Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Is it us versus them again? four forces part four


This or That =- Right or Wrong - Us or Them


Well the last few posts have been dedicated to primal influences in our (U.S. and Western) culture that influence how we make meaning of things and thus seek peace and joy in life.  So far we have considered industrialization which has dominated  our work lives and educational systems, science or more specifically the scientific method which has dominated the way we gather and evaluate knowledge and elevated the notion that predicting and controlling how parts of a whole act can provide the Truth and what should be believed, television (or more generally the multimedia-visual input we bring into life using broadcast systems to present things on a screen and now we are looking into the fourth force—the tendency or need to look at foreign affairs and nearly everything else regarding  others as a “dualism.”  


I —yes I am starting with an open admission that this is a lifelong battle topic for me.  I have never understood the gravitation that most people have toward categorizing  other humans, where they live, and how they behave  in a manner that is either like me or completely the opposite  of me… Nonetheless just because I don’t quite understand this need it doesn’t make it any less powerful  and so observations  about it seem to be called for.  


Now that I am of an age and all humans  of an age, I can look back on a “lived through history.”  I can therefore remember  personally being taught that the communists the Russians  were evil and wanted to take over  the world.  We were in the space race with them, we were in the arms race with them, We wanted to stop their advance and the advance of communists everywhere on the planet because once one country falls the next one could and would fall to these evil thinkers who are godless and such.  Because we believed this  so completely we held atomic bomb attack drills in school where we had to get under our desk and “duck and cover.”  This meant we spent real school time teaching kids that a wood or metal desk would protect them if they were the target of an atomic weapon attack.  However, if that were true why didn’t we just build our school out of that stuff our desks were made of?   Oh and we were supposed to be quiet—why?  We’re there some secret  red spies in third grade who had a hot line to the folks in Red Square  waiting to reveal our strategic location? Wait..I digress..


Well the point is that as time went by the Russians power and influence lessened and communism didn’t quite work out the way it was drawn up in real world terms.  We learned that the Russians weren’t that great after all we could beat them in hockey and we made  them tear down a wall in Germany.  We beat them to the moon and we had better jeans and video games than they do… In short we couldn’t fuel what we did based upon beating them at something anymore.  So now what. Well given recent historical events we find it really tempting to hate the Russians again but it’s not the old Russia.  We could hate China but we pay them to build our iPhones cheap and so we can maintain a high profit margin.  China  pretends at communism  but not when playing in the international market.  So … with the lack of a global enemy we have faltered a bit in having something to be unified over.  What then has happened?


Well that’s simple… we’ve turned that need to compare and divide on ourselves.  We are either “red” or blue… Why can’t states be purple  or yellow or aquamarine?  Crayons come in big boxes with a sharpener built in (how many times  did you ever use that?  The big question is..why do we crave this simplicity?  Are we afraid to live in the complicated stew of trying to understand people. Rather than trying to control them?  It is easier to urge and oppose rather than understand and cocreate our circumstances.  For so many people we have not been taught how to take advantage of the pieces of a puzzle to form a beautiful picture when just sorting things into two piles  is so much faster.  When survival of humans wad more dependent upon identifying creatures that could and would kill us dualism was a bit more important however, the last I time I looked I wasn’t brushing my Wooly Mamouth  loincloth and chanting around this new-dangle cooking appliance called fire.  


Okay the purpose of this entry isn’t to cast evaluations of humans out there …it is designed to bring attention to the notion that dualism is  something shaping the ways we seek peace and joy and bring meaning to our experiences.  


Now…that we have illustrated these four forces… it becomes time to provide some “implications” and that is the business of the next entry…. 



 

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

What were watching last night Universal Force Part III


 The Four Sorces Part III —“Television”


Well we’ve sort of looked at industrialization/standardization as something that dominates or did dominate the workplace and our schools along with the narrative that if you try harder. And compete you will do better and better etc…. Then we looked at how defining the world in terms of science has  led to advances, however it also encourages us to break all things into little pieces, assume that these pieces always equal the whole and that we can predict and control the world and the people in it.  The implications for seeking peace and joy  related to these two forces alone  are staggering  and yet there  are more things to explore before a “summary” of sorts might be offered and the third of these epic forces is ….”Televison” and the changes. In it that are fundamentally altering the world.   Let’s tune in shall we?


Let’s take a stroll down memory lane shall we Uncle Milty?  Unlike “cultural products like say painting, theatre, music, dance,oh and let’s say books “television is a new deal.  Oh and it got it’s start during the New Deal and just barely.  If you are 75 or older there is a good chance. You remember not having a television in your house.  If you are in your 60’s  you grew up with only two or three channels and you developed some expertise  in going out of doors and spinning your attendance so that the “snow and shadows  could be reduced.  If you grew up  just a few years later you had “cable and three channels went to 20 or 30 and then to 60 then 100 then if you lived in the right place and had the right paycheck around 500 channels.   Well and now “television”  is “streaming digital”  where this thing we call a television offered tens of thousands of shows/movies/sounds when you want to watch it.  Oh and since this includes  YouTube and tick-tock… we are able to watch virtually unlimited content everywhere all the time.  


So what does this all mean for seeking peace and joy?


When TV was young it was a unifying force.  Everybody knew that everybody was watching one of  three nationally shown shows and a few local shows.  We all had something to follow in common and talk about the next day…. A whole country was wondering. Who shot J.R.?  We all watched as the riderless  horse led the mourning masses to the eternal flame and we all knew  the name Archie Bunker Hawkeye Pierce, and who rode trigger.  And then there were reruns… and millions still watched the same shows where people ent to places where everybody knows your name and had questions on their minds like  will Ginger, the skipper and his little buddy and the professor get off that darling island this time?  Sure some of us wondered  how there were six kids when Mike and Carol never touched each other in the bedroom and wasn’t it amazing that Lude and Laura never had to pass gas or tinkle?  anyway the older generation went from radio  where all programming was pretty local to a media that was pretty unified and so our cultural experience  of entertainment  became a common thing we could share.   And then…. 


Technology started giving us more and more choices and more and more decisions and more and more  and more and more and more and is still giving us more until  now the programming  we could access and produce went from a narrow range. To something that offered much but also drives us  into smaller and smaller  bunches and where we fight not to produce  similar things but to produce unique things and hope that  we gain a little fame  or go viral so to speak.   The same thing.holds true for print media or digital print data… In short seeking peace and joy with others has become far for complex as we once  could believe in what we watched however now we can watch anything we might choose to believe.  


In short this thing known as the TV once pulled us together  and now it often leads us to be staring  at a screen by ourselves.   We may alll think of TV as if it is what it was when we grew up… and depending when you grew up that’s an entirely different thing than it is now.  And yet… what we see on these screens is still a dominant. Force in how we look at the world and when we look at it too.   When some of us grew up it was the six o’clock news or the 10 o’clock news and now everything is breaking news. 24 hours a day.  Oh and sports?  Well we used to watch one baseball game a week and maybe a couple of pro football games and one college  game a week.  We had that in common along with that poor guy crashing off the end of that ski jump feeling the agony of defeat.  


We’ll talk more about this force in the summary, however for now. Let’s all take a moment to think about how TV/video has changed in our culture  and in our ways of understanding the things we experience.    This whole discussion  will continue after these brief messages at the same bat time and on the same bat channel.