Thank you, Mr. Kierkegaard!
Thanksgiving morning I had an idea to turn back the cultural clock a bit, so I went to Youtube and watched a Walton's Family Christmas from the 70s. Youtube is of course many things, and one invaluable service it provides is an unending supply of increasingly forgotten commercials, films, news programs, and television shows. These offer windows into American culture through the decades.
I had a grandmother who read little, was largely unconcerned with the events of the world, and firmly believed that the moon landing was a hoax. Grammy, a devout Catholic, was a faithful viewer of The Waltons. I now better understand the comfort and familiarity that it provided back in the 70s. She had a simple life, immune to the cultural changes that swept the country a decade earlier. She blissfully avoided the once previously taboo ideas that were gaining traction then and which are now largely accepted (gay, women's, civil and environmental rights movements). She's been gone for over 30 years and I am absolutely certain that she would be thoroughly bewildered by today's world. I think she represents a fair number of people.
The Waltons show provides a no doubt romanticized view of depression era West Virginia. But there's something real, and substantive depicted in the simple family pleasures, the slow pace of life, and the hard work depicted. Expectations were limited to a degree, and apart from certain elite circles, information just didn't flow to the masses. People didn't know what they didn't know.
I'm reading Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. He has a passage that really speaks to the pace of today's societal, political, and cultural change, such a stark contrast with the lives on Walton's Mountain.
"Centuries ago human knowledge increased slowly, so politics and economics changed at a leisurely pace too. Today our knowledge is increasing at breakneck speed, and theoretically we should understand the world better and better. But the very opposite is happening. Our new found knowledge leads to faster economic, social and political changes; in an attempt to understand what is happening, we accelerate the accumulation of knowledge, which leads only to faster and greater upheavals. Consequently, we are less and less able to make sense of the present or forecast the future. In 1016 it was relatively easy to predict how Europe would look in 1050. Sure, dynasties might fall, unknown raiders might invade, and natural disasters might strike; yet it was clear that in 1050 Europe would still be ruled by kings and priests, that it would be an agricultural society, that most of its inhabitants would be peasants, and that it would continue to suffer greatly from famines, plagues, and wars. In contrast, in 2016, we have no idea how Europe will look in 2050. We cannot say what kind of political system it will have, how its job market will be structured, or even what kind of bodies its inhabitants will possess."
Harari wrote that almost a decade ago, and today, we have an even clearer understanding of the massive changes on our doorstep. We may well have lost the battle to keep preindustrial temperatures below 1.5 degrees centigrade. AI is an active agent, learning, changing, as we are helplessly engaged and enraged through newsfeeds chock full of fear, anger, and outrage. It's driving so much of our behavior and puppets that we are, we fail to see the pulled strings.
I don't think retreating to Walton's reruns is the answer, but the occasional glimpse of that time may well soothe our psyches a bit, slow down our racing minds, and remind us of what we have since gained and lost.
Peter T.
