It was what Luntz heard from the American people that scared him. They were contentious and argumentative. They didn't listen to each other as they once had. They weren't interested in hearing other points of view. They were divided one against the other, black vs. white, men vs. women, young vs. old, rich vs. poor. "They want to impose their opinions rather than express them," is the way he describes what he saw.
From "The Agony of Frank Luntz" by Molly Ball on "The Atlantic"
Perhaps Pepe Escobar's "Globalistan: How the World is Dissolving into Liquid War" itself inspired by Zygmunt Bauman's "liquid modernity" will begin to spread ever more within the more "advanced industrial democracies" too and not only in places like the C.A.R., or South Sudan's "Unity" state, or Syria or Libya, or Mali or Somalia or Yemen or "Afpakistan" or countless other "developing world" places .
ReplyDeleteThe spreading and the flowing of the "liquidity of contentiousness" into every nook and cranny of society is also being augmented by a broader crisis and lack of confidence in democracy and its institutions (e.g. tolerant participation) which is afoot and which is in turn being augmented (not lessened) by so called social media and the psychological pre-dispositions that it (and the current Internet more broadly) easily engenders (and has engendered). E.g. ubiquitous "self referential declarative insular narcissism" e.g.. "I have spoken, or thus have I written"....being only one of the more easily observable characterizing phenomena.
All this makes it ever more difficult to manage the cultural, political, and socio-economic and cultural (e.g. religious) identity differences which are in fact the unavoidable legacy of humanity's history over the past 10,000 years and more.
And more genuine personal modesty, humility and an (authentic) love of science and its methods, (and their required attendant methodological external skepticism and healthy internal self-doubt) and of culture, the arts, and history (and their attendant accompanying discipline, diligence and hard work) have been infected by the same. No one seems to be fully immune, or at least not automatically so because of their profession or chosen social activity or praxis. In other words “lower quality psychologies” are observably emerging. And this goes hand in hand with more contentiousness and argumentativeness.
The world's (meaning human society's) economic, financial, political, social, cultural and environmental realms are in fact all in turmoil across the world and in most of its societies, (both macro and in the more micro level communities as well) and (insidiously) interactively so.
More "contentiousness and argumentativeness" are likely to result (based also on an ever lower quality of understanding of the underlying processes in which we all find ourselves immersed including but not limited to "information overload" which further reduces genuine reciprocal understanding and tolerance)
The main hope lies in the fact that everything that happens and doesn't happen in human society DOES eventually end up having CONSEQUENCES. And consequences create streams of observable evidence which affect experience which in turn eventually affects understanding. This is happening with the weather consequences of climate change but not only with environmental phenomena. The consequences thus lead to new societal circumstances eventually fostering the emergence of new ideas, attitudes and even some revised institutions and cultural and ideological frameworks.
Eventually we will either understand and transform and adjust our systems and institutions (political, economic and cultural) to the new overall human society context which has evolved with the various phases of "modernity" and increasing "complexity" which have come into being over time (aided and abetted by cheap fossil fuels) or we will all go to hell. And of course, the Wall Street Journal will duly report.