Recent Facebook re-connections have caused me to remember my high-school days. I sometimes visit the profiles of people I used to socialize with. A glance at a profile picture causes me to do a double-take.
Christ, they look like that?
Yes, they do. Absent regular contact with these folks, I fall back on my hazy memories. But time has passed and my memories are wrong. But that doesn’t stop me from drawing a woefully inaccurate mental picture of these people.
Ideologies
Our place in time - its context - largely determines the terms and concepts that we use to engage our world. (CC Photo by Robert Huffstutter at Flickr)
Humans have a natural tendency to frame thoughts in a particular way and then freeze them in place. We do the same thing with the things we believe.
For example, glance at Tea Party opinion polls and demographic data for a bit. They’re mostly aging Americans caught on the losing side of the 60′s culture competition.
The dead giveaway is in the language. I read words like “fascism” and “communism” and it seems so… old.
This group tends to use cold-war era terminology that’s out of date now. When I graduated from high-school, the USSR was in its death-throes. By simple virtue of my birth cohort, I don’t interpret social events through that cold-war prism. It’s history.
But I shouldn’t get cocky. There will come a time in my future when the terms of perception will have shifted again. Then my terminology will be out of date. I will have been left behind. Will I be able to shift my frame of reference?
Geopolitics
The world changes. Sadly, we often do not (CC Photo by ToastyKen at Flickr).
The same thing goes for our mental picture of the world map. The gradual change taking place in the world goes largely unnoticed by a majority of Americans, until suddenly we wonder “how did this happen?” Rise of China, anyone?
While we were busy taking our kids to soccer practice and congratulating ourselves for being on the right side of some pedantic social debate, the world kept moving.
Back in May, I read this in Foreign Policy:
When I first read the news about the nuclear deal that Brazil and Turkey reached last week with Iran, I flinched. My reflex reaction was: Third-World troublemakers rally to the side of evil-doer in the face of Western pressure. That was, of course, the wrong reflex. (Traub)
Most of the article deals with questions of how the Obama administration should deal with ascending powers. That’s important and all, but more important than policy prescriptions is the observation that our mental framework could use some exercise.
No Gradualism
I suspect that for many of us, history seems to move in fits and starts that mirror our own attention span. Periodically, we panic and then reorient ourselves. It’s no wonder we all know some elder crank that bitches like this guy. It’s a stereotype for a reason.
So much of our angry clamoring strikes me as just another reactionary, socio-political mid-life crisis.
We ignore stuff. Then we go into panic-mode when the world appears less comprehensible. Whatever damned thing we’re bitching about will have been traceable and obvious for decades, but only if we’ve been paying attention.
