Ferguson: just the beginning

KMO: The embers have cooled, and by the time this goes out another week or so will have passed. I wonder what you think the lasting cultural impact of Ferguson will be. Michael Brown become as much a household name as Trayvon Martin two or three years from now, or will this be overshadowed by events to come? I’m asking you to go out on a limb, since some people will be listening to this a few years from now.


Brian: Unfortunately, we’re living in such a flickering society that it’s hard to say. When people got their news from a tangible object like a newspaper, or from conversations with people they knew, and it fundamentally changed the way people dealt with one another – a news item could have powerful repercussions across a community. Now, most people I talk to are social only in the sense that they stare at glowing rectangles all day, and connect with a lot of other people in their subcultural bubble who are also staring at glowing rectangles.

If you read books like Bowling Alone, and many studies in the same vein, it shows what a deeply-knit social structure my country used to have, and doesn’t anymore. To some extent you still have that in Ireland, at least among the older people, but Ireland is changing too as it becomes prosperous and Americanised – the young people are slowly losing the traditional songs and storytelling and pastimes, in favour of staring at glowing rectangles.

I don’t want to sound holier-than-thou about this, because obviously I blog and keep up with all these acquaintances over social media. It is, however, fundamentally changing the way we think; news now just appears on screens and disappears, and blink in and out of our minds, so I don’t think these events will linger in the public consciousness much. But it should. Because as we go further into some very difficult times – difficult because of fossil fuels, weather disasters, outages, shortages and other things like that -- and specifically for Americans because their empire is faltering visibly – people in general, and Americans in particular, will see some difficult times ahead.

What impresses me when I talk with elderly people here, and try to learn some of their traditional ways myself, is that Americans still have it really, really good. There’s no reason for most Americans to be suffering right now; they’re just not used to having less. But they are having to live with that, and Americans right now are some of the most frightened people I’ve ever met, frightened in a way that people in most other countries are not. And that’s a very serious thing.

Most of the economic relationships – their rudimentary means of getting food, shelter, warmth, water, security and so on – the basics of life – are vertical, to strangers in distant and possibly unaccountable institutions, rather than horizontal, to family or neighbours nearby, or singular, things that they can provide for themselves. We grow up warehoused in schools, and most young people are aware of it and don’t appreciate the squandering of their early years. But it prepares us for the life that many American children will live, as cubicle plankton in office jobs. We didn’t grow up with many real skills to provide for ourselves, and most of us didn’t know anyone else who had them either, so that kind of life was difficult to imagine.

When I talk with elderly people here, or people from any traditional society, who grew up before wealth or electronic media, I find their lives were fundamentally different. Most security was accomplished through social pressure and shame, rather than armed men wearing uniforms. Young men grew up occupied with chores and hard labour, rather than the opportunity for mischief. People were able to provide for their own needs in many ways, that we were not raised to be able to do.

People had deep relationships to other people around them, so that the person who runs the shop might have also helped dig your father’s grave, and might have helped you with your first communion. These many threads of relationship in every direction wove a quilt of community, which cushioned the weight of the world. So people might have been poor, but they were incapable of feeling poverty the way Americans do now, for their lives were not spent floating idly upon a sea of strangers.

There are lots of things like that, which I mention in the American Conservative article, that I don’t see many people talk about, in any political group. People talk about big things like the war, but not the million little things that make up people’s lives. Right now many Americans are terrified of each other, paranoid of authority but completely dependent on it, and convinced that everything is the fault of these vast conspiracies controlled by these people on the other side from their own, and filled with flamboyant stories about how terrible those people are. It runs through political groups, races, religions, all kinds of divisions. It’s an extremely unstable situation.

Here in Ireland recently there was a presidential election, with seven parties running candidates, and they had prime-time television debates between all of them. People in my office building would talk very freely about how they supported this or that candidate, and would argue jovially about it. Even in this country, which endures a revolution, a civil war and a decades-long guerrilla war in the lifetimes of people still alive, people were not so divided that they couldn’t open up about their opinions in a very friendly way.

But when I talk with a lot of people back home – again, Tea Party, Republicans, Democrats, Green Party and so on – it’s not that people felt strongly about their point of view. It’s that most people were incapable of arguing even their own point of view, because they couldn’t believe how anyone could believe anything else. They don’t even have an argument, and it’s difficult to bring up most subjects without having somebody explode.

With many things declining, it’s important for most Americans to understand that it doesn’t have to blow up. They are still wealthy enough that they could cope very well with less, but most of my countrymen have never had to do so and have no model for how this could be done. In the case of Ferguson, it started over what has become tragically common, the shooting of a young black man. So the story entered around my country’s deep and unresolved problems over race. But it could be something else next time, but unrest is likely to hit more and more places in the coming years.

I’m hoping that the kind of thing that I do – studying old crafts and values – could, in some small way, bridge different groups, like traditionalists conservatives and ecological liberals, and use some of the lessons of the past to help us prepare for a difficult future.

All text from KMO's C-Realm podcast. Photo courtesy of ABC News.