THE SHORT OF IT

Created in the summer of 2023 at ArtCenter College of Design’s printmaking studio, “Better Angels” is part of a series. “I Dream of the Future” is the first.

“Better Angels” is intended as an optimistic or affirming resolution to the neutral statement posed in that first print. In the lower-left corner of “Better Angels”, a question is posed to the viewer: “Will we find hope there?”, written in Spanish.

It draws a link between any hope we might find in the future to concepts of family, connection, and belonging, as exemplified by the pair of elephants found in awe at the beauty of the natural world around them.

The piece was created by using the intaglio technique to etch imagery onto a 6’ x 9’ zinc plate. Intaglio is a centuries-old family of techniques for etching; it derives its name from the Italian word intagliare, meaning “to incise” or “to carve”.

Line drawings are transferred onto a zinc plate and etched by submerging the plate in acid for a specific amount of time. Lighter linework can be achieved by limiting the time the plate spends submerged in acid while darker, deeper lines are exposed for a longer duration. Stop-out, a substance very similar to asphalt, is used to block out areas that the designer does not want etched by acid.

The final print was printed onto a 16” x 22.5” sheet of Reeves BFK paper.

THE LONG OF IT

Looking at the modern world, it might be reasonable to conclude that the main drivers of human existence are greed, consumption, domination, and exploitation.

The pages of history books and each day’s evening news are painted with acts of barbarism and duplicity. Entire countries justify brutality and whole groups of people are denied basic rights by others and made second-hand citizens. Even everyday interactions with other people sometimes seem colder and more dangerous.

I have sometimes chosen to cross the street and jog on the opposite sidewalk when I see someone doing something as innocent as walking their dog down towards me. This seems like a small thing, but it speaks to a larger alienation that I think I am not alone in experiencing.

Why do I do this?

At the height of the pandemic, I told myself I did this in order to practice social distancing. Nowadays, long after the hysteria of those early COVID-19 days, I am somewhat more open with my true reasoning: I simply don’t want to go through the effort of greeting them or acknowledging their existence.

The fact of the matter is that I know that I have become colder, more distant, and perhaps more callous in my thinking over the past couple of years. Endless protests, social injustices, land invasions, news of floods and wildfires and dying coral reefs, as well as the normal tectonic drift of friendships in adulthood in my own life, take their toll. Perhaps I feel a degree of misanthropy, of distrust and suspicion in other people, beneath every interaction.

One of the eternal questions on my mind is, who are we as human beings? Are we ‘good’, whatever that moral judgment may mean? Is our species one that we could truly say was deserving of being the dominant lifeform on our planet? I may be extending the question to myself: who am I as a human being? Am I good? Am I worthy?

It’s in these questions that I began to formulate the germ of this next print. It was meant intentionally as a response and an antidote to these kinds of dark sentiments. In my mind, it’s in our ability to empathize and understand others that we can find Mankind’s saving grace and our most noble qualities. Bizarrely, our facility for empathy and compassion is also rooted in the same brain structures where our capacity to stigmatize, ostracize, and dehumanize comes from. The same brain regions where we formulate our notions of identity, family, and who and to what groups we belong also construct our concepts of who is unlike us, outside of what we might consider human, and to whom we may direct our resentment, frustration, violence, and hatred against. Prejudice and belonging share the same strange root.

When we say someone is ‘humane’, or when a country or group has committed ‘crimes against humanity’, what is it that we mean? I think we are aspiring to the most ideal and noble things we can be as people. Although history is littered with atrocities, it is also full of examples of people standing up for themselves and others in the face of injustice or cruelty. These hardly make the news or make it into history books. This may be due to an evolutionary mechanism that allowed us to survive: a bias towards danger and a hyper-vigilance towards the negative as a method of ensuring self-preservation.

Perhaps this is why we were not happy staying in our cradles of civilization in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and why we continuously explored and searched for what lay across the sea or on the other side of the mountains. Homo sapiens are probably inherently predisposed to discontent and anxiety because those things are the other side of curiosity and intellect. The other human species we shared the planet with, the Neanderthals and Homo habilis and Denisovans, probably did not have the same drive to explore as we did. Perhaps they were gentler too; our species seems particularly talented at committing horrifying acts of dominance and violence against others.

Until just within the last couple of centuries, these qualities were thought to be exclusive to human beings. They were considered evidence of our reflection of a Creator in whose image we were made, and that other ‘lower’ creatures did not have. It’s now obvious that many of the noble qualities people may exhibit are also present in animals, particularly chordates and mammals. Empathy may be an evolutionary advantage for mammals: cooperation and strength in numbers boosts chances of survival when you aren’t as fast as a cheetah or as strong as a bear, when you do not have fur covering your entire body to withstand an Arctic winter. We don’t consider lions evil for hunting gazelles, or eagles evil for skewering mice. Viruses, as terrible as they can be, don’t choose to infect other living things. The capacity to be evil seems only to exist within human beings.

Could the particular bond between parent and child that was formed in mammals who breastfed their offspring be the genesis of compassion and empathy?

Parents have children with at least some hope that the life their descendants will live will build upon or improve on what has come before. It must be very difficult being a parent. I think all the time of what my own parents may have felt about my siblings and I and our future as they raised us. To be a parent, as I imagine it, must be constant fear and anxiety. Perhaps it is also purpose: now at long last there is a focus for all the love and humanity someone is capable of in raising an entire other person.

This absurd juxtaposition, this kind of tragicomic quantum state where two opposing things are true at the same time, is what informed my thoughts during the creation of this print. Elephants seemed to coalesce all the noble and altruistic qualities I found admirable in our species: wisdom, compassion, gentleness, memory, and family. They exemplified the “better angels of our nature”, to quote Abraham Lincoln.