Is it just me or is there a possibility that our culture is becoming more melodramatic as the tendency for hypercaution creates a lack of real drama? I’m not trying to suggest the advent of the safety belt or the push to wear helmets is a bad thing. What I am wondering is if the sense of danger we feel today, and the sense of heroism isn’t, just maybe, due to our lack of real persistent struggle (in main stream, middle class, bourgeois America).
On a friends blog I have heard about a plumber advertising, “Life saving services” a title that is likely bloated just a bit, and the pronouncement of “Hero” upon someone who donated blood. I just wonder if back when people were circumnavigating the globe, slaying dragons(j/k), and strapping on their armor to go to battle, what they would have thought about a plumber as a Life Saver! or a blood donor as a Hero!
Oddly enough, due to the rampant amount of disease and the condition of the water supply, a plumber may have been saving lives back then, and a blood donor could have in fact been a hero if the technology existed. In a society where we buy our prepackaged food, cook it properly in our microwave or electric oven, climb in our air bag ladened cars, take our flu shot and keep antibiotics on hand, has there has been both a loss of real danger, and a heightened awareness of any perceived danger?
In a post 9/11 world I’m not trying to insinuate that we are all safe and the color indexed terror-ometer is a hoax, but rather I’m trying to draw attention to part of the cause for our fear obsession. Is it possible we need some sense of danger, of foreboding to keep us motivated? If so, where does this need for danger and fear come from? Certainly there is precedent for the adrenaline junky out for a quick sense of danger, but what could cause a need for a dangling sense of dread or fear?
As someone with absolutely no qualifications to make such a postulate, I will simply continue my “wondering out loud” here. Could it be that we sense there is something wrong with the world around us, that unless we see vivid signs of this we feel as if we are going crazy? Most honest people will admit the world isn’t perfect. Many of the motivations people have are broken. If all we see around us is safe and good, how can we explain this? However, if we find traces of evil, drama, and impending danger it validates our emotional reaction to what we feel is going on.
What am I really trying to say? We can feel deep down that the world is screwed up. With all of the technological advances, and even political and moral “advances”, we feel we still haven’t fixed, “the problem”. Instead of admitting there is some underlying problem we won’t be able to fix, we just point to more superficial problems and say, “No, that is still wrong, which is why I fell bad,” all the while refusing to accept some underlying problem. If we admit the human race is intrinsically fallen, or bent as Lewis put it in Out of the Silent Planet, it means there is something we can’t fix ourselves.
Until we acknowledge our sin, we will always be searching for a reason everything seems broken.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
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8 comments:
I think that we long for something interesting to happen until it actually does. Only then do we realize that usually it is a bad thing, like someone dying or something being blown up, or friendships dissolving. As for the terror alert system- don't get me started.
I am willing to admit that a certain amount of the problem may be people just wanting something exciting to happen, but I think that falls more under the adrenaline junky part. Not that they are entirely the same phenomenon, but rather they are both concerned with short term interest - not a looming sense of forboding.
Meh, I don't know.
you just explained the Bush propoganda machine.
-hey, the economy sucks
-uh, terrorist
-the war sucks
-uh, gay people
-health care
-WMD's!!!!!!!!!!! look out!!!!!!
-didn't bush repeal clinton's deforrestation act and refuse the Kyoto agreement?
-um yes, but you're not a Christian unless you support him.
-isn't the approval rating plumiting?
-remeber after 9/11 how those liberals wanted to give terrorist therapy instead of judgment? (karl rove actaully said that, almost exactly, after the presidents approval rating hit it's lowest point in 5 years last month--no one has any idea what the heck he was talking about, but it made people scared of liberals and the approval rating started climbing again).
fear factor aint just a show hosted by the balding janitor from news radio...it's how we live, it's who we vote for, it determines how we spend out money, etc etc. I'm scared right now. i realize it yet i still can't escape the fear--though mine is more material than political, anyone who knows me can see that. it's sad.
Right on, Mike. However, I must insist that I am in fact a heroine.
Although I hear what Grant is saying, I think that the obsession with fear Mike is talking about has been present in our culture since long before the Bush administration. Let's not forget about Cuba and the Soviets. Maybe Grant's take is that the Bush administration plays on this ingrained fear.
This idea goes along with another that I've been thinking about on a more personal level. We (individuals, Americans, the human race) are constantly reaching for that "something else." We seem to think that if we could only fix X, everything will be ok. But there will always be Y. And Z...
Until we acknowledge our sin, we will always be searching for a reason everything seems broken...
I can most definitely agree with Grant about what he's saying. However my full response would be pretty much what Patti has said. I truly believe that the closer we get to "fixing" everything, the more we will realize there is something at the root of us that we cannot fix ourselves.
If you were a math person I would describe it as a limit. No matter how much you do to fix things, there will be this limit you approach where nothing you do can push you past that limit.
P.s. I'm glad Grant chimed in with the terror machine thing. I would have felt gypped if he didn't go there!
“In our age everything has to be a ‘problem.’ Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.
Sanctity in such an age means, no doubt, traveling from the area of anxiety to the area in which there is no anxiety or perhaps it may mean learning, from God, to be without anxiety in the midst of anxiety.
Fundamentally, as Max Picard points out, it probably comes to this: living in a silence which so reconciles the contradictions within us that, although they remain within us, they cease to be a problem. (of World of Silence, P. 66-67.)
Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.”
From Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton.
I agree...and disagree (see John Kerry).
I think the problem here is that you're confusing an executive policy with how we as individuals react to it. The primary function of the U.S. gov (one of its only intended functions) is to protect its citizenry against enemies. It just seems as though this administration gets scorched one minute for not taking action and burned worse the next for taking too much.
We can certainly take an alert system and use it to guide our actions without living in constant fear and anxiety.
I appreciate all the comments, and in fact welcome more. I have to admit that the naming convention I used for the blog was meant not to indicate the main thrust of what I was trying to communicate, but rather stand as just one more example of the point I was trying to make. It appears that some people have perceived I was talking specifically about "terror" as an unofficial political platform, when in fact I was really speaking primarily about that sense in all of us that there is something messed up about the world and trying to see that broken-ness everywhere we turn in order to validate that sense. By doing such we relieve ourselves from having to admit that maybe there is something inherintely wrong.
I apologize for the butchered spellings.
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