FEBRUARY 15, 2020 – In every era society faces two over-arching questions: 1. What’s happening? and 2. What should be done about it? In the current era, people have ready but competing answers to the second question. These prescriptions, however, turn on the answer to the first question, and again, everyone knows exactly what’s happening.
Not so fast.
In reality we’re so overwhelmed by the constant cascade of headlines, data points, and commentary, not to mention, “spin” and propaganda, we gravitate inevitably to simple explanations. It’s robots or corporate greed or corrupt Democrats or spineless Republicans. But when examined through the scope of time, “what really went on” will doubtless look very different from what most people perceived in the moment. This is understandable, since conditions that result from what was happening reveal more definitively what was actually happening.
Under the clearest of times, the ability to discern “what’s going on” is no easier than reading a large print book an inch from your eyeballs. In the midst of World War II, for example, if you’d asked any American, “What’s going on?” you’d have heard a universally certain answer: “We’re fighting to beat the Japs and the Nazis!” (racial slurs and Italians be damned!)
But by the end of August 1949, when the Soviets detonated its first nuclear bomb, it turns out that what had been going on between September 1, 1939 and August 15, 1945 (the beginning and end of WW II) was something far more central to the future: the rise of the Soviet Union and the United States as world powers in a cold war that would fuel countless proxy conflicts and threaten the globe with thermo-nuclear annihilation.
With yet another half century, perhaps the view of “what was going on” during the Cold War will change to, “the rise of Western consumerism, which, with the end of the Cold War, would spread (like a virus?) around the globe, leading to uninhibited consumption, requiring unprecedented burning of fossil fuels, producing a dramatic rise in carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and wholesale altering of global climate.
So now, back to the here and now—and an age-old conundrum. To answer intelligently, “what should we be doing about [what’s happening]?” we need to understand what, in fact, is happening. But how on earth can we understand what’s going on when the goings on are an inch from our irises? And to make the challenge ever more difficult, we’re not even afforded simple, large print that says, “We’re beating the bad guys!” We’re eyeballs-to-script; information conveyed in all styles and sizes of superimposed fonts, much of it gibberish, lots of it manipulated, too much of it unverifiable, and in aggregate, a crushing load on our limited capacity to absorb and synthesize.
Yet nothing about this condition stops us from shouting continuous bursts of angry certitude from our individual soap boxes and collective bull horns. All of us know exactly what “the remedy” is!
But it’s not so simple as “dumping Trump” or “trashing Democrats.”
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
