figuring out how best to apply known data (typically through trial-and-error). To oversimplify, it's the difference between '
how will we get across the ocean' (process) and '
what will we find there' (discovery).
I think focusing on impotence and futility, which certainly exist, only leads to more impotence and futility. To draw from a fantasy world, in Angel when the characters discover that they cannot fundamentally change the world, rather than sinking into despair over their impotence, they decide that small acts of heroism are that much more important because you can't fundamentally change the world. When faced with an unwinnable battle in the end, they shoulder their weapons and go down fighting.
Hey, I agree. Angel's good, but I think possibly the best articulation of this attitude is the old Norse myths--the gods know that Ragnarok is inevitable, but they'll eat, drink, fuck and fight every day until the end, and when the sun goes out they'll be on the battlefield ready to meet their doom with the same vigour by which they lived. (I've thought that there's something Ragnarok-ish about that last scene in "Not Fade Away...")
All I'm saying is that seems to me a better way to deal with reality rather than sitting down and crying because we are able to dream up worlds lacking the complexities of reality.
And what I'm saying is that I see no reason why an active life and nihilism (or whatever you want to call it, as I don't think it's exactly that) should be incompatible. For myself, I prefer to live honestly than wrap myself up in false paradigms that my goals have universal meaning or resonance. I won't pretend to be happy, or even satisfied, when that's not the case (plus, it's damned exhausting to keep up that pretence), but that doesn't mean catanonia is the only recourse. It's just a question of living self-aware, unvarnished and disillusioned.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
