Mechanization Of Life In Henry Bergson's Defiant Earth By Aristophanes

The world has entered a new geological epoch, in which after all the damage we have caused as, we are losing control over something that was never meant to be controlled to begin with. Many don't see the effects taking place, rather they see it as a joke, one which they believe will never defy us. In the novels Defiant Earth by Clive Hamilton, it describes how we as humans, have become too powerful and have rendered the Earth more unstable and less controllable. The Birds, by Aristophanes, follows the storyline of Pisthetaerus, who persuades the world's birds to create a new city in the sky. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic by Henri Bergson, explores what laughter is and why people do it. They define the new epoch we have entered: …show more content…
For Bergson, life is ever in flux through time and space, and any divergence from this principle of flux, any attempt to fix or concretize life, is removed from life. Any time a living thing takes on attributes of death or mechanization or rigid automatism, it ceases to be wholly alive and inspires social laughter. Comedy, in Bergson’s view, is a social gesture designed to promote organic health in the social body. Comedy attempts to return to life those half-alive people on society’s fringes whose “failure” to adapt themselves impairs social well-being. He explains laughter as a social gesture, ¨a function with a specific utility in society and how drama helps to illustrate an idea¨(Bergson). Comedy is necessarily, we laugh at people or the things they do. It plays a major role in Anthropocene. People don't seem to take it serious and believe they have nothing wrong. The changes the earth as created, it has become unstable. Rather than trying to do something about it, they either ignore it or take it has a joke. Making themselves believe it is nothing serious and that it will just go away Laughter is purely cerebral, being able to laugh seems to require a detached attitude, an emotional distance to the object of laughter. People are amused by a discord in music and a lack of harmony in color. Even in the landscape, we sometimes detect an unexpected image which excites our laughter. Laughter is incompatible with emotion or with sympathy with an object. "Depict some fault, however trifling, in such a way as to arouse sympathy, fear, or pity; the mischief is done, it is impossible to laugh. The comic will come into being whenever a group of men concentrate their attention on one of their number, imposing silence on their emotions and calling into play nothing but their intelligence."(Bergson). As