Well, you're not setting the bar very high... the Eiffel Tower is just a hunk of metal that was for (of all "auspicious" things) the World's Fair. A mud hut is a home. Homes are hard to come by, whereas hunks of metal are commonplace.
Curiously, in the background of the great unwashed are the origins of the
cave paintings - what makes them notable is not the who or the why or the wherefore - but most importantly the "What". Failed offshoots such as Denisova hominin aside, if you were to take a human child from that time period and raise it in today's "educated" milieu, it would develop to be intellectually indistinguishable from you or I. "Great," you intone, "yet another brat playing Grand Theft Auto on a hardware foundation he is unequipped to comprehend."
And indeed, I would be inclined to agree. Except that in the historically anarchic morass that is Punk Rock, it could be argued that such mindless rebellion was necessary not so much to destroy the excesses of the day (we note here the passing of the great Keith Emerson, RIP) but simply to preserve the very notion of (Western) music's baroque foundations which inspired those excesses in the first place.
For example, given the familiarity of every Richard Feynman that anyone who ever attended even the lowliest of science classes knows, there exists his lesser known partners in time, such as the great
William Whewell. Where Feynmann had an innate rhythm, an obsession with mad tribal drumming which may be witnessed in the successes of his free-associative approach to reasoning, Whewell was a polymath of the highest order (what your great unwashed would call a "Renaissance Man") - yet his contributions to the scientific curriculum be many, I would focus on the arts of his rational bereavement: tracing Goethe to Schiller, Schiller to Shakespeare, and Shakespeare to the very anguish and joy of life itself.
Which brings us back (stream of unconsciousness) to our Video Game obsessed 40,000 year old teenager with her ochre fingers and her on-line wherewithal... when the too careful boffins of the day scoff and diminish grass and mud hut accomplishments (that's Wattle and Daub to you) one perches upon the precipice of not just paths of knowledge and Bruce Chatwin's songlines, but the very disorder
necessary (that's Necessary with a capital N) for understanding why any of us do this in the first place.
Are there great repositories of specialised knowledge which should remain sacrosanct only to the well rehearsed ministrations of that knowledge's disciples? Or, as history may dishonestly suggest, need we fear the thuggery which aims to cheapen our own experiences at the expense of a fascination for fear and violence, mayhap threatening to destroy that very knowledge itself?
Despite appearances, I have consistently claimed to be a Medievalist, eschewing the fancies and bromide lies of the Ivory Towers for the preferred (if cold, dark, and suspicious) blunt knife that Caliban and his thousand twangling instruments could strum. If that means I take tech and throw it back at the gods that punished me with it in the first place, then so be it; I will relish in this role of miscreant, I will shout louder, longer, and with a terrible justice against the contemporary beliefs I was taught to respect in school.
Like the Punks,
like the educated iconoclasts
- I will rebel
against the received "rules" of experience,
and in so doing introduce
a hinting wit
that
unsettles the coffins of
intelligentsia,
grins and snarls,
where Rimbaud meets Guillaume de Machaut
crushing Villon
under the polyphony of
the
lay
itself
Like the Punks,
Like the educated iconoclasts.
Even the smallest achievements must (and
do!) outshine the Eiffel Tower - that is the very reason it exists: a counterbalance to the storm of learned mediocrity which kowtows too little and too late to its conservatist masters. Long live the unwashed masses, may their difficult deaths ultimately count for something.