Cities tend to be alike insofar as they are places to meet future spouses,
raise families, go to school, work at a job, grow old, get born. Your
whole life story can play out in a city, and there is a way in which
your human life can sort of be lived the same no matter what city you
live in. In Delhi or Lima (each under a cloud of smog), people meet future
spouses, raise families, go to school, work at jobs, grow old, and get
born. I went to Lima for a few days, when I was 17, and was
impressed by the smog. But if I had stayed five years, while that would
have been bad for my respiratory health, I might have gotten more involved
in friends or perhaps a girlfriend, or a church, or something like that.
The smog would have been a background condition, one which I noticed
here and there, maybe every day, maybe not. But I would have been
living my life, the important, (near?-)universally human parts of
life, of developing as a person, caring about things which were
emotionally weighty to me (God, art, science, etc.) and participating
in other people's lives. I would have shifted back and forth from
theism to atheism to agnosticism in my fiducial
depths, and experienced whatever other essential features of the human
condition. But the smog wouldn't have been worth mentioning.
The alien view of a city is to see the smog and not the people
raising their families (and going to school, growing old, etc.),
which is the familiar view of a city. Both the alien view and the
familiar view are right, and both are wrong.
Except for time I spent in Davis, CA, going to college,
I have lived my whole life in San Diego. I'm not particularly interested
in travel, and tend to feel the monk's feeling of wanting to stay
in my cell. When I'm feeling very local, I see nearby me only a few
places, which comprise my whole world that I can see. It's as though
San Diego is my house, and I'm looking out the window. My whole world
is Southern California, plus a view into Mexico. The Imperial
Valley to the east is a desert farming community, and Tijuana to the
south is in another country, reputed to be dangerous. I don't go to those
places very often. To the west is the Pacific Ocean, which is a
watery desert. To the north is Los Angeles, which of all these
neighboring places I have the strongest impression.
As an outsider, my view of Los Angeles is that it is a place of
spiritual darkness. There is greater stress and hostility there
than in San Diego. Los Angeles seems to have been shaped by the movie
industry, which sells beauty, but it's an ugly place. The Hollywood
neighborhood is not a vision of beauty. But the sun shines "all year long"
(not literally true, but something like it). A constant 72 degrees
Fahrenheit may sound idyllic (it's the temperature you set your
thermostat to), but that 72 degree sun gnawing at your skin, day after
day, becomes a horror. You find yourself irritable under its gaze.
(We have spells of this in San Diego as well.) That irritating
pleasantness can even have an obscene component, the obscenity of people
being fed things engineered to please them. Hollywood actresses are selected
for for appearing beautiful to American men, but I have come to feel
like I'm looking at a Doritos chip, a snack chip for the eyes rather
than for the mouth, which has a dark energy to it, something to make
me high, addictive and bedazzling. Films themselves are like
Doritos chips, though they are all superficially beautiful. There is
an obscenity to their beauty, which I see as an alien to them. Los
Angeles is a place of desperation (aspiring actors and musicians), of
broken dreams, of exploitation. While not all of LA is in the movie
or music industries, I would guess that this spills over into the city
at large.
When I go to LA, I often come in on the train. As it approaches
Union Station, where I get off, I see the same thing every time, a
kind of industrial landscape, with the Los Angeles River running through
it, channelized with nothing natural about it, graffitied, sometimes
with trash and the belongings of homeless people. In San Diego, there's
nothing exactly like it. The Skid Row equivalent in San Diego as I've
experienced it is smaller, and I have felt uncomfortable but comfortable enough
walking through it, but an Angeleno friend had me canceling my Greyhound
tickets so I wouldn't have to go to Los Angeles' Skid Row, where the LA
Greyhound station is located. There is a hostility in Los Angeles, and
an aggressiveness, both in the way people drive, and in the things people
say. My Angeleno friend once said "Welcome to LA" after a homeless person
went off in a train station in a way I don't think I've ever heard in San
Diego. Being homeless is stressful, but perhaps more stressful in Los
Angeles.
I visited a therapist in San Diego one time at a particularly dark
time of my life. He said good things about Portland, but his opinion
was that Los Angeles was a spiritually dark place. I don't want to
be unfair to spiritualities which are not Christian, but I will note
that goth and occult spiritualities and aesthetics are relatively
strong in Los Angeles, and while they could be defended by some as
not being really bad for you, their imagery tends to be dark and often
weird, a participation in horror. David Bowie went through his worst
years in Los Angeles crawling deeper into cocaine and occultism, enabled
by false friends and money.
Hollywood (and Los Angeles, to the extent that Los Angeles is a
support organ for it) sells America, and the world, fake beauty, so no wonder
Los Angeles itself has arguably the pleasantest weather in America
(shared with San Diego), but is actually an ugly, dark place.
But to be fair to Los Angeles, though I am familiar with San Diego
in ways that I am not with Los Angeles, I can see San Diego, as well, as
an alien. San Diego, often enough, is a place of genuine beauty,
not fake beauty. San Diego is the good life, a genuinely nice
experience. It shares some of Los Angeles' dark side (we have that
gnawingly pleasant weather, and some of the traffic) and San Diego
had (and has?) a relatively strong goth scene. But San Diego is
a sleepy place, a kind of "last man" place. San Diego is more
spiritually dangerous than Los Angeles, because in Los Angeles,
you know something is wrong. But in San Diego, you feel
like everything is right. The word "hedonism" sounds to some
like cocaine and strippers on Sunset Strip -- a Los Angeles
phenomenon -- but to me it sounds like a beautiful sunset at
La Jolla Shores, or Coronado, or whatever other San Diego beach,
that feeling of the "pacific" ocean calming you, quieting away
the deeply personal side of you, drugging you with genuine
psychological health. How can you really learn to love in San
Diego, when it is at its "finest"? You have a better chance in
Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is known for the film and music industries, and
its container ports. San Diego is known for the military, and
for craft beer and burritos and going to the beach. The World
Famous San Diego Zoo is here as well.
The vulgar hedonism of Hollywood rock stars in the 1980s is
probably too easily grown past. Also, the version of hedonism
envisioned by transhumanists (for instance, discussed somewhat
in X-Risk), while exciting
and motivating to them, may seem sort of ridiculous and unnecessary
to the average person. But San Diego, instead of radical hedonism
represented by rock stars or transhumanists, represents normal
hedonism, for normal people. If you want really good, human
compatible experience, come to San Diego. Watch a sunset. Eat
food from a taco shop. Drink a craft beer. Go surfing. Maybe
stay home and watch a movie. Go check out a farmer's market on
the weekend. Forget God. Lose your passion. Let go. Turn
off the part of you that cares about anything outside of your
lifestyle of normal humanity.
San Diego is the hedonism that
normal people would choose, and already do choose, long before
any advanced technology makes an Experience Machine possible.
It may be the exact experience that people choose once they've
tried all the "adventure programs of youth" that you can
run on the Experience Machine. At the end -- our vision of
heaven, I guess, will be San Diego, or culturally varied versions
of it.
One San Diegan I knew lived in Germany for school, but came
back to visit his parents in a neighborhood close to mine. He said
that when he visited San Diego, he felt sadness. That was his
alien view. I can connect with that -- the sadness of a beautiful
sunset, all the people beautifully bedding down for one last night,
as the dark settles in and they cease to exist.
San Diego says "look at things from the familiar view". Los
Angeles says "look at things from the alien view". I feel like I
would have a much easier time discussing the content of this post
in Los Angeles-as-Los Angeles. I feel it very difficult to talk
about it in San Diego-as-San Diego. In Los Angeles, we can have
the possibility of really being aware of weird things, like that
if we give $5,000 to a charity, it could save someone's life,
a totally meaningless and abstract behavior from the point of
view of an ordinary human's life. But that weird sacrifice,
from our perspective, is like a gift from heaven for the person who
benefits, who gets to live 35 more years (up to life expectancy, at least).
In Los Angeles, we can be aware that the familiar view, normality,
human nature, themselves are horrors, which prevent people from
giving to anyone outside their own familiar lives. In Los Angeles
we may long for something other than "this", and perhaps even
occasionally cry out to God. But San Diego is self-sufficient.
I don't want to be too kind to Los Angeles -- I don't know that
Los Angeles leads people to love God. But at least in a sense
it is unstable. San Diego is more hedonically stable, is a lower-energy
point of cultural development. You can become aware of God if
you can see outside the totality of the experience-as-experience.
You can become aware of persons as persons, as more than just
experiences, if there is some outside to the hedonic moment. A
perfect San Diego could exclude you from loving God as a person,
as a real being, and you would have no way to motivate yourself to
leave that perspective. It would be a perfect sunset at the end of
a 10/10 day.
The truth is found in totality. So while I have presented
the alien views of the two cities, to be accurate, one should
remember their familiar views. Every person is an alien to us
and family to us, and every collection of people is alien and
familiar. Most aliens have some element of horror to them,
and so do most people, though there are some aliens who are
like cities of God.
