Half an Hour,
Oct 23, 2024
When I first started in this business of working online some thirty years ago I was somewhat surprised to learn that it would involve more, not less, travel. And so here I sit on a red-eye to Morocco, not for the first time, to immerse myself in a world where the call to prayer happens five times daily, where I will give my talk in French, where, maybe, I will be able to buy a fez in Fes.
It's not my world as I imagined it when I was young. Oh sure, I had a wanderlust from an early age, but I really had no idea of what to expect when I got to wherever I was going. How could I, an average boy being raised in a rural community in eastern Ontario, Canada. Even if I did read the news every day - and I did, before I delivered the paper that day - it would not and could not prepare me to see the world.
And it's not an easy world to travel through. There have always been wars, but they seem to be more intense today, with the stakes being greater. There has always been differences of opinion but it feels today that we're too quick to jump toward hate. There have always been rumours and conspiracy theories, but today they're funded by state actors and spread at the speed of the internet.
And that leads me to the main point I want to talk about: the idea that we are fracturing into different factions, each with their own version of the truth, drifting toward a world where there are no facts, where nothing can be known for sure, where there are no foundations, no bases for ethics and morality, no common conception of the good, just individual tribes each fighting for a share of fewer and fewer resources on a stressed planet.
And I'm here to say that it isn't so.
No, that does not mean that I've here to announce some common foundation or shared truth that we must all believe and that can form the basis for a future society, as so many others before me have. I doubt that such a foundation exists, nor would it be universally accepted even if it did. Someone could say "here is a hand" and there will always be someone who, with good reason, will object. Ceci n'est pas une pipe. It's all wordplay.
No, what I want to question is the idea that we're fracturing. I want to question the idea that there was once a common conception of The Way The World Is, that there were trusted sources on which we could all rely, that we knew what truth is, as plainly as we know the back of our hands.
Look at that hand, maybe. If it young or old? Is it smooth or scarred? What colour is it? Do you remember all the spots you are now looking at? Were they all here last month? That large spot - is it the same size it was a year ago? I am describing my hand, of course. What is it about your hand I couldn't imagine.
You see, the dominant narrative is that we were all once one society, but now we're drifting apart. But that has never been the case. We have never been one society. Not even those of us who were living together in a small eastern Ontario village.
We were just far away enough from Ottawa that the newly improved highway meant people could live in the country and commute to the city. That's what my father did, to his job at Bell. We were a city family, and lived in a different world from those around us who made their living on the farm. There was just enough farmer in us - my mother grew up on a farm - that we could make it work.
As a child my community was defined by its edges. When we lived in a Montreal suburb, we never spoke to the 'Frenchies', who lived next door. When we lived in Metcalfe, it was a clash of expectations; I was led to value reading, good grades, chess and public speaking, but the only currency of value in a rough and tumble farming community was achievement in sports.
We - the different communities - could and did live apart. There was virtually no overlap. It was an incredibly rare and valuable person - a Ralph James - who could transcend these boundaries. Last I heard, he was working at the gas station, which of course the centre of the community.
It's not the same today. Digital technology in general and social media in particular are bringing communities together whether we want them to or not. It's called 'context collapse'. As originally envisioned, it means something like the idea that your work, family and friends, three separate contexts, are now collapsing into a single space. You see them all in the same environment - on Twitter perhaps, or Facebook, or Reddit, or Insta. That joke that would kill with your friends horrifies your parents and might get you fired at work.
If it were only that, it might be OK. But there's the aforementioned fracturing of society to consider as well. When I was growing up there were many types of people I never saw: black people, gay people, Muslims, indigenous people. I learned about them, a bit, but what I read in the news and in the library didn't really reflect the reality once I met it.
In many ways I was lucky. My love of learning led me to finish school in the community, to read people like Francis Moore Lappe while still a teen, to move across the continent to find work, to go to university, to meet gay people and Marxists and hippies, to travel to indigenous communities, and eventually, to meet with and work with and visit people around the world. It is a truly rare experience and I am incredibly grateful for having had the opportunity.
And today, having had such experiences, I find it laughable that I ever worried about how I dressed, how I looked, how I seemed to other people. The things that I thought were so important, especially when I was young, now seem so trivial in this wider world. It was as Laoze said, that all these things, these definitions of what is and what isn't, what's right and what's wrong, what is valued and what is worthless, are all artifices we create, and not part of some underlying 'reality', whatever that is.
But if all this is true (I hear you ask) then how could the dominant narrative be false? We live in a world now where instead of being one society, people are quoting Laoze and creating their own facts, their own truths, and even inventing their own sense of right and wrong. How can our society survive if we can't even talk to each other.
I'm here to say, our society isn't fracturing; it was always fractured, always divided into myriad subsocieties. True, it never felt divided. But that was because these others were beyond our view. They were there, but we literally did not see them, literally did not know that they existed, and even if we had any inkling, we didn't want to know.
It's like when I was a kid. It's not like black people gays, and Indigenous nations didn't exist. But they existed in my consciousness, if they existed at all, only as fables, only as an artifice created by news media and television and even the books I read and classes I took.
As I grew older, as I read more, as I traveled more, it was like a mist separating me from them began to lift, and I could see - at least partially - into their communities.
And this same thing is what is happening on a global scale. We are not fracturing, we are growing closer together. People and cultures and societies who were never a part of our daily existence and now right in front of us, unavoidable. A gay person is gay, and you have to look. A Muslim references Allah, and you have to listen. Someone you met online talks about Tang poetry, and you have the whole library to your fingertips (with Google to translate it for you).
It's no surprise that people want the fog to come back down, so that things will be the way they were. But nothing gets better that way. The old prejudices return, the old myths prevail. Some cultures are repressed, other cultures are exploited, and others threaten the well-being of an entire planetary community.
We will never be united, never share a single common language or world view or way of life, but at least now we can see that each other exists. We're not required to agree with them, to share their values, or to believe what they believe. But what we can do, at least, is talk with each other - to see them as less of the 'other' and more like different versions of ourselves.
People talk of this being the atomic age, the space age, the information age - but in reality, it is the age of the great coming together. All the possibilities of human existence are laid out before us like some great smorgasbord. It can be hard, challenging, frustrating, but is, for those of us who choose it, rewarding and enlightening.
Where we were apart, we are now together, a dense mesh of possibility.
