The most striking thing about the modern world is that our ability to live as we want has far outstripped our ability to live well or wisely. Ours is the most advanced society in history—where technology is concerned. But in our art, architecture, philosophy, public discourse—or even ordinary concerns like romance or happiness—we are infants amongst the giants of the past.
I was reading about the formulation of the U. S. Constitution when this thought came to me. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were the product of hundreds of years of thinking, writing, reading, and debating. Calvin and Hobbes (not those—the other ones), Beza, Locke, and a dozen other governors and philosophers explored thousands of ideas on their way to the establishment of the American federal democracy. What are human rights? Upon what are they based? What is the proper role of government? When is rebellion warranted? They wove subtle arguments, long and deep, trading them back and forth through books and articles, passing them down from generation to generation. The answers they discovered built on the work of ancient thinkers whom they read even in the original languages—Hebrew, Greek, Latin—having been trained as children to study the wisdom of the past. And the answers they discovered, and ultimately expressed in the Constitution were, it still seems today, spot-on: remarkably wise and enduring.
There simply isn’t anyone left who still thinks like that. Politicans think, do, and say what they must to get their way. The public doesn’t think. Even academicians have largely given up on the quaint ideas of the past—ideas like truth and justice and the value of the human soul. We are the most advanced society in history but we don’t have time to read the Constitution, can’t understand it when we do, and couldn’t explain why it says what it says.
So when President Obama advances health care reform, we throw out witty soundbites and caustic opinions, but no one has time to make a real argument or to listen to one being made. Sorry, I’d like to discuss the future of the nation with you but I just received a text, it’s time for my next tweet, check out this video my friend just sent me.
Or when President Bush launches an attack on Iraq, my opinion follows that of the last pundit I happened to see on FOX. I can’t actually evaluate what the pundit says. I’ve never been taught to think that hard. I can’t decide for myself whether he’s lying or telling the truth, whether he’s using or abusing logic. But he has a deep voice and an expensive suit, so he’s probably right. So I’ll just say what he said if anyone asks me as I’m pouring my morning joe in the office kitchen tomorrow.
And when my loan officer tells me I can get a $300,000 house on my $40K salary, I’ll shake his hand and grin ear to ear and thank him for giving me such adorable news. I run Excel for a living but I can’t do basic math, and so I’ll enter the deal without another thought. Everything’s easy in America—has been for generations—so why worry?
Why worry when you always get whatever you want? Because, you see, our ability to live as we want has far outstripped our ability to live wisely or well. Why change when everything’s going so well? And if things go badly, just complain until they get better.
Modern America demonstrates that too much blessing can be a curse. For us, our blessing has much to do with technology. It is the dazzle in our eyes.
Technology has made the world our oyster. Technology gets better every year—every month. Every day a new way to meet somebody new. Nifty new cell phones flying off the line. Mind-control toys the hot new thing this (holy) Christmas (shopping) season. New drugs to calm indigestion, to calm the kids, to calm the soul. New drugs to eradicate influenza—that terrifying pandemic, the latest disease to have plagued humanity for the last ten thousand years.
Everything is getting better all the time. And that’s why we don’t need to worry, as Calvin and Hobbes and Beza and Locke and Jefferson and Franklin and Washington and all those other primitive, ignorant forefathers did, about how to merely get along as a society. How to merely make good decisions together. How to talk. Things like that. Because we know how to talk now in ways they never dreamed of. We’ve got Facebook, for example. Whatta they got?
4 Comments
Wholehearted agreement. Technology, as much as I love it, has divided our attention in so many ways, and has given us the capacity to work on more things at once, though the quality of our attention and work has suffered greatly. I can’t help but make a trivial comparison between this and the Horcruxes in Harry Potter. Our souls have been split, and it’s killing us.
I heard someone say recently that in the years to come, intelligence will be measured not by what you know, but by how efficient you are at finding the necessary information. That statement ignores the fact that the ability to find information doesn’t give you the ability to process that information. The American education system continues to ignore critical thinking by teaching to the tests and lauding people and systems that consistently score highly on those tests.
I’m preaching along a similar vein tomorrow, with more of a focus on how all of this has affected our view of God and of what it is to be a follower of Christ, and I really do believe that the modern American version of Christianity which has arisen out of the morass is nothing short of heresy. It follows a god who is worthy only of an amount of time, thought, and energy that we find available among our other pursuits, which usually take priority, and we don’t have time to be “transformed by the renewing of [our] minds.” A god who inspires so little motivation and response is not God at all, and therefore is an idol.
Horcruxes—awesome. Yes. And as for the rest—preach it! (How did it go?)
Good article, Jeff. I tend to agree mostly, but I had a few caveats: 200 years ago, were Jefferson, Adams, et al, among the most educated or were they the norm for their society? If the former, then are we better or worse today? In those times, the printed media certainly had a lot more sway on masses, and there are many documented cases when it was misused as much as the tabloid media of today. Was the common man better off or worse off because he didn’t have 24 hour news channels spouting ideas and soundbites at him? Look at us – we are here conversing such things back and forth mostly because we have a medium that allows us to do so – I’m certainly no elite thinker; what would we be doing with only pen, paper, and candlelight?
I agree with Chris, in that there is a tendency to avoid teaching critical thinking, problem solving, and other waning skills. Ironically, it seems that the only criticism allowed anymore in our schools is that which is directed back at those longing for such things. In a society where there is so much more opportunity for learning, it is a necessity to sort the diamonds of truth from the chaff.
On the other hand, Jeff, I think you are simplifying modern individuals as well. I come from a technical education background, and I didn’t spend a lot of time with the “classics” or much philosophy in school. I understand only a smattering of other languages, and none of them classical. But even as immersed in modern media and technology as my life is, I have what I think is a very good grasp on modern issues and concerns, and I’m able to distinguish shiites from Shinola from most media and pundits – even the ones I like. There are those who are very similar in my peer group.
(Now, if the latter was true, and the 1800′s common milk farmer was regularly debating Cartesian Dualism with his neighbors, then we really are screwed.)
Thanks for the comment, Jim! Your point about the founding fathers is a good one—as far as I know, they were, on the whole, the educated elite. But I would make the claim now that even our educated elite wouldn’t have the first clue when it came to making hard decisions on governance. One fellow is an expert on economics—he might have some ideas that direction (though the opposite ideas would be taken by another 100 economists). One lass is an expert on foreign relations—she could make sound decisions on certain questions. The sort of holistic thinker of two hundred years ago—both educated and practical, with opinions that are founded on ancient philosophy on up to modern complexities—doesn’t exist.
Also, I wouldn’t say that pen and paper is the key difference between then and now. Electronic media tends toward ephemerality by its nature, but in the right hands (minds, really) it could be used to great effect. In practice, though, modern people, with our relatively poor education and thinking skills, combined with modern media, which promotes attraction to “noise” (i.e. celebrity, news, the cognitive dissonance du jour) and ephemerality (Can you remember what you were browsing even 10 minutes ago? Could you, if you looked away from your computer now, tell me the topics of all the tabs you have open?), produce a toxic mixture. Volume of information makes digestion impossible. Soundbites replace discussions. So the quality of social thought is destroyed.
Here’s a case in point. I think of this one because I watched it happen and was amazed at the time. When the Bush administration started talking about invading Iraq, the obvious first thought was, “Wait, wasn’t that your father’s war?” It felt bizarrely obvious that Bush and his team were motivated to “finish the job.” That motivation came out in the press to a certain extent. But the stronger, more potent motivation that the public picked up on was intelligence about WMDs. And of course, in effect we went to Iraq ostensibly because Saddam had WMDs and might bomb us (or Israel?—the target wasn’t clear) at any moment.
But this was plainly bizarre reasoning. There are all sorts of countries that might bomb us or Israel at any moment. Saddam hadn’t bombed us in the prior 10 years; why would he bomb us this year? Why the urgency?
Now before we get all worked up about the politics of it all, let’s just step back and look at the social thinking process—how the whole country thought at that time, in the run up to the invasion. There might be WMDs—probably were—so that’s a threat. It’s not really an imminent threat. It just isn’t—there was never any real statement made that Iraq was likely to attack any minute. But they might attack in the next 5 or 10 years or whatever. So we might as well go in now. Why? Because of a host of little “side dishes”: Saddam is evil; he persecutes his people; he harbors terrorists (but those claims were thoroughly discredited even at the time); we should have “finished the job” the first time, and now’s our chance.
In a sense, the even bigger motivations were emotional. America felt wounded, felt exposed. We felt angry, a need for justice, yet there was nowhere to lash out. Iraq offered a way to lash out against “those Arab/Muslim terrorist people.” Of course we knew that was irrational, but the Gestalt of all these feelings and thoughts and bits of “security intelligence” amounted to a big, mushy, confused support for the invasion.
So in 2003, America launched an unprovoked, preemptive attack against a nation that had not attacked us in any way whatsoever, against the heated protest of the United Nations (which we dismissed as out of touch and half-Muslim themselves). It was wrong. It was obviously wrong at the time. Even if Iraq had WMDs, it was still irrational and wrong to attack them.
We did it for a bunch of soft, fuzzy feelings and thoughts. And that right there is the state of the American mind today. From the pundits on “down” (assuming they’re somehow “up”), Americans trade in gratuitous assertions, surprising statements, alarming statistics, rapid point and counter-point. But we, uh, don’t think. Or discuss. Except football. We discuss football with eloquence.
And BTW, we elected Obama on the same mushy basis. If Bush felt bad and wicked, and Obama felt the opposite, we should elect Obama. More than that: Obama feels so good, he must be some kind of saint!
Speaking of saints, it was Augustine (along with Aquinas, later) who concocted the “just war” doctrine that informed ethical discussion of war for 1500 years. That phrase, “just war” came up in the debates over Iraq. Um, can I just ask?—what is Augustine’s “just war” doctrine? I mean what did he actually say? The answer: 99.999% of Americans don’t know. (I checked.) And they don’t care. Because what—ha!—what could that rusty old Geezer have to say about ethics that we can’t figure out for ourselves? We’re great at thinking—we’re Modern! We don’t need knowledge. We don’t need the past. All we need is Google.
Okay—must—stop—ranting….