{"id":124,"date":"2003-07-02T03:07:43","date_gmt":"2003-07-02T03:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:15","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:15","slug":"doom_faith_the_rough_waters_of_history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=124","title":{"rendered":"Doom, Faith & the Rough Waters of History"},"content":{"rendered":"

“klaatu” commented on my post below about doom & gloom<\/a>. As his comment was a thoughtful representation of a position with which I respectfully disagree, it’s worth further comment. This isn’t a ‘Fisking,’ as I don’t think that his points are self-evidently stupid; but I think there’s a critical place where his point of view is fundamentally flawed.
\nKlaatu’s point of view was as follows:<\/p>\n

Doomster and proud of it.<\/p>\n

From a fellow “doomster,” the columnist Pete Hamill:<\/p>\n

“Over the past six months, in conversations with old friends or with strangers, I keep picking up a new kind of bleakness.<\/p>\n

‘I can’t even watch the TV news anymore,’ one friend said. ‘Three dead in Gaza gets one minute, followed by another American shot in Iraq, a minute and a half – and then they cut to Scott Peterson and I turn the thing off. Even in 1968, in the worst of everything that year, there was some hope. Not now. It’s gone, and I don’t think it’s coming back.’<\/p>\n

The bleakness index contains many items: the mediocrity and cynicism of politicians in both parties; the merging of religion with politics, from Peshawar to the Potomac; the growing power of true believers in our government; the wretched runup to the Iraq war, the war itself and the bloody aftermath. We’ve known since 9\/11 there are lunatics out there, some so crazed with religious visions that they’d try to knock down the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the world’s glories. Reason has fled. Vandals haunt our nights.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Welcome to the real world, Pete. The forces that exploded into your attention on 9\/11 have been building for decades, and other people – pretty much anyone who read the local news in places like Great Britain, India, Sri Lanka, or Spain – not to mention the entirety of the Middle East and Africa – has been living with them at least since the 60’s.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the American government says it feels free to launch preventive wars, the way the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor. Vice President Cheney’s old firm, Halliburton, is building a prison camp in Guant\u00e1namo, complete with execution chamber. And the bloody quarrel between Israelis and Palestinians goes on and on.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to find consolation, for popular culture is also a wreck. Most prime-time TV is insulting to human intelligence. Movies are comic books. Popular music is calculated junk. Exuberance is gone, along with joy or even the artistic defiance of the ’60s.<\/p>\n

In public life, facts don’t seem to matter much. Through sustained propaganda and ingenious presidential photo ops, illusion dominates the political debate. In Iraq, nobody’s found weapons of mass destruction or a factual link to Al Qaeda. Yet the polls show that as many as 65% of Americans are in favor of their own deception.”<\/p>\n

The full column is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I think that if you’re cheerful these days, you’re either stupid, insane, a chaos-and-war- lover, a “true believer” seeing the apocalypse coming or so because of medication.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, I’m certainly bummed that Pete and klaatu are so depressed about things. Somehow my core response is to envision Woody Allen, standing next to the pale woman in the art museum, listening to her bleak description of the painting they are both examining, finally works up the nerve to ask if she has any plans for Saturday night.<\/p>\n

“I’m killing myself,” she replies.<\/p>\n

“How about Friday<\/u> night?” Woody asks.<\/p>\n

Folks, the world isn’t a sitcom in which a hapless but inherently sage parent can resolve matters in twenty-two minutes or an action-adventure movie, where the hero defuses the bomb and winds up two hours later on a beach in Bali with the scantily-clad secret double agent\/temptress. <\/p>\n

We humans are a problem-solving species. But most people know that it is inevitably part of the solution to any problem that it creates new problems. Before the automobile, the streets of New York City were awash in horse dung. After the invention of antibiotics, the population began to rise. We step down the stream from rock to rock, each step risky itself, and each destination rock slippery and itself no safe harbor.<\/p>\n

In the specific case, we’re riding in a canoe down a stream; up until now, we didn’t realize that there were rapids. But the rapids have always been there and now it’s our turn to have to navigate them.<\/p>\n

It is a challenge, and it will be risky. There’s no guarantee that there won’t be rapids below these. It certainly is the case that choices we made over the last years put us here. But it’s also true that, had we made different choices, we might have faced other, more dangerous waters.<\/p>\n

But I’m not interested in being led by people who look upstream and talk about how much worse things will be in the future, and how we should have taken that branch twenty years ago. The future we face is coming regardless of our desires.<\/p>\n

The future belongs to those who would paddle into the rapids, committed to seeing the other side. Too often, the left side of the boat – the side that in my lifetime used to propel the boat forward, embracing the future – is checking its oars.<\/p>\n

It would matter less if it was just a matter of arguing about steering the boat, if the issue was between two different paths into the future.<\/p>\n

But somehow klaatu and Pete Hamill have come to stand at the depressed, helpless center of things that would as soon capsize now and avoid all the future pain they see coming. And the inarticulate rebels – the anti-Modern, anti-Western rage<\/a> that sits at the heart of what I call “Bad Philosophy<\/a>” doesn’t only put them at risk, but all of us.<\/p>\n

Societies proceed on faith. It is the accumulation of faith – in society, in laws, in our fellows – that compels civilized behavior, and allows the complexity that delivers the computers and electricity that allow you to read this today. That faith depends in large part on our belief in the future.<\/p>\n

I’ve got a very different faith<\/a> than Trent does. But I believe in the future, and I’m happy to sit here, helping paddle the boat down toward the sound of the oncoming rapids.<\/p>\n

I don’t do it for fun, this isn’t some kind of recreation<\/b> to me. I do it so that my sons can live on the other side of the rapids, and in turn face rapids of their own.<\/p>\n

Anyone who believes they can live in another way – who expects their life to be led entirely in calm waters – is spending entirely too much time in front of the TV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Societies proceed on faith. That faith depends in large part on our belief in the future. I’ve got a very different faith than Trent does. But here’s why I’m happy to sit here, helping paddle toward the sound of the oncoming rapids so my sons can live on the other side – and in turn face rapids of their own. Anyone who expects their life to be led entirely in calm waters is spending entirely too much time in front of the TV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}