It's a miracle. Not so big a miracle, as the occupier of the White House says will happen with the disappearance of the corona virus, but it's still a miracle. I found something really helpful in a discussion of Facebook. I had posted the following photograph with a caption from George Orwell's 1984 A Novel.
'Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day, minute by minute. History has been stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.'
A few people gave the post a thumbs-up. One person said that the only thing Orwell had wrong was the size of the screen. But more people said that I was having a 'OK boomer moment', and that I was over-reacting, that books hadn't actually been burned yet. Since most of the woke folks don't read a lot of books, it was the erasing people with whom they disagreed that concerned me. Having been accused a few days earlier of being an old head, which is apparently someone who thinks that there are complexities to issues that are known by woke people to be simple, I realized that the idea that I might learn from listening to different positions on an issue was no longer fashionable. But then I was told that the destruction of statues of people who have been dead for 150 years is important to generate a discussion that it's important for us to have. No discussions without destructions, eh?
My own feeling is that monuments to people who held values 150 years ago today can be very helpful, if we would have our discussions in the context of human history. Since Shakespeare has been deconstructed as a white male chauvinist, we need them to remind us, among other things, of what fools we mortals be, to remind us that people who consider themselves marvelously moral can make mistakes. I suspect that nearly all of the folks who are on the side of tearing down the monuments now would have been subscribers to their erection 150 years ago. I remember a discussion at a United Methodist Church in marvelously woke Bellingham, Washington, about how evil the United Methodist Church is in Georgia, where the Methodists weren't fully behind gay marriage. It took no great courage or critical thinking to support gay marriage in liberal Washington. In each case the Church was just adopting protective coloration which helps them to 'grow', since it is having trouble paying its retirement expenses.
But it seems I was making a simple situation complex. If we don't tear down the statues of the folks who lost the civil war, NYU students will start opening slave markets in Union Square. We need, I am told, to be rehashing the arguments of the 1850's and clearly state the virtues of being on the side of the winners.
In that discussion the small miracle of enlightenment by social media occurred. I remembered again how right McLuhan had been to say that as we move into the future: 'we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look a the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future'. We no only are fixated on what we see in the rear-view mirror, we are rioting about it.
So, although I still think the demand for the destruction of past monuments is really, really short-sighted and foolish, and even though I tend to be snarky by nature, I am going to try to change the way I interact with people who are fighting about what they see in the rear view mirror. I am going to continue to suggest that Rightthink is almost always Party jargon that destroys freedom. I am going to try to be as truthful as possible about what I really think, even if it means deconstructing NewSpeak. I am going to try to encourage folks to think of ways we can make the future better based on probable results rather than on warm fuzzy intentions. I am going to try to encourage people to look at ways we can understand our future rather than just argue about the past.
What could go wrong?
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