Backing away from the hyperbole

LB Johnson on the campaign trail. Credt: Wikicommons.

Our internet is back, and so am I -- thank you, readers, for being patient in the meantime.

My night on Irish television went well, and I hope to have a piece about the election appearing in a national magazine in the USA soon -- I'll let you know. Later this week I'll be back to posting about pickled apples, our neighbours, our bog butter and other things. For now, though, the US election is still on everyone's minds, and I'll have a piece about it appearing in a national US magazine soon. For this blog's 1,000th post, here is a longer version.

 ***

The morning after the election, you could recite the articles before you read them. After “the most contentious election in US history,” they wrote, “the art of fiction is dead.” Pundits called Donald Trump “the most unqualified president in history,” but said the voters were reacting to years of “social experimentation and economic extravagance,” motivated “not by ideology but a desire to vote against Hillary Clinton or a desire for change.” Democrats, meanwhile, were “turning their guns on each other” in despair. 

So far, so familiar. Except none of these headlines were from this election. The first quotes were from 2000, the last from 1980 (with the names of the candidate changed), the “social experimentation” line from 1942, the “turning their guns” quote from 1880. The “most unqualified” line has been used a lot lately.  

The protests, riots, and screaming apocalypse headlines crop up every four years – just more hysterically now than ever. After every recent election, bloggers and activists from the losing side announce that the USA has died and been replaced by Nazi Germany, and that we’re all heading for concentration camps. Some rural conservatives spent the Obama years talking about this very thing, a few even organising militias to prepare for what they thought was the inevitable. It wasn’t. 

Right now my Democratic friends are circulating reports of attacks by pro-Trump groups, in what the news site Quartz refers to as an “ugly picture of a torrent of frenzied hate.” Most of the reports, however, are based on unverified Twitter posts, with no more substance than similar reports from the other side. The most forwarded viral image – an alleged gay journalist covered in blood after an attack – contains few details, and as the debunking web site Snopes.com reports, no such incident was reported to local police. 

The same is true for other widely circulated stories – the Muslim woman who said that Trump supporters pulled off her headdress later admitted to police that she made it up. Activist web sites claim to list “hate crimes” from pro-Trump groups, but many of the photos and stories they list are dubious – for example, a photo of a truck flying a Confederate flag, something that is not uncommon, nor connected to this election, nor a crime. 

Even if a few fisticuffs broke out, my Democratic friends tell me, this is how Nazi Germany started. Except that almost every election in history has seen some similar tensions, and in all cases but one, it did not lead to Nazi Germany. In fact, that’s not how the Nazis began; events like the Krystallnacht left hundreds dead and tens of thousands arrested after a single night. In the week since the election the USA, a country five times the size of Weimar Germany, we have seen only a few violent incidents, and some of those were by Clinton supporters vandalising businesses, smashing windows and setting fires.

Look, I don’t know what it feels like on the ground in the USA right now, and I take threats to Americans’ freedom seriously – and if my friends feel despair or fear, I take that seriously as well, whether it’s founded or not. It’s just that I took it seriously with my conservative friends eight years ago too. It’s not that they were wrong about everything, just most things – and the good criticisms they had were drowned in a sea of hyperbole. 

Yet the rage and despair get visibly worse every election, and it’s worth asking why. Some of it, obviously, is the quality of the candidates -- but contrary to popular belief, we’ve had far more corrupt or vulgar candidates, and not that long ago. People aren’t just concerned – they are ready to blow a gasket, whether their side won or lost.  

Some of it, surely, is that so many Americans are working harder to make ends meet right now, so there is more at stake. Many reasons, however, seem to have more to do with our mental landscape than our physical one. 

For one thing, this election might mark the moment social media became the dominant force in politics. Newspaper journalists could be biased, but they were professionals who strove for at least a nominal balance, and wrote for the general populace. Social media gives you a flood of click-bait, hoaxes, and out-of-context images – and I mean “you,” as it’s algorithmically filtered to fit your darkest preconceptions. 

Through every increasingly tiresome cycle my conservative friends forward me horror stories about the violence and hatred of the liberal moonbats, and liberal friends do the same about the conservative wingnuts, with each side --- and many cliques inside those sides -- living on a different news planet. None of us, honestly, have the time or bandwidth to research everything we receive. All this leaves us breathtakingly unprepared for the moment when we look up from our glowing rectangle at some actual fleshy neighbours, who have spent the last several years inside a different filter bubble, and realise we have no shared points of reference to discuss our country. 

In the internet age, moreover, information flickers and then disappears, leaving the headlines of a few years or decades ago forgotten and making every situation feel unprecedented and apocalyptic. On Election Night I was part of a panel on Irish television, and was struck by how often pundits called this “the most contentious election in US history,” or some such phrase. I remarked later that the 1860 election, which resulted in a million deaths, might have been a bit worse.

This mass forgetting leaves us with few analogies for any new event, save those provided by pop culture; when a populist demagogue is propelled into power, Americans can only debate whether they will be a.) Hitler, or b.) not-Hitler, without asking whether they could be Peisistratus, or Sulla, or Justinian, or Komnenos, or Andrew Jackson, or any of the other possibilities. 

Likewise, the US media too rarely reports on the rest of the world, so Americans have no way to compare their democracy to others. Most other countries have multiple third parties representing a variety of approaches to government: socialist vs. capitalist, cosmopolitan vs. nationalist, globalist vs. protectionist, religious vs. secular. The US media steamrolls all these issues into a single left-right line, with various positions on abortion, trade, the environment or religious expression falling onto one side or another through shotgun marriages. 

There’s nothing inevitable about the current combination, however –William Jennings Bryan a century ago could be simultaneously feminist, segregationist, pro-union, anti-war, and creationist, and parties a few decades from now could come up with other combinations horrifying to the political class but much more in keeping with what most Americans want. Seeing only two sides encourages voters to see politics in terms of good and evil, which drives people to further extremes in pursuit of purity. 

Yet another reason for the bitterness of today’s elections might lie in the USA’s religion of progress. You might think of progress as a fairly obvious truth; we have vaccines, wi-fi and GPS, and our forebears didn’t. The religion of progress, however, doesn’t stop at being grateful for our current good fortune; it declares that history can and must continue in this same direction forever, at an ever-faster speed, as both a natural law and a moral imperative. 

Of course, this god has been failing for decades now; fusion power, flying cars and Mars vacations never panned out, and never will. Nor have the real technological changes turned out to be all beneficial; when authors extrapolate current trends for science fiction, they imagine a dystopia. 

Each side of our culture war has abandoned the religion of progress in certain areas, but no one can let it go completely; conservatives still demand progress in economics and technology, while leftists are “progressive” in social and sexual arenas. Whichever you are, your faith demands that you can never rest -- whether you imagine the next step to be artificial intelligence, genetically-engineered meat or multiple gender categories, it must be taken, no questions asked. No one, on any side, is allowed to ask whether some experiments have succeeded or failed, or to question proposed future changes -- that would be surrendering to the enemies of progress, condemned to the wrong side of history.

For many Democrats, the Obama election was the ultimate proof of progress, and Clinton’s the next necessary step – so they didn’t just see a single election defeat, but the derailing of our national future. Newsweek accordingly called Trump’s supporters “anti-progress,” but most of them have a similar philosophy and use the same metaphors. They simply believe the train already derailed, and want to put the country “back on track.” Neither side questions the basic metaphor, or whether a single office-holder can change the direction of a train.  

Another reason US politics feel so urgent to American voters is that most were born in a Cold-War superpower, and we reflexively refer to our president as the “leader of the free world,” the individual with their “finger on the button.” Yet that world is ebbing away, along with the USA’s monopoly on global influence, and it turns out that’s literally not the end of the world – many leaders far more dubious than Mr. Trump have fingers on buttons these days, yet we’re a lot further away from nuclear war than we were fifty years ago.  

In the 19^th century, electing the president meant electing the supervisor of a single branch of a single level of government in a single country. The same is true for elections in Ireland, Norway or most countries today; they look downright relaxed in comparison to ours. It’s not because there is more agreement or less choice – just the opposite – but because voters are simply choosing someone to represent their interests, someone who can vote for a new hospital or bus route.   

As the executive branch swelled to dominate the federal government, the federal government swelled to dominate the country, and the country swelled into a global empire, the US presidency took on more responsibility than any office should have. Americans today are told they must choose a leader for the entire world, someone who will negotiate peace between nations, repair the global economy, command US troops, reverse the global climate shift, violate the laws of physics, be charming on television and set an example for young children everywhere. Demanding such impossible standards every four years means that every candidate becomes the Man that Dreams are Made Of, and every election carries enough weight to break us. 

Finally, we Americans grow up with the stories told by movies and television – hateful villains, sassy heroes, a countdown to Armageddon, a last-minute save and a happy ending -- all designed to pound our emotional buttons and resolve in an hour or two. After generations of these stories, their maximalist language has become our own; any new infection becomes the Zombie Apocalypse, any candidate we don’t like becomes an Evil Overlord, and we discuss all social or environmental issues in disaster-movie language, saying “we have only a short time left” to change everything “or it will be too late.” 

What happens after it’s “too late” and we’re still here? High unemployment? Occasional rioting? Government spying on citizens? Troops at war overseas? Local uprisings? Mass incarceration? Those things are happening now. Sure, they could get a lot worse –the USA is so divided right now that it’s not impossible it could break into mass unrest as Northern Ireland did, or break up as the Soviet Union did. At the same time, you probably still have all manner of food and technology that most people never had, and are safer and luckier than most humans who have ever lived. My liberal and conservative friends alike, as they pound all-capital-letter messages with multiple exclamation marks on Facebook, are not actually in a concentration camp, and it's not too late for them.   

I don’t know what kind of president Mr. Trump will be– by all means, keep a watchful eye on his administration. Clinton supporters can stop, however, going on as though they’ve been robbed of the glorious future they were supposed to have, if only their candidate had been elected, and that we are now sliding into an age of evil and darkness. No political figure will fix or destroy everything. There is no bomb counting down to Too Late, no point at which it is Game Over, nor any point where our story ends Happily Ever After. The nation is not a ship that can sink or a train that was speeding towards Progressistan; it was not derailed, and will not get Back on Track. 

You won’t defeat the Moonbats, Wingnuts, Useful Idiots or Forces of Hatred, because those are imaginary concepts from a web site – the people on the other side are named Molly and Amy and Adam, and they are trying to do the right thing just like you are. The odds of they, and you, dying is 100% in the long run, but the odds of dying in the next few years in a Zombie Apocalypse, Nuclear Armageddon or Nazi Death Camp are quite low. Remember, we’ve been through this many times before, and we’re still here. 

No matter what happens, no matter what your politics, there is one thing that’s bound to help your country in the years ahead. You could help rebuild the social institutions around you -- churches, fraternal organizations, town halls, unions, markets, and webs of mutual obligation – that have so deeply deteriorated. They are what democracy used to be, before it became images on a screen. They are what our dreams used to be made of. They are what kept towns and neighbourhoods functioning fifty or a hundred or two hundred years ago, back before we looked to a candidate to fix everything for us.

Commenting on Irish television tonight

I'll be part of a panel commenting on the US election on the Irish network RTE tonight; check it out if you can. I still don't have our internet fixed at home, so I'll be slow to respond to comments.

In the meantime, everyone stop panicking about the election. You see that sunset? They'll probably be a lovely sunset tomorrow night as well, and for many nights to come. We're used to thinking of every new development as the end of the world. It won't be.

Our internet is down

My apologies to those who have written to me; I'm not ignoring you deliberately. This just happens sometimes where we are. I hope to have internet again in the next few days.

In the meantime, if you are one of the many people writing me in a panic about the US election, you might like some of my previous articles on:
* elections in general,
* this year's US election,
* this year's big news in UK politics,
* this year's big news in Irish politics, and
* the current US penchant for revolutionary fantasies.

Finally, if you're feeling as tense about the future as many of my friends, feel free to check out this piece I wrote on the alleged 2012 apocalypse scare. This time it's an election instead of a Mayan prophecy, but I'd say much the same.

Human Time and God's Time

One of the many reasons I enjoy John Michael Greer's blog is that his posts, and the comments, spur me to write about things I find fascinating but might ordinarily let pass, and inspire me to make time to post something new. Today he wrote about the term "Anthropocene," newly popular among the ecologically-minded. 

The term is meant to reflect the fact that humans are transforming the face of the planet as deeply as the asteroid did at the end of the dinosaur era, or as deeply as the Earth ripping open at the end of the Permian. Therefore, they argue, we can't call this era by the old biological or geological classifications; it is an era in which the chemistry of the air, the acidity of the seas, the temperature, the albedo, the animal and plant species, are all defined by humans. It is, they say, the Anthropocene. 

Greer is not fond of the new term, and gives a good argument as to why, which I won't sum up here. I did, however, contribute my own thoughts: 

You make an interesting point, JMG. 

A bit of rumination on your theme: I’m not personally bothered by the term “Anthropocene,” simply because all these divisions are, to a point, imperfect teaching tools created by and for humans. Our divisions reflect a physical reality, of course – there really is a K-T boundary about 65 million years down through the rock, for example – but as you mention, they represent modern scientists building on and adapting the terms handed down to them from their predecessors, who did the same, back to the beginnings of science. 

Someone doing the whole thing over from scratch might make the major division the Great Oxygenation Event – or the Iron Rain, as I call it when teaching my daughter – when the seas and sky became saturated with oxygen. It would be about halfway through the Earth’s history, and it changed the planet in what, for us and most living things, are the most tangible ways – the seas and sky turned blue, the iron rained out of the sea, and most life was wiped out. Or before and after eukaryotic cells, or Hox genes, or land vertebrates, or any number of other game-changing developments. 

Our divisions tend to be biased towards what we can see, because we can see it, and biased toward animals rather than plants, because we’re animals; the spread of mammals also coincided with the spread of flowers, fruits and grasses, which changed the world more than mammals did, yet we think of the Age of Dinosaurs and the Age of Mammals. We divide eras or divisions into single-digit groups of three or seven, rather than thirty-three or five thousand and seven, partly because that’s what human brains can remember. 

I mentioned in a comment some weeks ago the difference between fact and truth; facts are data, but how we put them together reflects the truths we believe in. It doesn’t mean we’re not describing reality – we are, and can back it up with evidence. But we can describe the same reality in a number of different ways. 

In other words, it’s like the debate over whether Pluto is a planet – no one can deny that there are several large bodies and many small ones orbiting the sun, but the inner rocky planets are small, solid spheres, asteroids are smaller, solid potato-shapes, gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are stillborn stars, and Pluto and the comets are dirty snowballs with weird orbits. 

We group the four rocky spheres and the four gas giants together and call them “planets,” and possibly Pluto if we feel like it, but not the asteroids or comets. The planets and their orbits are proven facts; how we group them with our human language reflects our human truths. We group them into eight or nine partly because we remember that a lot more easily than the several million smaller bodies. 

We called Pluto a planet when we discovered it in the 1930s, partly because society believed in progress and wanted to celebrate new discoveries, partly because the growing power of the USA in the 1930s wanted to claim its own astronomical discoveries, and partly because Percival Lowell (whose initials, supposedly, were part of the reason it was called Pluto) had long predicted there would be another planet out there, and people thought Pluto was it. 

What I’m getting to here is, if referring to the current ecological disruption as an era helps us take it more seriously, call it an era – it is from our human perspective. It won’t be an era to God, who -- as Aquinas pointed out -- exists outside of time, but we can’t second-guess Him anyway.

 

Chatting with neighbours

When I lived in a regular American suburb, we would be surprised to see a tractor rolling up our driveway, but here it’s a normal thing. Today, it was our neighbour’s farmhand carrying a giant round hay bale for us, a gift from our neighbour.

My neighbour – we’ll call him Liam – has raised cows down the road for 75 years, and whenever I drive, jog or bicycle down the canal road, we stop and chat. I mentioned to him my daughter does archery, and uses bales as targets; he had bales that had sprouted grass and were no good anymore. Thus, we get a free archery target sitting in our driveway, and this week we’ll roll it to some suitable location behind the house.

Liam also passes on news about all our neighbours – not idle or intrusive gossip, but information you’re thankful to have. He tells me that his farmhand’s trailer was robbed recently; they suspect a few shady local kids rumoured to use drugs. Ireland has far less crime than the USA – one-fourth the number of homicides, for example – but we still have drugs and petty theft, and every area has its share of ne’er-do-wells and troubled souls.

The difference is that in more traditional communities, everyone knows who they are, and you can’t get away with much. It’s not that there’s no privacy – not like living in an internet culture, where people’s browsing history and bathroom photographs can be displayed for everyone to see. Rather, most people out here keep to themselves, and don’t nose into each other’s lives – but what you do in public matters. 

Everyone here knows the “boy racers” that drive too fast along narrow roads where children play, and some neighbours, I’m told, run to stretch spike-chains across the road when they hear the racers coming. Everyone knows to dogs are blind, and to slow down when they pass that stretch of road. If there's waste clogging up the canal or a bad smell coming from the mushroom factory, someone will complain; these things affect everyone, so everyone has a right to know.

Today I ran past my neighbour’s field --- we’ll call him Padraig – as he was picking his potatoes, and asked if he wanted help. He’s 86, and still sows and harvests his own crops by hand. He refused the help, but chatted amiably for a while.

Your potatoes look good, I said – ours got the blight.

“When did you plant them?” he asked.

I believe it was around St. Patrick’s Day, I said.

“You shouldn’t get the blight like that,” he said “We planted the same time, and we had a crop by July. Did you buy the seed?”

We chitted our potatoes, and then planted them from ones we bought, I said.

“Ah, those are bag potatoes,” he said. “Try certified seed next time, and if they don’t get the blight, use the eyes of those to make the next year’s crop. Do you have any sallies around?”

When I first got to Ireland, that sentence would have made no sense, but I knew he meant willow trees. Quite a few nearby, I said.

“You don’t want sallies too close to potatoes,” he said – “They encourage the blight. They attract the things from the air that cause the blight, and if potato fields are nearby, you’re more likely to get it.”

I haven’t looked into whether this has any scientific basis, but I like that people here carry that kind of local lore. We talked about the blackberries growing all along the hedgerows, distracting me from my morning jog, and he said they weren’t as tasty as last year’s, but were larger – he put it down to when the summer rains came. “That makes all the difference,” he said, and he might be right.

In fact, the hedgerows that line each field are positively sagging with berries of all kinds -- poisonous yew; lovely blackberries; the rose-hips that are so good for jam, and the sloes that grow on the blackthorn trees, so good for making into gin. We also see a profusion of haws on hawthorn trees and elderberries on the elders – the first is too bland to eat raw and the latter too tart, but both make a nice wine. Most years we’d be spending our spare time gathering them, but this year we’ve been busy with other things.

Right now, it’s merely cool and dry, a high wind is whistling across the bog, all our neighbours’ gardens swell with crops ready to be picked, and the leaves are changing rapidly. Everyone – people, animals, plants – seem to be in a hurry, doing their duty before the wheel turns and we plunge into the long and rainy darkness of the Irish winter.