But it’s hard to process the feeling of this. I almost said “to know how to feel”, but that’s really an odd phrase, isn’t it? As if we can choose how to feel.
In the face of all this uncertainty, though, I think anger and intellectualism are safe refuges. They take us OUT of this place and time, but in doing so they create some stability.
I see something every day to be angry about. Don’t you? Don’t we all, on every particle of the political spectrum?
And is not the news nearly 100% abstract? Are we not always reading about people in some other country or city saying things we have not witnessed? Has the whole world, outside of our small circle, not become abstract, and do we not even then make our own small circles abstract? When you see a group of girls–it seems more often to be girls, although of course I am generalizing–sitting around, together, but each on their phone texting someone else–they, too, have become abstract to each other.
A robot is an abstraction of a human being. It is what a human being would be if you took all emotion, and all physical need out of it. Does this abstraction make it perfect? Of course not. Not to me.
Abstraction and the cult of efficiently go together. Jacques Ellul pointed out, back in the early 1960’s, how the cult of efficiency was a peculiarly American form of propaganda. We ingest it, and we rarely question it. Well, the hippies did, and the slackers do, but they more or less oppose it because they want to remain perennial children. They have nothing creative to offer as a genuine alternative.
But I think this whole background needs to be noticed. It is the backdrop of much of the rage so many people feel about so many things. Fear leads easily to rage, and it is really impossible for anyone who thinks and feels not to wonder where this is all leading, if our world will still exist anything like it does today in 20 years.
So we shout and scream at each other. Anger both presumes and breeds certainty, and certainty–even a little, even for a short time–is an emotional analgesic.