We're in an age where it seems as if anything could be possible. We have gently swushing sidewalks that move us in airports, instant communication across miles at the touch of a button or slight voice prompt, gadgets in our kitchens that replace hours of manual labor, and roaring vehicles that dash from one point to the next with reliability and comfort. We have a seemingly limitless supply of information at our whim and wish- on everything from underwater microbiology to the worship practices of ancient cultures we'll never need to know about. This is truly a Golden Age of progress, technology, and learning. We have medical advances that people never dreamed of, and the medicine goes far beyond mere bodily function and crosses into matters of the mind and soul, it seems.

Yet somehow, in the midst of all of this, mankind is regressing. Not all, of course, but I look at the progresses we've made in learning and education and wonder where things went wrong for many industrialized nations, especially the USA and UK. I've compiled a list of the things that I feel our society is losing grip of, abstract things that need to be found and tagged and set on a museum shelf for future generations to ponder...

1) We're losing our ability to focus.


I sat on the couch next to my husband the other day, watching Penelope (which is an excellent movie, look for a review soon!) and attempting to play Civilization III on my laptop while I watched the movie. Michael gets irritated with this habit, he would love to just snuggle and be still, but I feel a need to keep my hands busy. I check my email addresses, blog, StumbleUpon account, and icanhascheezburger.com way too often. One email at work can send me frantically running about the store, forgetting whatever project I had going on. I'm not the only one like this, I know. We're bombarded by such a constant influx of information, suggestion, demand, pressure, and appeal that we often do not know which way to turn. This fractures whatever concentration we could get in between soundbytes and drivel, and we're left with no focus and a whopping migraine.

2) We're losing the art of conversation.


I recently ate at a pleasant little restaurant in Grand Rapids. At a table near us there was a very young couple sitting nearby. Typical 'Abercrombie' style teenagers, the boy looked disinterestedly around the restaurant while the girl sat and texted on her jeweled phone. She had a tight tee shirt on that read: 'All I need is love... and jewelry!' paired with a miniskirt. Please let my kids become nuns before they hit that age...
When we left the establishment, he was still staring vacantly into space while she texted. This isn't the first time I've seen things like this, and I've noticed that people's conversations are more fractured, more shallow, less meaningful. People are more apt to stick to their opinion, you don't see as much real give and take in conversation as could be comfortable, and many people seem disinclined to really, really engage in a stimulating intellectual conversation that isn't about themselves. Maybe the science fiction books were right when they predicted a culture that merely grunts and squeals at each other, while communicating on giant holographic screens. Or did I even read that...?

3) We're losing our ability to entertain ourselves.



I remember being a kid in rural Michigan. We were poor, dirt poor. I had very few toys, and my dad was bipolar and would often send us out of the house for hours on end. Although it seemed rather cruel, this was excellent for me. I learned to plant things (they occasionally grew, I figured out the whole growing seasons/watering gig a decade later) from seeds I found in the fields. I learned to dig clay out of the ground, separate it from the sand, and sculpt tiny earthen bowls, dolls, and play food. Most things cracked and crumbled, but it was great fun, and completely free. I found bricks of some forgotten project of my dad's and drew a fairy tale scene on every last one, I picked whatever wild fruit was in season and ate it until my belly ached. My sisters and I mad mudpies and picked flowers and wove grasses and ate snow and jumped in fallen leaves and made elaborate structures from pine needle beds. We didn't know the meaning of the word 'bored'.
Many of the privileged kids nowadays have one gadget after another. Even low-income kids have plenty of stuff to do and buttons to press and boopy sounds to hear and creepy disembodied voices to tell them what button to press next. They are surrounded by so much stimuli that their brains kind of melt into a pile of goo, I think. Take a kid out of this constant bombardment of bullcrap, and they get the fidgets.
Even us grown-ups have an almost chemical dependency on 'fun'. We spend a great deal of our income on vacations, gaming equipment, gambling, porn, food, reading material... you name it. You stick most of us (me included) into a bare room with no electricity or screen of some sort, and you'll soon have a screaming nutcase on your hands, whereas many people of old would whittle wood or stitch fine embroidery, or build something out of matchsticks, or write memoirs (on paper, with a pen) or engage their brain in something other than mindless reality shows.


Sure, we're making leaps and bounds in technology and medicine. We have smart cars and programmable microwaves and intricate scheduling tools. But has any of this made us any smarter? I think that we're actually losing our ability to innovate. Having less things made people more resourceful in older days, still does in third world countries. I am still astounded by people who just cannot manage to assemble a healthy meal for their families out of what's in the fridge or pantry. If you've grown up having every single need accomodated, you will never have a reason to invent, say, a fork that heats a bite of lasanga as you pick it up (please tell me someone is inventing this).
Our loss of ability to create is somehow connected with my next point:

5) We're losing art.


Quick, think of a great, original graphic artist of today.
Did you say Banksy? Audrey Kawasaki? Those were two of the very few that came to my mind. But if I cast my mind back to older times, dozens, if not hundreds of names, styles, and art forms come flooding to my brain. Sure, there's the compounded years to account for, but I really believe (and so do many artsy people I've spoken to) that we are in an artistic dry period. Very little beautiful or really unique has come out of the past several decades. I cannot blame it on computers- I have seen some utterly gorgeous things come off Photoshop tutorials- but I think I can blame it on easy access to cheap art supplies, limited attention span, a need for mass-production, and an arrogant refusal to embrace anything of old.
I'm not complaining about any modern artist, I just think that our learning approaches and schools are structuring so much method and technique into an art class that the essence of beauty and creativity is lost.

6) We've lost our innocence.


This is not something ongoing. It has happened, and it is, I fear, permanent. We have been bombarded with racism, war, sex, violence, cruelty, disaster, human conflict, injustice, and everything in between or that is a combination of any of those. We laugh at coarse humor, we mock people who try to live a good life, we believe nothing right and everything tawdry and wrong. There is an internet forum (or twelve) for any deviancy known to mankind, with rabid supporters and detractors.
Children are not allowed to be innocent. If they are kept from knowledge of things adult for a while, they are instead pasted with corporate merchandising, slogans, and drivel. It is nearly impossible these days for me to find an affordable pair of shoes for my little girls without Dora, Nemo, Tinkerbell, Barbie, or those most hideous Bratz affixed to multiple surfaces of the vinyl. Why do our kids need this? They don't, but some corporating somewhere feels that they need the 'brand recognition' from infancy.


... so what is it going to take to win back our innocence, our attention spans, our true cultural identity? I'm not exactly sure, but I do know that it requires a severance of some ties. We cancelled our cable months ago and haven't missed it. We instituted a 'no licensed character' rule for clothing and acessories (not all grandparents adhere to this, but we're getting there). We bake our own bread, churn our own butter, and sew our own curtains. It's just a beginning, just a very bit of the surface, the brown part of the onion. Eventually, hopefully, we will have a patch of land somewhere with an off-the-grid straw bale house and multiple inventions working inside, a pantry stocked with home-grown preserves, and a cellar lined with homebrew. There will be a loom in place of a television, and out-loud stories in place of an expensive sound system. There will be herbs growing on the roof and mushrooms in the basement. Goats will nibble on our flowers and fruit trees will shower white petals on the gravel drive, hopefully. A huge kitchen will invite people in to sit and chat, argue, pray, read or draw. We hope for a hub of human activity, a source of learning and inspiration, a refuge from the storms of unrest outside.


It's a dream. We'd like to re-discover some of the roots of our human civilization and re-establish traditions of comfort and family.

Labels: art, conversation, culture, innocence, knowledge, learning, losses, modern, rebellion, society

There is something horrible in our world today. It has been bothering me lately, niggling at the back of my mind, wanting explanation.

Today, I (somewhat) sorted it out. I was dealing with a rather difficult pair of customers, and I tend to sum people up as I'm listening to them. The only word that I could hear in my mind was:

"Arrogant!"

.... which they were. The man had the audacity to think that I would repair, for free, a watch that he had purchased elsewhere, the woman demanded the use of one of our tools that was sitting out of her reach, and together they accounted for my worst customer experience of this week.

I drove home behind a pick-up truck labeling me as an obscenity if I didn't appreciate that particular driver's mode of traveling.

After work, I watched a short newsclip in which an unnamed eyebrowless presidential candidate shot off his mouth about something or other, all the while wearing this grin that made my teeth set on edge.

Later that evening I indulged in my usual guilty pleasure of reading all of the help columns, such as Dear Abby, Annie's Mailbox, and Dear Margo. Something about reading the sob stories of others makes my own pathetic life seem not quite so wretched. One story after another marches across my weary vision, stories of broken marriages, ungrateful children, and unrepentant family members. Not one person is taking blame for an ugly situation, they all want to pin it on others and make them pay for their suffering.

We are living in an age of arrogance. Pride- not the good kind- mocks us from the covers of magazines, brazenly struts across our television and computer screens, and taunts us from every media outlet imaginable. We have come so far from humility that generations of children do not even know what humility is.

People in this day abuse power and laugh over it, steal other peoples' jobs, spouses, and assets and feel no shame, and admit not a single shortcoming or character flaw. To be selfish is good, to be arrogant is normal. How have we allowed society to degrade this way?

I know that arrogance is nothing new. Many evils throughout history have been perpetrated solely from sheer pride. But I really feel that it is becoming epidemic. No one puts misbehaved children in their place anymore, and the children grow up into rebellious monsters. No one takes responsibility for screw-ups anymore, and the liability lawsuit industry costs industrialized nations billions of dollars a year. People allow themselves to have a roving eye- I personally have heard women say that they deserve to cheat on a loving spouse- and the divorce rates soar.

What has happened to us? Is it the shift from religion to humanism? Humanism is a self-centric philosophy, whereas religion tends to be theistic, centering on one or more beings, or others. Humanism is actually, in my opinion, the religion of self, of mankind. How can one project compassion- genuinely- onto another when all one has at heart is the good of himself? Maybe this is not a good theory, for I find arrogance to be almost more prevalent among religious people than anyone else lately. But look at our churches now- rather than preach contrition and absolution, we preach self-esteem and affirmation. We are a people fat on the empty praise of our culture, drunk on the insignificant contributions we have made to our little selfish worlds.

Arrogance strips us of true compassion, blinds us to the faults within ourselves, and sears our consciences. Arrogance is as much in the soul of the unrepentant criminal as it is in the smiling politician on your television.

I don't have a solution to offer. The only thing that I can do is try to remember to be humble, to raise my girls free of the 'princess' mindset, and to do as much good for others as I can in this short life. The only thing that I can hope to impact the world through is this measly blog posting. And I say this to you- as much for me as for anyone- check yourselves for pride today. Search your heart and try to weed out any thought that puts you above another human being. Learn to serve, learn to be quiet, learn to not mock. Find meekness, find humility.

I'll be right there beside you, and maybe together we'll learn how to make the world a little bit better of a place.

Labels: arrogance, compassion, culture, divorce, fault, hope, humanism, moral decay, pride, society