September University

Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters

2011-11-05T11:02:00.000-07:00

©Charles D. Hayes

“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia forinnocence and an appeal to the essence of being.”

--Albert Camus

Why doesit matter that the past assumes greater importance for people as they age? Whydoes getting older seem to cause people to discount the future, diminish theimportance of the present, and experience a longing to live in the past?Furthermore, will this happen to you, and if it does, what will you do aboutit?

Inseventeenth-century Europe, nostalgia was thought to be a treatable disease. Itwas an especially dreaded malady in military organizations during that periodbecause it provided a plausible excuse for AWOL soldiers. While it is no longerconsidered an illness, nostalgia is often thought of today as an escape fromreality. It is also associated with aging, and American demographics makenostalgia a topic that’s growing in importance.

In her thoroughlyengaging book The Future of Nostalgia,Russian writer Svetlana Boym warns us that “nostalgia can be both a socialdisease and a creative emotion, a poison and a cure.” She says, “Nostalgia is asentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s ownfantasy.” She reminds us that what might appear to be a longing for anothertime, may in fact be an act of rebellion, or a longing for something that neverexisted. Such is the case, I believe, for many of us who grew up in the 1940s,’50s, and ’60s, as we shall see.

Imperceptible Influences

I’ve knownmany people over the years who seemed as they grew older to be lost in time,and you may have observed something similar. My father, who was born in 1921and died in 2002, appeared to spend the whole of his adult emotional life inthe 1950s. Of course, this was only in his attitude toward life in general andhis taste for entertainment, but the older he got, the more he seemed towithdraw to earlier times. The days of his youth in the 1930s and ’40s werepainful, so he found comfort in the ’50s. As the years passed, the onlytelevision programs he would watch were reruns from earlier years. He may haveset a record for watching Gunsmokeepisodes, and he did so without seeming to remember what would happen next,even though he had seen each show scores of times.

The morethings changed in popular culture, the more my father resisted, and the sameapplied to my mother. Their reluctance to participate in what was currentlyhappening was a mystery to me when I was growing up, but it is less so now, inmy seventh decade, as I find myself more and more reluctant to take part insome of the new social media technologies. Puzzling over my own shift inattitude has led me to the conclusion that the past matters because it has muchmore influence on our experience of the present than we commonly think it does.The better we understand its influence, the more we may be able to help thenext generation contend with the future. Let me explain.

The geographicregion where we grew up, the economic conditions, the prevalent ethnicity, thesocial ties, the religious affiliations, America’s foreign relations—all ofthese states of affairs congeal in our individual psyches in our youth andresult in our outlook or worldview. Indeed, the human relations we experienceas children very often affect our relationships with others for a lifetime.

In thepast, it has been commonplace for generations shaped by circumstances to gothrough life sharing opinions of a similar nature because of their commonexperience. History reveals, however, that many of the things taken for grantedby generations past were based on illusion or mistaken premises. In otherwords, each and every generation makes perceptual mistakes in apprehendingreality. These can lead to a lifetime of unrealistic expectations based uponmisperceptions of the times in which we’ve lived. This is why understanding thepast is so important to the present, the future, and the very quality of ourlives.

Many of us,even in the fall and winter life, continue to be steered along a life coursethat began when we were much younger. We are still impelled to act by forces wedo not yet recognize as being a part of our motivation. And thus our grasp onthe illusive nature of free will is suspect, especially in light of recentresearch in neuroscience that has many scientists rethinking the wholephilosophical premise of free will and the notion of authenticity.

A Search for Significance

In histhoughtful book How to Say It to Seniors,DavidSolie says, “When we start to realize that we’re not going to be here forever,we become aware that it’s not clear what it meant to be here at all.” I thinkthis is true for many of us, but I don’t think it applied to my parents. They wouldhave shunned this level of introspection, refusing even to entertain such aquery, because they never learned to question their experience. They tookeverything at face value, and when people do this without careful scrutiny andcritical examination, they become easily manipulated by anyone with a hiddenagenda.

Solie goeson to describe how aging comes with a drive toward discovering one’s legacy.Again, I think this might be true for most people, but not for everyone. Thatsaid, I recall that before she passed away, my mother began to focus on thingsno one but she took seriously, and she dwelled on them repeatedly. It was clearto me that she was in search of something of significance, no matter howtrivial it seemed to others.

Granted,our experiences as individuals are so varied that it’s hard to make universalclaims about our behaviors. Nevertheless, I believe it is a common occurrencefor thoughtful people to initiate a search for the things that have made theirlives meaningful when it becomes obvious to them that the time they have leftis much shorter than amount of time they’ve already lived. For many people thisseems to occur subconsciously. This is where nostalgia can lead us either to ameaningful north or to a dead end of isolation and despair.

It makesperfect sense that as we age we would begin at some point to long for thethings that have meant the most to us and that this experience ismetaphorically analogous to mining one’s past for value. If this is true, then it is likely that we will find what weare looking for by closely examining the tailings of our life experience andhow they compare with other generations. Moreover, this is something we must doourselves because no one else can sift through our personal life experience.

Fantasy as Reality

ElsewhereI’ve written at some length about how each generation longs for what it grew upwithout. This novelty is intriguing when we compare our perceptions with whatreally happened during the time periods we are drawn to. For example, televisionfamily life with Ozzie and Harriet Nelson and Lucy and Ricky Ricardo in the1950s gave the appearance of representing a much simpler and more innocent timewhen there was little mystery about the notion of right and wrong. Indeed,black-and-white television, which is all most people could afford in thosedays, provided the perfect moral metaphor for the time period.

I recallthe 1950s fondly. If memory serves me right, I took some comfort in theidealized family life portrayed on television during that period. It seemed tome that the Nelsons’ life experience might be something to aspire to and thatmine was not a good comparison by any measure. A great many of us probably feltsimilarly about I Love Lucy. Ourlives were not as much fun, but still we could hope for better times. Ofcourse, back then we didn’t know (at least for sure) that Lucy’s sponsor,Philip Morris, was slowing killing many people in the audience with cigarettes.

Knowingwhat I know now about the history of those days, it’s hard to appreciate whatit might have been like if I had been aware that the Nelsons’ television familylife was a façade, that Ozzie Nelson was something of a tyrant, and that thedysfunction in his family mirrored that of my own in some ways. What if we hadknown that Lucille Ball was not the fun-loving nut she appeared to be onscreen, but was instead an aggressive businesswoman, obsessive aboutappearances, or that Ricky was a hard drinker and a womanizer, and that Lucyknew this but kept going for business’s sake? What might this knowledge havemeant to us back then? Would it have changed how we feel now about 1950s?

In thosedays, our entertainment was aspirationally idealistic. Say what you will aboutthe producers of 1950s television, I think they meant well, even if thelong-term results of their efforts are not so clear. Today the quest forrealism often calls attention to the worst of the worst, as if this werenecessary for establishing a credible foundation for entertainment.Believability is paramount right up to the fantasy genre, at which pointnothing is too bizarre. If we had been better acquainted with the reality ofthe circumstances in which we were growing up, you have to wonder whether ourideals and aspirations would somehow be different today.

How mightwe view the 1950s if we considered our idealistic entertainment to be adistraction from the realities that should have been acknowledged andaddressed—realities like mindless conformity, bigotry, racism, misogyny, and anearly total lack of awareness about how our activities affected theenvironment? Was our ignorance bliss or arrogance? Answering these questions isnot a simple task, but I can’t help but think there might have been a greatdeal of solace in realizing that television was portraying unrealisticexpectations of family life in America. In my own case, the knowledge mighthave helped to make my family life seem less of an unfortunate exception tonormality.

Nearly twodecades ago, Stephanie Coontz published TheWay We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, a work thatshould be required reading for every person who wants to truly understand theAmerican psyche. It explains how our egregious penchant for thinking ofourselves as exceptional human beings on a planet of lesser individuals stemsfrom deep-seated illusions about who we are, where we come from, and the waythings used to be. Coontz suggests that “growing up in 1950s families wasnot so much a matter of being protected from the harsh realities of the outsideworld as preventing the outside world from learning the harsh realities offamily life.” She has a point.

Coontzdemolishes the historical and ideological justification for government hatredthat is so much a part of today’s politics with a narrative of what really tookplace in the early days of American history, and she exposes the myth ofself-reliance for the fantasy it is. This is not to say that the early settlersof the American West were not industrious, hard-working people. Rather, it wasrailroad expansion, public subsidy, government land grants, and militarymobilization that built much of middle America and the West, along with a formof community volunteerism that was based upon expectations of being compensatedby the government. Simply put, with almost a religious sense of admiration wecelebrate a West that never existed, and by doing so we set ourselves up forfailure because we can never quite measure up.

All ofthis romanticized history was played out in American movie theaters in the 1950s.Not only did we celebrate a west that never was, but we continue to do sotoday. As a result, we persist in holding on to unrealistic expectations aboutthe general cause-and-effect aspects of daily life and about human character inparticular. We readily excuse ourselves for not living up to our own idealisticexpectations simply by the nature of being who we are, while we simultaneouslyproject the failure to live up to historical myths onto the imperfections ofthose we consider out-groups, outsiders, or freeloaders, as we are likely toview them. All of this for the simple reason that we have difficulty relatingto people when their differences are so great we cannot accept them into ourgroup. This deeply unfortunate human saga repeats itself in perpetuity, asignorant people aspire to aggrandizing fantasy, live on misattribution, andthrive on a form of contempt made up from legend.

Coontzunderstates the case when she describes nostalgia as a potential trap; it isthat and much more. Ethnocentric contempt is magnified when groups ofindividuals idealize a past that never really happened, and they do so becausethe very existence of the otherbecomes a threat to their daydream. If human beings cannot be depended upon tolearn beyond the heresy of popular culture, then we are doomed to experienceneedless anxiety and pointless conflict, especially in our politics.

Of course,a much more realistic view of the past has long been accessible for thoseadults who really care enough about the truth to get beyond the culturalillusions that serve as protective barriers for our respective groupidentities. The irony is that, even though most of what we need to know aboutthe past is well documented by serious historians, the record of actualAmerican history has been so thoroughly revised by ideologues in our publicschool systems that many history books are little more than fairy tales withregard to the truth they are supposed to represent. School boards in Texas havebeen censoring history textbooks for years, and they do so openly.

In thecommunities where I spent my youth, racism was as prevalent as sunshine.“Separate but equal” was anything but equal in Oklahoma and Texas. The racismwasn’t subtle; it was overtly in your face and ruthless, if pressed. People inNorthern states sometimes express doubt as to the claims people make about thesegregated South. Unless you experienced it, the depth of social discord andthe complexity of the relationships among the races can be hard to comprehend,both then and now.

Though Ididn’t grow up in Mississippi, Katherine Stockett’s The Help and the movie of the same name portray the essence of thesegregated South very much the way I remember it. The novel and the movie havebeen subject to a fair amount of criticism, and the ambivalence on the part ofAfrican Americans who view this subject with bitterness is understandable.Indeed, the story may not represent the truth as it applies to every Southerneror their memories about those years, or to the racism that continues to beprevalent today. Nevertheless, Stockett raises issues that still need to beaired and examined thoroughly by society at large. Racism is such a difficultpsychological hurdle to get beyond that regardless of which race tells thestory, and regardless of their sincerity or what they say, their efforts willevoke criticism from the other side as a way of pushing back.

Lessons of Hindsight

In hisbook Back to Our Future, David Sirotaoffers a compelling argument that the past has a tremendous effect on thepresent and that today’s politics are an ideological battle, the firstsignificant shots of which were fired in the 1980s. About this period hewrites, “The pitting of the idealized fifties directly against the tarnishedsixties and then making that battle America’s central political cause startedright at the beginning of the 1980s, thanks to events at once calculated,chronological, and coincidental—events that symbolized a monumental changing ofthe guard.” Sirota argues that Ronald Reagan represented an ideological returnto the 1950s and a complete refutation of the 1960s. Today, the Tea Party isresurrecting the same battle cries.

Howstrange, how odd, how ironic, and how sad that the very time period thatresulted in the civil rights era for minorities and advocacy for women’s rightsstill raises the ire of many people as a period to be scorned, and that anidealized period that was not at all what it seemed is still revered. It was atime when standing up for one’s conscience was a common occurrence and theVietnam War was brought to a close, resulting in the cessation of theunnecessary deaths of what surely would have been many thousands more of ourservicemen and women.

Warts andall, if there was ever any social movement since the end of slavery to be proudof it should be the 1960s. We take the positive results from those days forgranted, and yet the nonsensical things that shouldn’t matter much at all, likelong-haired hippies, still evoke a sense of rage in people who see no progressfrom those years and who continue to see things that weren’t there when theywere.

It’s worthconsidering here that, regardless of the period in which we grew up, theidealized aspect of that era is magnified by the fact that, when we werechildren, being free of the worries that come with adulthood made things seemmuch simpler and better than they actually were. We remember the good withemphasis and relegate the bad memories to the dark corridors of our minds. Aschildren most of us didn’t have an ideological political worldview that we feltwe needed to protect and defend. As adults we do.

Many of uswho grew up during the Cold War were emotionally acculturated to be so averseto the implied threat of Communism that some of us to this day can’t discussany subject that veers toward anything socialistic without experiencing a floodof emotional anxiety that in effect ends the discussion before it has a chanceto begin in earnest. This crippling expressive response is a political weaponof choice by those factions who know how to use it, and nostalgia plays a bigpart in their ruse by associating the past with things we cherish, even if theynever existed.

Growing upin Irving, Texas, I overheard adults speaking in hushed tones about the evilsof Communism and socialism. Two school teachers in our neighborhood, with whattoday would be considered slightly left-of-center politics, were rumored to beCommunists or, worse, Soviet agents. If I recall correctly, they eventuallyleft the state to escape the stigma. Of course, bomb shelters andduck-and-cover classroom drills helped drive home the fear that still makes itimpossible for many people to have a rational conversation about matters ofovert social inclusion for those considered outsiders. And indeed, part of ourargument about the superiority of capitalism over socialism was our access tomaterial wealth. Material wealth was taken as proof positive that our systemwas superior to socialistic societies.

Anabundance of material goods during the 1950s made the future look as bright asone wanted to make it. It seemed as if every few weeks Betty Furness announceda new kitchen appliance or household product that threatened to end housework.This perception was so prevalent that in his book The Fifties,David Halberstam notes that dishwashers didn’t sellwell at first, precisely because their use seemed to call into question theneed for housewives, period.

The racewas on to the suburbs as tract houses appeared by the thousands. Millions ofpeople left the farm when industrialization overcame agriculture as themainstay of the economy. Income tax rates were through the roof (90 percent inthe top brackets), but people still got rich. The wages for many entry-leveljobs were enough to enable the purchase of a home with all the furnishings,plus an automobile. Of course, those of us who were children at the time didn’tknow that this applied almost exclusively to white men. Not that there weren’ta lot of clues, if one had been paying attention. In hindsight, the racialinequality of those years stands out like a skyscraper.

Incomparison to today, the 1950s seem prudish to young people, and no doubt theywere. Still, these days, when “the moment is right” Cialis commercials playduring prime time, nostalgia for the 1950s seems to me an appropriate response.Think of how far we’ve come from a time when male and female adults could notappear on television sitting on the same bed. It’s important to remember,though, that the self-censoring conformity prevalent in the 1950s carried withit a cultural reaction that would make today’s notion of political correctnessseem mild by comparison. Back then, in the community where I grew up, anyone whoeven mentioned a politically controversial topic in mixed company, like civilrights for women or minorities, was shushed to silence with a vengeance and put in one’s place, so to speak—itself aterm laden with contempt and steeped in racial prejudice.

So, is itbetter to pretend that things are rosier than they actually are and to embraceidealistic entertainment, or is it better to focus on the worst and appreciatethat indeed life is not really as bad as all that? I don’t have clear answersto these questions, although I think it is a grave mistake not to ask them andpersist in finding answers that suit our individual life circumstances. Perhapshaving the answers is less important than encouraging people who lived throughthose times to figure out why bygone eras have such great appeal. If those ofus near the end of our lives were to do this in large numbers, we might be ableto offer the younger generations some clear-cut advice that would ring trueloud enough to be taken seriously. It could help us decide what we might bedoing now that is worth preserving and what we should stop doing immediately.Today the amount of material goods we have dwarfs what we had in the 1950s. Westill suffer endless distraction, but our idealism and goodwill for our fellowAmericans seems in serious decline.

If wecould get to the bottom of what is really valuable and why, perhaps we couldcease with generational battles over things that we imagined were important butthat never actually occurred or existed. Maybe we could get to the crux of whattruly matters in a free society in order to sustain freedom—not an abstractnotion of freedom, but something most of us would consider the real thing, likenot being bankrupted because of a serious illness. Economic freedom for whitemales seemed very real in the 1950s. I for one would like to do whatever isnecessary to make this so for everyone today. Betty Furness probably couldnever have imagined the household gadgetry we have today, and yet the Americanmiddle class by nearly every measure seems to be in freefall toward a moreimpoverished existence.

In the1950s, the American economy nearly doubled, and job growth was explosive in allsectors of the economy, while the percentage rise in wage compensation wasgreater for rank-and file-workers and middle managers than for CEOs. Since the1970s, the economy has grown exponentially at warp speed in the otherdirection. Perhaps if we can shift back and recall what we thought was valuablebefore we became psychologically politicized, we might be able to think our waythrough today’s growing inequality.

Many ofthe parents of those of us who grew up in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s themselvesexperienced the hard times of the Great Depression. So, it’s not surprisingthat they would want much more for their children than what they had when theywere young. And thus, it’s also not surprising that a whole generation andsubsequent generations would be given more in material comforts than anygeneration in history and that we would thereafter be viewed as spoiled. No doubt many of us were.Perhaps we still are. But growing up accustomed to getting just abouteverything we wanted had a surprising effect. Instead of being eternallygrateful as we were expected to be, hundreds of thousands of young people inthe ’60s, with the aid of college and television, began to become overtly awareof the injustice that they had taken for granted as the way things are.

Sad tosay, I wasn’t one of them. I was discharged from the Marines in 1964, after afour-year hitch, and it wasn’t until many years later that I began to seethrough the cultural façade that I had thought was a just society. The civilrights era began in earnest in 1955, but it didn’t pick up full steam until the’60s. Once this movement was coupled with ending the war in Vietnam, the wholecountry appeared to be coming apart.

Make nomistake in assuming that what at times seemed like a revolution underway didn’thave its share of charlatans. The so-called Age of Aquarius yielded a seeminglyunrelenting barrage of new religions and spiritual snake-oil salesmen of everybent imaginable, not to mention the sexual revolution generated by birthcontrol or the rise in drug use. The call to“do your own thing” was takenunderstandably as an affront to everything the older generations had workedfor. Those who were young then but are old now can surely empathize all of theway back to their grandparents as to why they were troubled by the chaos.

No one hada lock on moral virtue in the 1960s, but when the psychological dust hascleared from that era (and I’m not sure that’s happened as yet), I trust itwill be apparent that the good that came out of the ’60s outweighs the bad insome ways, but not in others. We are without a doubt a better society as a resultof the civil rights and women’s rights movements. But it’s not clear that wehave learned the lessons we should have from our experience in Vietnam.Moreover, the anxiety kicked up as an aversion to the ’60s culture resulted ina war on drugs that by any standards is a legal and moral disaster. Furtherstill, business malfeasance coupled with government corruption has led to greedso scurrilous that it threatens our very way of life. If the financial meltdownin 2008 didn’t convince us of this, perhaps nothing will.

Mining for Value

Some notedpsychologists in the past have observed that if we could take a snapshot of theworld when we were about ten years of age, we will have found the well fromwhich our values spring. By that age, we have come to accept that the way theworld is, is pretty much the way it should be. So, now that we know this, howdo we make an adjustment that realigns the older adult that we have become witha world of experience, a flawed memory, and the ten-year-old who mistakenly tooka childish worldview for an acceptable reality? I regret that there is not aneasy answer to this question. But, in my view, it’s crucial that we must ask itof ourselves. Just as one must prime a pump to draw water from a well, we mustalso question our past critically in order to learn from it.

Whateveryour political views are today, I would wager that a thorough rethinking of thepast, beginning when you were about ten, can help you make better sense of ourcurrent situation and perhaps have a positive effect on the future. If theexperts on aging are right, we are going to feel the tug of nostalgia anyway,so why not make it worthwhile? Having been raised with blinders on, so tospeak, it should be easier for us to help the younger generations see throughthe illusions that have enveloped them since birth.

It’salmost embarrassing that every time a major election rolls around, ourpolitical candidates try to outdo one another in their claims about Americanexceptionalism. We are no doubt exceptional in our arrogance: America is a landwhere millions of people have adamant opinions about subjects they’ve neverseriously looked into. The fields of psychology and neuroscience have madegreat strides in the past two decades in understanding the frailties of humanbehavior and the powerfully dominating influence of our political identity, butwe are still far from benefiting en masse from this research.

Nostalgia,though, is a good place to start because it cuts to the chase of what we reallyvalue. We long for what we care deeply about. Not what we imagine was valuable,but what we really think that matters or mattered in the past, period. Gettingto the bottom line of what stands out as being truly important in our lives issomething adults do more and more of, especially when their future is eclipsedby the reality that the time they have left to live is short. Simply put,nostalgia can become a comforting refuge from the ever-increasing complexity ofa world we find more and more estranged from than the one we grew up in, whichmakes it enticing and a bit slippery.

In Composing a Further Life: The Age of ActiveWisdom, Mary Catherine Bateson appendsa footnote, or perhaps something better described as an amendment or an add-on,to Erik Erikson’s life stages. Oncean assistant life-stage teacher to Erikson, Bateson introduces us to what shecalls Adulthood II, characterized as engagement versus withdrawal, with thebasic strength being active wisdom and indifference existing as its corepathology. Sad to say, my parents chose withdrawal and indifference. Today, aswe each become aware of such tendencies in ourselves, we can make a consciouschoice in favor of wisdom.

If thepast represents the holy grail of our values, then getting to the bottom of ourfondest memories is an effort vital to our aspirations as human beings.Nostalgia is a key to unlocking that which was once valuable and subconsciouslystill is. But even if what we value is still present and ubiquitous in popularculture, it is often obscured by the increasing complexity of everyday life.Hindsight really is valuable but not for the reasons most often given. Over thenext two decades American demographics are going to make nostalgia a front-pageissue. It’s already underway in the entertainment industry, and these effortswill pull at the heartstrings of those of us who can and will be easilymanipulated politically. Ideologues of every stripe see opportunity in thevulnerability of public sentiment, especially among large groups of people nearthe end of their lives.

Thequality of the future will depend in part on whether we learn from the past orwhether we are simply manipulated by advertisers and politicians. If we canmine the past for real value, perhaps we can gain enough existential equilibriumto live without blaming others for our misfortune, whatever it might be. But aslong as we continue to live by historical illusions, we will continue to failto live up to expectations that were doomed to failure from the beginning, andthe need to find others to blame will continue to dominate our politics. Thereis much about the past to treasure for good reasons. Let’s just be sure that weknow what those treasures are and whether, in fact, they are real.

KINDLEBooks and EBooks on Amazon:

SeptemberUniversity: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life

ExistentialAspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher

TheRapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning

Beyond the American Dream: LifelongLearning and the Search for Meaning in

ProvingYou're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees

TrainingYourself: The 21st Century Credential

Self-University:The Price of Tuition is the Desire to Learn. Your Degree is a Better Life

Portalsin a Northern Sky: A Novel

KINDLE Essays on Amazon:

Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out ofthe Fall and Winter of Life

America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance

Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake toBelieve in Ayn Rand

Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? OrHas It Just Begun?

Heroism,Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt

Learning A Living: Career Success WithoutFormal Credentials

Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters

PursuingJustice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy

WhyPolitical Dialog Is Disingenuous

NOOK Books and Essays on Barnes& Noble

Portals in a Northern Sky: A Novel

Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out ofthe Fall and Winter of Life

America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance

Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake toBelieve in Ayn Rand

Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? OrHas It Just Begun?

Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedyof Hidden Guilt

Learning A Living: Career Success WithoutFormal Credentials

Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters

Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and theBaby-Boom Legacy

WhyPolitical Dialog Is Disingenuous

Websites

AutodidacticPress Website

September University.org Website

Blog Sites

Self-University Blog

September University Blog

An Essay by a Philosopher

2011-07-23T11:52:00.001-07:00

Here is an essay titled "Killing theThings We Love" by John F. Schumaker, who is one of the cultural criticsthat I admire most on this planet. I thought you might find it of interest.Best.

http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/762/1/

As always your comments are appreciated.

Charles D. Hayes

KINDLEBooks and EBooks on Amazon:

September University: SummoningPassion for an Unfinished Life

ExistentialAspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher

TheRapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning

Beyondthe American Dream

ProvingYou're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees

TrainingYourself: The 21st Century Credential

Self-University:The Price of Tuition is the Desire to Learn. Your Degree is a Better Life

Portalsin a Northern Sky: A Novel

KINDLE Essays on Amazon:

Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake toBelieve in Ayn Rand

Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? OrHas It Just Begun?

Heroism,Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt

Learning A Living: Career Success WithoutFormal Credentials

Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters

PursuingJustice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy

NOOK Books and Essays on Barnes & Noble

Portals in a Northern Sky: A Novel

Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake toBelieve in Ayn Rand

Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? OrHas It Just Begun?

Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedyof Hidden Guilt

Learning A Living: Career Success WithoutFormal Credentials

Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters

Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and theBaby-Boom Legacy

Websites

AutodidacticPress Website

September University.org Website

Blog Sites

Self-University Blog

September University Blog

Time for Boomers to Step Up or Matter Not

2011-05-09T13:01:00.000-07:00

© Charles D. Hayes

For decades I’ve seen a spate of new books be published, almost as if the times demand them, celebrating the rewards of aging. Then a few years later, more books emerge to refute the lot of them by focusing on the darker side of growing old. I would like to think that September University falls in the middle, although that’s for others to decide. But four recent books in the latter category come to mind and offer some insight into the realities of aging when we compare them to the positive hype we hear so often about the so-called golden years.

In Shock of Gray, Ted Fishman’s subtitle forecasts his expectation of what’s to come: The Aging of the World’s Population and How it Pits Young Against Old, Child Against Parent, Worker Against Boss, Company Against Rival, and Nation Against Nation. Fishman paints an austere image of the future, assuming we stay the current course. He cites studies showing that older adults are easily influenced by negative stereotypes associated with aging. In other words, if we are said to have poor memories because of our age, we tend to act the part. Fishman asks many provocative questions about aging demographics that only time will answer, but many portend an economically depressive time ahead if immediate actions to avoid them are not taken.

A still darker view comes from Marc Agronin’s How We Age: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Growing Old. Agronin provides examples of aging seemingly gone wrong. He does so with the best of intentions, but it doesn’t make his observations any less dismal. One of his conclusions, though, is heartening. Agronin claims “our greatest humanity emerges in the desperate process of caring for someone old and ill.” If we could cultivate this virally as a stereotype, it could be useful.

Then comes Susan Jacoby’s Never Say Die. One of my favorite authors, she reminds us of the absurdity and nonsense we experience as suggested in her subtitle: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age. Jacoby breaks through the psychobabble as she always does, regardless of the subject, and stops in its tracks the hyperspin about positive aging with assertions of reality like this: “We cannot continue to base our image of old age on the extraordinary person, blessed by a combination of affluence and physiological hardiness, who remains ‘sharp as a tack’ and takes up a new youthful hobby—say, skydiving—in her nineties.” Personally I’ve heard the sharp as tack assertion from people describing an older relative more times than I care to recall; it’s a stereotype for certain and one we can do without.

Finally, the book about aging that I can’t get out of my mind is Ira Rosofsky’s, Nasty, Brutish and Long: Adventures in Old Age and the World of Eldercare. Perhaps I’ve seized on the book because it’s about nursing homes, and my experience with them has been grim in the extreme. Rosofsky writes with profound seriousness, but also with humor and compassion. What he calls the “Rosofsky Law of Inverse Proportionality” is the part I find unforgettable. About professionals like himself who care for the elderly, he writes, “The more training you have, the less time you spend with patients.”

This fact speaks volumes about the lack of objectivity among healthcare providers and in nursing homes in particular. It speaks even louder about their concern for their profit margin, which too often is a more important objective than the well-being of their residents. Rosofsky’s Law bodes ill for the future of millions of people—a future where little encouragement is needed to find something to worry about on the dark side of aging.

Perception

Recently I was explaining to a colleague that never in my 68 years on the planet do I recall a time when the future seemed more threatened and unstable than now: earthquakes the world over, nuclear devastation in Japan, and tornadoes by the score in the Midwest. The U.S. is to varying degrees engaged in three wars and counting, as the Middle East implodes and the threat of collateral terrorism is always a concern, especially with the death of Osama bin Laden. Financial ruin is the reality for hundreds of thousands of people as the housing meltdown continues seemingly unaffected by efforts for remedy. We still experience unemployment that rages on in spite of record profits for corporations, while compensation for the well connected is off the charts, even higher now than before the financial calamity began.

All of this concern makes the idea of some measure of economic equality and stability for America’s middle class at large seem totally out of touch with reality. Through media sound bites and a diligent investment in political lobbyists, the rich and powerful have managed to subvert the public imagination so thoroughly that a large percentage of the electorate who are ironically near the bottom economic rung in America view the prospect of raising taxes on the rich as tantamount to a Communist plot. And raising the cap on payroll taxes for social security, which is one obvious solution to keep the payout stable, is avoided as if the idea is radioactive. Add the exponential growth of Alzheimer’s, rising medical costs, an absence of goodwill to see that everyone gets healthcare, the threat of global pandemics, and the looming shadow of ever- possible government shutdowns over simplistic ideologies in future federal budgets, and one could easily begin to worry about what’s ahead. My list could go on and on, but I need not continue because no doubt you can do that on your own.

Reality

What I do know for sure is this: In a few short years those of us in the fall and winter of life will be no more, but the effects of what we did or did not do in life will continue on like a tsunami of cause and consequence. Or what’s just as likely is a void reeking of irresponsibility, where action could have made a difference but didn’t due to collective apathy. Maybe this attitude is better characterized simply as a lack of interest, while individuals en masse play cards and strive to improve their golf game.

Depending, of course, on where you are in the world and under what circumstances you live, my emphasis on the perception above can seem trivial. Earthquakes and tornadoes, for example, have always been a part of our reality, and if you’re near the epicenter of the former or in the path of the latter, the rest of my argument is moot. But through the centuries, from the very beginning, Americans have been called on to act when action is necessary, and every generation has a responsibility to take responsibility for their times. Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation is a case in point.

Even for those of us who are keenly aware that life is not fair, the realities of aging accentuate that unfairness with a vengeance. So much illness and so many accidents befall people later in life that spending too much time fretting about the future can rob us of what time we have left. In September University, I layout an ambitious blueprint of ways in which I hope to make a contribution to posterity. Though I’m very much aware that I may not be able to live up to my own expectations, I’m determined to do as much as I can while I can.

Rising to the Occasion

In sharp contrast, I’m reminded constantly that the two people I have admired most in life, my maternal grandparents, would have thought it strange to set out to do something for posterity. In a recent episode on Book TV, Stephanie Coontz talked about her new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. She took her book title from an opening paragraph in Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, where Freidan wrote of the need for women to rise to the occasion of changing their life circumstances. She described this first realization by many women as a strange stirring.

Many of us today are likely experiencing similar stirrings but with misgivings as well. Coontz puts in perspective the difficulty of taking action when it’s called for because of how hard it can be to figure out what ought to be done. When one is beset with feelings that the status quo is unjust, the path forward can seem unclear because any action taken to correct the situation will go against the grain of custom.

Hearing Coontz describe the social mores of gender roles in the 1960s is stunning, even though I experienced them as an adult. Gradual change over many years can later seem striking with the full realization of how dramatically things have changed. A half-century ago, women’s rights were more apparent than real. Their roles were in many cases rigidly defined. Some form of oppression prevailed in most aspects of women’s lives, from being highly subservient in marriage to the kind of work women were thought to be suited for. Upon reflection, this kind of realization makes the actions of past generations more understandable. Times change and people do, too.

My grandparents’ generation lived through the global upheaval of World War I, and my grandfather experienced the war firsthand in the trenches in France. Their generation endured the Great Depression, and to a significant degree this was their occasion. They rose to meet it with a penchant for self-reliance that would last a lifetime. So, while my grandparents likely would have thought that openly setting out to make a contribution to society is puzzling, they did, in point of fact, rise to the occasion of the times in which they lived. Their extraordinary self-reliance stands out now as strange in contrast to the expectation of receiving some kind of aid that most people live with today whenever assistance is needed.

In an earlier essay, I wrote that my grandparents increasingly found themselves in a more alienated world, a world of strangers and of customs that seemed to grow more absurd with each passing year. And now that they have been gone for many years, the world no longer seems like a place amenable to their very existence. In other words, they were not right for now, and the world today is not right for them. There simply has been too much change. This affirms Coontz’s observations and implies that each and every generation can expect to experience enough change to require reflection and thoughtful action in response. Indeed, I would argue that, because of advances in technology, the need for reflection and thoughtful action is growing exponentially. The kinds of change that once took a century can occur in a generation, and what once took a generation can now occur in a year or two.

My grandparents lived lives very much worthy of emulation, but my parents did not follow their example, and in many ways I haven’t either. And yet, nowadays, the lessons of their lives are constantly on my mind. Now, I realize that they rose to the occasion of the times in which they lived in the best way that they knew how. These days, the occasion in which we find ourselves calls for nothing short of a political intervention, to keep middle-class America from disappearing. Our taxes are the lowest they’ve been in a half-century, and yet public perception is so erroneously skewed that it’s considered unthinkable by many to ask that corporations and the super rich pay a higher tax rate. Wall Street captains of industry complain that we have the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world, and yet two-thirds of American corporations pay no taxes at all.

This brings me back to the biggest lesson from recollections about the last years of my grandparents’ lives. The two people I admired most in life experienced years of misery as their health deteriorated. So acute and severe was the condition of their physical health that the word torture comes to mind as an appropriate descriptor. My grandmother cared for my ailing grandfather at home rather than send him to a nursing home, and her own health suffered as a result. She did eventually go to a nursing home, where she died what could only be described as a wretched death. If we want something better for ourselves and our family members, we are going to have to rise to the occasion and make it happen.

With thousands of baby boomers turning 65 each day, seldom a month goes by that some news of their life circumstance doesn’t make a media headline—how many baby boomers can’t afford to retire, for example, or how many will face poverty in old age. In September University, I put a lot of faith in the baby boom generation to use their life experience to the fullest, with the expectation that if only a small percentage of their vast demographic chooses to engage in some activist sense of rising to the occasion, it could, would, and will have a positive impact on the future. If there were ever a time for a strange stirring it is now. Time will tell. What will your contribution have been?

September University Blog is now available on Kindle

My latest books:

September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life

Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher

The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning

The Other As Enemy / Is Enemy to Democracy

2011-04-08T08:26:00.000-07:00

Described as “an eloquent meditation on the nature of hatred,” philosopher Sam Keen’s Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination, published 20 years ago, should be taken down from the library shelf, reread, and republished. It doesn’t, however need to be updated; it’s as pertinent to today’s reality as it was when it first appeared in print.

Keen opens the introduction with this observation: “In the beginning we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or the ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology.” He goes on to explain that depth psychology presents us with the “undeniable wisdom that the enemy is constructed from denied aspects of the self.”

While acknowledging the fact that there are real aggressors who qualify as real enemies, Keen calls to our attention the idea that, to produce mass hatred, the body politic must remain unconscious of their own paranoia, which, due to a predilection for thoughtlessness, never seems to be much of a problem. Moreover, Keen acknowledges that paranoia, far from being aberrant behavior, is a normal part of the human condition and that it contributes to the ethos of tribal loyalty and patriotism.

Faces of the Enemy is rich with quotable material on nearly every page. Keen shows how utterly easy it is to alienate one’s imagined opposition in such a way as to justify any and every means of obliterating them. The reason this is so effortless is that people we observe as different in some way are easily dehumanized. Differences can be exaggerated and magnified, and once someone’s humanity has been destroyed, the way they are to be treated is no longer a matter of morality because they are no longer seen as qualifying for fair treatment.

Although I’ve said Keen’s book does not need updating, we do need to put contemporary culture in perspective through the lens of Keen’s insightful and morally profound observations. I still recall reading a few years ago about the notion of ideological amplification in academia and how stunning a revelation I thought it to be. Ideological amplification is simply an acknowledgment that when groups of people of a particular political or ideological bent get together they are apt, by nature of their association, to go further in the direction to which they are already leaning. On the face of it this seems too simple an observation to get excited about. But to the contrary, people unaware of this tendency are especially vulnerable to ideological manipulation. In my view, America is suffering mass manipulation today for perhaps the most sinister and egregious reasons ever: egoism and greed.

Each day millions of people begin their day with nothing particular on their minds other than how they will spend their time and perhaps how they will spend their evening. But in the course of the day, whether they are engaged in meaningful work or drudgery, they often tune in various media pundits as a means of staying, in touch with what’s going on in the world or simply for entertainment. Now this would seem a harmless activity, except for the effects of ideological amplification.

Many media pundits make their living by fomenting human emotion into a response ensuring enough rage to keep anxious listeners tuned in. Doing this helps pundits maintain their ratings, and thus add to their wealth, while simultaneously satisfying their narcissistic egos. Hatred, after all, is metastasized emotion, and unfortunately it plays to our worst instincts: to promote the bonding of the group so engaged at the expense of the other. Hatred is one of the greatest unifiers for human beings, as philosopher Eric Hoffer frequently noted.

That millions of people willingly go along with the mass manipulation of their emotions in ways that alienate others as enemies unworthy of the respect due to our fellow man is one of the most pathetic behavioral traits of our species. We have extraordinarily sophisticated brains but make little use of them when it comes to finding simple fault in matters that aren’t simple at all when we really examine the evidence.

What if most days, most people spent their time living up to the responsibility that democracy requires? What if instead of listening to narcissistic zealots, they listened to people looking for and working toward real solutions to problems with so much enthusiasm for the better argument that it wouldn’t matter to them from which side it was presented? Given the current state of public discourse, this may sound insanely naïve, but it would be the mature thing to do.

If we don’t begin soon, en masse, to act like adults, our children and grandchildren are going to experience wretched lives because of our inability or our unwillingness to stop the commercial manipulation of our emotions. Generations from now (providing there is a viable future), our current society may be viewed as having been ignorant beyond credulity because of our passivity and willful inattention.

For unscrupulous pundits, the way to a quick fortune is to read between the lines of Sam Keen’s book and think about how easy it is to turn fear into a profit center. It is embarrassingly easy, and for that we should be ashamed. The resulting incivility keeps us from being a just society, one that could leave succeeding generations something to live up to instead of an economic shambles where a great nation was once thought to stand as a living example of a viable democracy.

Pundits who decry those of us who point to vitriolic media as a major reason for incivility these days do so to protect their livelihood, not to further civil discourse. People of retirement age can recall a time when civil discourse was a reality, even when political issues were as ideologically divisive as they are today. But, with rare exceptions, those were the days before hate-radio, partisan TV, Internet echo chambers, and the commercial application of dogma for the sake of audience share.

Of course, none of this would matter, except that human beings have an overpowering predilection to argue about things they know very little about. That’s in large part why it is so easy to alienate the other in the first place. In point of fact, we have no real social problems in America that could not be readily solved if most people were educated to the level necessary to sustain a legitimate democracy.

The greatest threat to the future is ignorance, and the first step to a better outlook is to acknowledge that those among us who promote and perpetuate ignorance are not patriots. People who attempt to gain stature through promoting fear of the other undermine the very idea of democracy. That they are able to do so without being exposed as the self-absorbed zealots they are speaks volumes about the current state of adult education in America.

But Keen offers us a way out. He writes, “There is a single secure, sacred vocation to which human beings can surrender without the fear of falling into idolatry. We are called to bring justice and compassion into the communal life of our species. Our purpose is to create an order that is not red in tooth and claw, a commonwealth that is governed by our highest capacity for consciousness, conscience, and compassion, rather than by our lowest capacity for inventing the means for the triumph of raw power. Precisely because the ‘objective’ world does not incarnate the virtues of repentance and mercy, it is the human calling to do so. Ours is the task to so reduce the unnecessary ‘surplus’ of evil, that we will be left with the necessity of coping only with the inevitable evil of disease, tragedy, and death.” A tall order, no doubt, but one worthy of our aspirations and one that in a nutshell captures the idealism that gives purpose to the very notion of September University. I hope you will join in the effort and begin to speak your mind.

September University Blog is now available on Kindle

My latest books:

September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life

Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher

The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning

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Generosity as an Expression of Affection

2011-03-07T09:05:00.000-08:00

When I was growing up in the 1940s and 50s, vegetable gardens were ubiquitous. Indeed, victory gardens were encouraged in both world wars, and although I was too young to perceive an association with patriotism and gardening, it helps explain the enthusiasm for gardening I witnessed among adults when I was a child. I have clear memories of the custom of sharing food and of a time when neighbors would come for a visit bringing bushel baskets of fresh produce. My guess would be that this is still a frequent occurrence in many parts of the country today, and yet, for the most part, these customs seem to have been lost to the lifestyles of modernity and urbanization.

My maternal grandparents usually had a garden, but during the times when they didn’t, they would still purchase their produce from nearby farms. They would then spend several days each spring and fall canning a vast assortment of fruits and vegetables. Their pantry was seldom stocked with less than a year’s worth of food. Of course, people still do this, but the tradition is not nearly as common as it used to be. Increasingly I wish that weren’t the case. Although it would seem we have gained from the enormous availability of food in the modern-day supermarket, there is still something lost—something important and something for which finding a suitable substitute seems difficult. Vegetable gardens engender a sense of community in a way that binds us to the land and to one another at the same time.

Moreover, the care and effort required for growing and preparing food for storage is rewarded with an appreciation for the precarious nature of our physical environment and the degree to which we are dependent upon the biological requirements for life. At a deeper level lies an ethos of sharing because most gardens produce more than one family can consume while the produce is still fresh. For many years my grandparents lived in Oklahoma while my family lived in Texas. We would travel several times a year to visit my grandparents, and without fail, when we prepared to leave and return home, we were inundated with food from my grandparents’ pantry. Thinking about this practice many years later, I realized this gesture of showering family members with the fruits of your labor was an overt expression of affection.

My grandparents, like so many others of their Victorian generation, were not much for expressing affection verbally, but when I compare their customs to those of the present day, I prefer the old ways. But for a few changes in lifestyle, what’s to keep us from sharing as our grandparents once did? After all, we reap what we sow.

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September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life

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A Longing for Solitude

2010-11-14T15:19:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, while presenting a September University workshop, I made a point of suggesting that each generation longs for something it grew up without—something that is likely to be disrespected or readily dismissed by the generation to follow. This prompted a question from a participant about today’s younger generation currently in high school and college. What are they growing up without? What will they long for and subsequently rediscover in a few years? It didn’t take long to come up with an answer—something I suspect will someday in the not too distant future seem like a profound breakthrough. The revelation hit me like a lightning bolt: what’s missing today is solitude.

If history is a reliable measure, today’s frenzy of texting and tweeting, with cell phones and a never-ending selection of new gadgetry with which to connect oneself with the rest of the world, is going to produce a backlash. But whether the repercussion will have lasting reverberations is an open question. The rush to cities decades ago resulted in a back-to- the-land movement that seems to have subsided, even though telecommunications opens up more opportunities for living in the country than ever before. So perhaps, in the long run, multitasking will be humanity’s destiny. I’m quite confident it won’t be mine though.

Many people spend a big part of their vacations answering business e-mail. Millions upon millions of people increasingly live in a constant state of perpetual distraction, where one interesting subject of focus morphs into another before the previous matter of attention is fully satisfied or absorbed. In effect, individuals are being overwritten both by their tools and by the crowd.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal” and “It is easy to live after the world’s opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Of course, it’s doubtful that Emerson could have envisioned a society like ours, where the horde follows us to the bathroom and to bed, and awakens us in the night to connect. But I can imagine what Emerson would have said about tweeting, and I suspect it would be an eloquent expression of outrage. He had little tolerance for chit-chat. There is, however, growing resistance by more and more people to being constantly connected, and I would wager that it’s only a matter of time before this resistance begins to get wider public attention.

Scientists sometimes express annoyance when analogies are drawn to subatomic particles as a way to illustrate a point by people who don’t know enough about quantum physics to know what they are talking about. Knowing that risk, I’m going to join those ranks with regard to what’s known as the observer effect, which says that the act of observing subatomic particles affects their behavior. Even though I don’t have a clue how this works, I am quite confident that this analogy applies doubly to human behavior. There is no doubt that our actions are affected by the eyes of others, and can influence us in the same way.

So, if a person spends most of his or her time responding to email, texting, and participating in our vast cornucopia of social media, then what becomes of the self? What happens to our individuality and authenticity if everything we do is a reaction at the behest of another individual or group? The very thought of living one’s life as a perpetual reaction to external stimuli is disturbing, and yet at some level this is philosophically inescapable. The antidote, I suspect, exists only as a matter of degree and comes from thoughtful contemplation. Such contemplation requires some measure of privacy and quite possibly a generous serving of solitude as well, at least enough to dissipate distraction.

Philosophers through the ages have expressed the notion that there is strength and creativity to be gained from brief periods of isolation. Albert Einstein observed that we shun solitude in our youth but cherish it as we get older, and I couldn’t agree more, except that I clearly recall being fond at times of being alone during my childhood. I used to spend many hours by myself in the woods. Now, with five acres of tall timber on my property, I feel as if I live in the woods. I admit to liking e-mail and some social media, but I do not text and I will not tweet on the principle that chit-chat is an absurd waste of time. Life is much too complicated to reduce the essence of our experience to 140 characters.

We are all affected by our interrelationships in society, and much of what we do each day is not what we started out to do. Instead, it is the result of a reaction to something someone else has done. What we think about is affected, in large part, by the media we use. Moreover, if one is not very careful, becoming subordinate to one’s tools of inquiry is a real possibility. Spending most of your waking time on Twitter is analogous to being a proton perpetually spooked by no-matter.

In The Shallows, a book about how the Internet is affecting our brains, Nicholas Carr observes that Google is in the business of distraction. We think we are using it, but it may be more accurate to suggest that Google is using us. Carr discusses the fact that young people today are shying away from novels because the sentences are too long and difficult. How unfortunate that as society gets more and more complex and our problems grow exponentially, our citizens become less and less thoughtful.

Carr writes, “A personal letter written in, say, the nineteenth century bears little resemblance to a personal e-mail or text message written today. Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.” I suspect it’s much more than that; it’s a loss of the substance of critical thought at a time when the need is so important that it’s hard to overstate the case.

So, anticipating a backlash that my generation may not live to see in full measure, we can only hope our children and grandchildren will someday reawaken to the realization that without setting aside sufficient time for contemplation, without a dedication to thoughtfulness, humanity’s future is suspect. While it may not seem so readily apparent now, someday soon I trust it will be clear to anyone striving to live fully that thoughtfulness is what holds society together and that some solitude is necessary in order to nourish autonomy. Otherwise there is nothing to tweet about.

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September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life

Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher

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2010-09-19T10:07:00.000-07:00

September 2010

One thing I think most people today would agree about is that the Internet is having far-reaching effects on society, and at this point in time, it’s difficult to predict the outcomes. Radio and television required passivity. The Internet invites participation; it promotes curiosity, conversation, and conviction. Social connectivity makes ideological amplification easy, allowing like-minded people to get together and venture further in the ideological direction they’re already leaning than they would have ventured on their own.

Regardless of the sentiment, it can be amplified in cyberspace. Any one of the above features of social media offers the possibility of revolutionary change. The Internet, therefore, can bring us together or rip us apart. Today’s communication upheaval can play to our worst instincts or our best; how we respond is up to each of us as citizens.

During the past half-century the media sources we utilize have continued to dramatically affect the way we live. Television, for example, has entertained and educated us for more than sixty years, but in some respects it has had an anesthetizing effect. It’s managed to distort our intelligence into a sort of semiconscious stupor in which we can watch reruns over and over without recalling having seen them before. In other words, millions of people use television to relieve stress and tune out, so to speak, just as others under the stress of modernity use drugs to turn their anxiety into euphoria.

Contrast today’s communication capabilities with the 1950s, when there were only three television networks. The differences are so profound that many young people today have difficulty imaging what life would be like without constant connectivity. Millions of people used to go to work each day having watched the same programs the night before as most of the people they worked with. This shared sense of entertainment offered the feeling that we were really in the same boat, minus the racial and gender biases prevalent at the time. Social media may seem to have a similar effect today, except that the groups are far more self-selecting and the subjects of interest more trivial in nature. After all, how thoughtful and reflective can one be when the expectation is to respond quickly in 140 characters or less?

If you had a message you wanted to communicate to the general public in the 1950s, you were pretty much out of luck. Radio, television, newspapers, magazines, and letters were about the only options. Not so today. But when you start to imagine what the results might be from turning those billions of hours of television stupor into something more productive with today’s connectivity, the possibilities are mind-bending. In Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Clay Shirky, who teaches in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, shows how using our heretofore dead-to-the-world time differently has the potential to change the world. He describes interactive media as the connective tissue that holds society together.

Shirky writes, “In a historical eyeblink, we have gone from a world with two different models of media—public broadcasts by professionals and private conversations between pairs of people—to a world where public and private media blend together, where professional and amateur production blur, and where voluntary public participation has moved from nonexistent to fundamental.” Shirky also makes it clear that we have always found the time to do what interests us and what we really care about—the same realization that prompted me to write September University.

As I make clear in that book, the fall and winter of life is the optimum time to reflect on our experience, to use that experience and our learning to achieve a fulfilling end to life, and to do so with enough enthusiasm that we leave something worthwhile behind. Regardless of whether you are politically left, right, or center, what is important is to set contempt and animosity aside and be willing to engage in a civil dialog with people of opposing views while maintaining a resolve to opt for the better argument.

Imagine what the Internet and all of the attendant social media could and would support, if most people used its power to find real solutions to real problems. What if more and more people were to truly care about discovering the better argument, regardless of whose side might appear to be winning? What if, instead of spending so much time posting incendiary remarks about their ideological opposition, people sent out positive messages seeking common ground? What if most people began to act as if the way we act toward one another really matters, and as if they believed we will get the future we deserve? What if a significant number of people past middle age began to focus on generativity and their legacy for the generations to follow?

I invite you to join the discussion and to visit the September University Facebook page and engage. Please invite others to do so as well, and tell us how you plan to make the best of the rest of your life.