THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

Several other Floyd songs are helpful in dissecting this troubling condition. One element of the diagnosis is the loss of yearning. David Gilmour's composition, "Learning to Fly," (1987) employs the metaphor of flying to describe a longing for something more than the everyday:

A soul in tension that's learning to fly

Condition grounded but determined to try

Can't keep my eyes from the circling skies

Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I

Though the dream seems out of reach, hope, fueled by an "attraction" with an "irresistible grasp," is not extinguished:

Across the clouds I see my shadow fly

Out of the corner of my watering eye

A dream unthreatened by the morning light

Could blow this soul right through the roof of the night

Yet again, in the closing song to Pink Floyd's fourteenth album, the wistful "High Hopes" (1994), admits to being "encumbered forever by desire and ambition / There's a hunger still unsatisfied."

Another element of the numbed state is a kind of thoughtlessness that means the shallow soul ignores his mortality. Too many, in public and private life, seem to live as if they had no soul. "Time" (1973), addresses the tragedy of a life unlived, precisely because its end was never contemplated. Think of it as a "memento mori" with a beat.

At a late juncture in life, the individual realizes the decades have passed, but he has lacked the ambition necessary for a meaningful life."

And then one day you find ten years have got behind you

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

But at that point, it seems too late as "every year is getting shorter" until "the time is gone, the song is over" even though the individual "thought I'd something more to say." The imagery is striking:

And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking

Racing around to come up behind you again

The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older

Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

The collective politics of the band were decidedly left-of-center, especially those of Roger Waters, who could be arrogant and obnoxious, especially to his bandmates. Pink Floyd's acclaimed album "Animals" (1977) repurposes George Orwell's Animal Farm so that the oppressors include the commercial class as well as the political. But the band's insight into the human condition has appeal across the political spectrum. Their diagnosis of our present state is remarkable, and when that acumen is expressed through their art, it is arresting.

Aristotle, in his Ethics, develops the idea of the cardinal virtues. In Aristotle's scheme, for every virtue, there are two vices: one vice is too much of the virtue; the other two little. One of those virtues is temperance or moderation. It is flanked by two vices, indulgence on the excessive side and insensibility on the defective side (Nicomachean Ethics, III, 11).While self-indulgence may be easy to recognize, insensibility may not, and that vice may offer a clue to the state of comfortable numbness. Whereas lust and desire may run amok in the vice of excess; in the defective vice of insensibility, the passions that support virtue, including honor, ambition, love, pride and fear, are scarce. Consequently, the insensible life is bland and driftless: comfortably numb. Aristotle warns such a state is barely "human." Curbing the vice of excess seems relatively straightforward, at least compared with awakening someone from the insensible state, precisely because the motivating passions are enervated. Perhaps ruminative artists like Pink Floyd can be of assistance in the quest for a cure.

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