I participated in building the computer network we all know today and almost everyone but me calls the Internet, with or without the initial capital. However, my opinion forming habits are from the late twentieth century, which means I grew up intellectually on newspapers, periodicals, broadcasts, libraries, and classes, not computer networks. Those habits linger, but the first source of information and opinion for most people now, even septuagenarian cave dwellers such as myself, has become the computer network.
Fifty years ago, I ordered books from Blackwell’s of Oxford and was happy to get the books in a month. Today, I am upset when a computer takes more than two seconds to respond. This accelerated information cadence has changed the way everyone thinks.
The old way was question-search-ponder-respond. New question. Today it is question-response-new question-new response-new question-new-response… No more forced pondering while waiting for a response, which could take months.
Unfortunately for us today, the pondering step is the most difficult and creative step. And the most valuable because pondering accesses inner resources, not inflow from the outside. Pondering comes from us, not others. Consequently, public discourse is easier and more voluminous than ever before, but the fire of its humanity is dampened. Thoughtless blurts retweeted ad nauseum wash in tidal waves through the forum.
Today, the assassination of Charlie Kirk is pounding back and forth in the echo chamber. Any assassination is deplorable. The end of the life of a popular, eloquent and forceful personality attracts immediate and intense attention, but, today, little pondering.
The U.S. has seen many assassinations: Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Martin Luther King come to mind.
How Kirk’s death will be judged by future generations is unknowable, but current technology means the public has read about his death more, but pondered it less, today than any of these previous deaths in the short weeks after their occurrence.
Socrates was executed 2500 years ago for corrupting the youth of Athens. The justice of his death and its effect on public discourse is still discussed in classrooms. How will Charlie Kirk’s effect on the youth of today be discussed even ten years from now?
I read an article in the New York Times this evening “The Radicalization of a Small American Town.” Brian Groh, the author of the Times article, describes a microcosm of the radicalization of America, a small town in Indiana that has been devastated by the economy of the 21st century, wracked with pain and death of opioid addiction, crippled by the response to the covid-19 epidemic, and violently political.
Sunrise in Whatcom County
Instead of the friendliness, lack of pretension, and sense of decency Groh remembers from his youth, he recounts the story of a former neighbor who was recently threatened when he expressed a political opinion.
Groh laments the change.
Opioid crisis and the radicalization of America
It’s a good story, but I wonder if many of his neighbors would agree with his view. I looked at opioid death statistics in Indiana where statewide deaths per thousand are above the national average. The county in the article has one of the lowest rates in the state. We in Whatcom County are fortunate: although opioid and other drug deaths are still far too prevalent, some statistics show a slight decline in the opioid death rate in Whatcom County between 2002 and 2018.
We have a problem, but not a raging crisis. Thank heavens. Covid-19 is bad enough.
Rural Indiana
I’ve visited Mr. Groh’s rural Indiana. I’ve never lived there, but it felt like home as I listened to conversations among farmers at the tractor dealership where I was installing software. Both my Dutch and German ancestors spent a few decades in the Midwest before they made their final jump west to the edge of the Pacific Ocean. In rural Indiana, I felt like I could have been in Lynden or Ferndale.
What’s changed?
Groh’s experience does not match my experience in Whatcom County. I agree that the rural America I see today is not the place I saw when I was growing up. But the question is what changed? Did Whatcom County change? Or did I?
Well. I changed. I know that. I went off to college and graduate school.
What I learned
There, calculus taught me that differentiation and integration are mathematically two aspects of the same operation. In chemistry and physics, I learned that science can measure and predict the changes around us with greater precision than muddled impressions of undisciplined observation, but it continually refines and deepens understanding rather than lays down immutable laws.
At the age of nineteen, a mathematical logic class forced me to plumb the mysteries of the proof of Gödel’s theorem, which asserts that no matter how much you know, there will always be things you can’t fully understand. By twenty-one, I had learned to read classical Chinese and was forced to notice that the Athens-Jerusalem axis of western civilization has not been the only foundation for successful societies.
Then I realized that a humble farm boy had best quit straining the seams of his underpants. I came back home to work that out, but I was no longer the kid I was growing up and already I saw Whatcom County through changed eyes. But I also realized that my eyes had become exotic. I fret over Gödel’s theorem. My neighbors don’t.
Fifty years later
Fifty years later, I’m still working on that project. I see that my neighbors and relatives have many virtues. They are tough, self-confident, often happy. Some are prosperous, some think the prosperity they deserve has been withheld by forces they should control but can’t. Some are accomplished, many are stylish. A significant number are convinced that they have right on their side. I’m still the lout with manure on my boots that I was fifty years ago.
My experience is in the software business, which is like most businesses, as far as I can tell. You don’t last long in the software if you can’t spot who is likely to get the work done and who is likely to screw things up. I learned to stay away from loudmouths who succeed by refusing to pay their help, stiff their creditors, shift blame, and counter reason with bluster. They may succeed for a while, but eventually business caves in around them and everyone loses. That’s about as far as my politics go.
Doubling down
I also know it is easier to double down on a bad choice than it is to switch to a better choice. Switching to a choice that you once rejected is a humiliating struggle. I’ve been wrong often enough to know the sick feeling and bad taste that fouls my gorge when I recognize a misjudgment. I’ve faced it often enough; I don’t wish it on anyone.
When a bad choice is not all bad, the struggle is more painful. If a segment of the population prospered for three years while others struggled, the segment that thrived will not readily give up their gains. They will be proud of their sagacity. Those who look up to prosperity often throw their lot in with the prosperous even though they have reaped few benefits. Humans are not good at balancing long and short-term gains.
2020 vs 1960
In pandemic 2020, everyone is overstressed and close to anger. Add an atmosphere that promotes strife and tension over calm, and you have a community inclined toward violence.
But is the Whatcom County community fundamentally different from the same place sixty years ago? I say no. It was not ideal then and it is not ideal now. McCarthyism was still a topic sixty years ago. Racism was casually accepted among my parents and grandparents. Abusing native Americans acceptable behavior. The Ku Klux Klan flourished for a while in Whatcom County. Dig into the local newspaper archives and you soon run into language and propositions that might make you flinch.
Given today’s conditions, I think the county of my youth would have been inclined toward violence, perhaps more so than today. Although gun enthusiasts are vocal and prominent today, guns and ammunition were more easily available fifty years ago. Most country people had weapons for dealing with varmints and were ready to use them. More so than I see today.
Racism was more overt, mistreating the tribes was usual.
But serious violence never erupted. That’s important. Today, folks rant about antifa and the far right. As a kid, I overheard talk about threats from Bolsheviks, Wobblies, Fascists, Communists, and so forth, but it all turned out to be nervous fretting.
Is Whatcom County radicalized?
I don’t think so. No more today than fifty years ago. What I do see today, like fifty years ago, is a huge and quiet majority of concerned good people who want to live their lives in peace with their neighbors.
Last week I attended the Washington Library Association’s conference in Yakima. It reminded me how important libraries are, especially today. When I look at the way people are split today, I am deeply grateful that I live in he 21st century and not in the 19th or even the 20th century.
I know many people wish they were back in the “good old days,” but don’t look to this reader of old books for support.
In the 19th century, in the United States, we fought the bloodiest war in our history over slavery. Opinions were so strong that brother killed brother and mothers killed sons and daughters over opinions that were comparable to our divisions today over issues like race, gender, immigration. In my opinion, if people travelled and moved from state to state as little now as they did in 1850, if communications were as slow and expensive today as they were in 1860, we would be on the verge of another shooting civil war.
But we are not.
In the 20th century, we fought two devastating world wars. Today, we have a trade war, we have cyberwar, treaties are being revoked, and nations are contemplating building their arsenals in ways we have not heard of for fifty years. There was an assassination in Turkey a short time ago that is as diplomatically catastrophic as the assassination that started World War I, but I do not fear another shooting and bombing war world war.
Nations are now mutually dependent. The isolation of war will devastate the globe faster than the explosions and bullets of 20th century wars. I noticed this morning that Caterpillar has put out a decreased earnings notice to the stock analysts due to the increased price of steel. A sign that the trade war is has set its own back burn.
The fire of war will begin to snuff itself out before the weapons discharge.
Why am I so optimistic? Well, I recently read a book recommended by one of the smartest people on this planet, Bill Gates. The book by Hans Rosling is called Factfulness. Rosling is a Swedish public health official and researcher. He has dispensed medical aid on the ground in some of the neediest and most dangerous places on the globe and he has rigorously sifted through world health and social statistics. He concludes that humans are undergoing a breathtaking transformation in which global hunger, disease, poverty, ignorance, and lawlessness are rapidly declining. The human race is safer, better fed, and healthier than ever before and trending toward improvement, not decline. These are trends that no single nation can change.
But Rosling’s observations are not the only reason I am optimistic. The world we live in today is much different than the milieu that made life perilous in the past. I find myself a more tolerant and better person than I was fifty years ago. I see better people around me. We are all better.
The library conference filled me with hope. I heard over and over that race is behind us, the folks at the conference, to a person, thought that fear and discrimination by race was irrelevant, stupid. I heard over and over that the old patriarchalism that placed males on a pedestal was just passé. Gender, sex, the weird old ways of structuring society are stupid, boring, a waste of everyone’s time.
Libraries and librarians are on the leading edge of a new society, and a very fine edge it is. I am so glad to have a part in the new way.
