The question of modernity

The question is really this: how do we occupy, emotionally, a world which is in a process of continual, global, and paradigmatic change?  A world where we fear daily we will read about some massive holocaust, and where we do read about angry people, new and possibly dangerous technologies, amoral leaders, and in which seemingly everything and everyone is interconnected?

I vastly prefer this to, say, the dislocations of the Hutus and Tutsis, both, in their civil war.  I think of the 250,000 Hutus who entered the Congolese jungle, and of whom only 40,000 emerged, all of whom, with perhaps a few exceptions, were then slaughtered and starved even then.  This is horrific.

What is happening to us is not that concrete, not that specific, not that real.  Rather, it seems there is a drip, drip, drip in which we daily lose some fixed source of comfort, in which something we thought we knew is taken from us, in which our culture and history is attacked, in which some small slice of our sense of self is taken elsewhere for examination, in which lab coats and expensive suits tell us everything will be alright, and we don’t, in the main, believe them.

How to occupy this world, with eyes open, with a receptive heart?  This is the question of our age, and those who have glib and easy answers are idiots.  Their solution is blindness.  Blindness is always an easy answer, but in my own world–resting as it does on the primacy of building accurate perceptions–such a thing is as close to a mortal sin as I can conceive.  I speak here mainly of those I call Sybaritic Leftists, and would include there people whose views on the universe and human relations as a whole I would otherwise support, like Deepok Chopra and Brene Brown.

I, obviously, haven’t worked it out.  I may never work it out.  But I guarantee I will spend the rest of my life trying.  It’s the only game in town worth playing.

Edit: I will add that the superficiality, particularly, of all hard core Leftists–who I will include in this group in the process of defining them–consists more or less in a Stockholm Syndrome sort of relationship with the “captors” of uncertainty, cultural erosion, and fear of the future, as manifested in psychotics with plans, like George Soros and the people ultimately behind Barack Obama.

Perhaps the relationship of fearful minds and evil has always been like this.  I suspect this to be true.  There is nothing new under the sun.

Courage, of course, is the answer.  How to summon and sustain it: that is my task.