Two lines from this piece stand out to me. First, “anxieties over health-care costs, for their children’s education, for job security, for medical leave, for home ownership, and more, are being ignored in the manic flurry of … executive orders.” And second, “we need to expand our political imagination and broaden our historical memory.”
Part of expanding our imagination and broadening our memory is not to get caught up in that manic flurry, but instead to focus on the real problems.
I think, for example, of something that Thomas Merton wrote: “Nine-tenths of the news, as printed in the papers” —or now, as appearing in social media and on TV— “is pseudo-news, manufactured events. Some days ten tenths. The ritual morning trance, in which one scans columns of newsprint” —or now, doom scrolls social media— “creates a peculiar form of generalized pseudo-attention to a pseudo-reality. This experience is taken seriously. It is one’s daily immersion in ‘reality.’ One’s orientation to the rest of the world. One’s way of reassuring [oneself] that [one] has not fallen behind. That [one] is still there. That [one] still counts!”
Merton continues: “My own experience has been that renunciation of this self-hypnosis, of this participation in the unquiet universal trance, is no sacrifice of reality at all. To ‘fall behind’ in this sense is to get out of the big cloud of dust that everybody is kicking up, to breathe and to see a little more clearly.”
(I take those quotations from The Pocket Thomas Merton, which collects his other writings. The ones above are from his 1968 book Faith and Violence.)
Another part of expanding our imagination and broadening our memory is, counterintuitively, to focus more locally—in our homes, our neighborhoods, our workplaces, and our own faith communities. One of the things that happens in a country this big, and in a world this big, is that we end up spending our outrage on things that are happening far away, whether somewhere else in the country, or somewhere in another country, even when we probably do not fully understand those things. And then when we come together in our own lives, we spend our time completely focused on things that are happening elsewhere.
This is something that I see almost every Sunday at my church. It is a particular “sin” of liberal Christians. We gather to study, pray, worship, or just be together in fellowship, and somebody comes in agitated because of “what’s going on in” such-and-such place (and it is a never-ending carousel of other places), or what emanated from MSNBC on the never-off TV in their home. And what that does is that it redirects the energy of the group away from thinking about where we are, and who we are, and what is happening in our own community, to our own neighbors—or even to ourselves—so that what we must do is calm the anxiety of the agitated person by collectively affirming that their anxiety is actually virtue-signaling, and yes, we all agree that “what’s going on in” that place is terrible. And because we are talking about things happening far away, we delude ourselves into believing that we have some broad and generous imagination and consciousness of the suffering of the world, when really what we are doing is using those faraway things as excuses to disengage from who and where we are. But really what we are doing is we are constricting our imagination and our memory, so that the only narrative we really participate in is the one that is foisted on us by a mass “news” media whose interest is certainly not in prompting us to engage in our communities to their improvement, but rather to keeping us on the treadmill narrative that those media companies are feeding to us.
What would happen if we followed Thomas Merton’s advice of “renunciation” from this “self-hypnosis” in this “unquiet universal trance,” but instead were to exit the dust cloud and see more clearly what is going on around us?
And while I confess that it is exceedingly difficult for me to sympathize with the people whose votes for the current regime brought us into this moment, I do believe that all of those people share the same basic needs as everyone else: to live meaningful lives, to experience beauty, to have access to affordable housing, to have access to affordable health care, to be free from oppression, to be able to envision a future for their children. I think their desires for those basic needs have been twisted and distorted by racist and theocratic ideology that makes them imagine that the primary impediments to those things are immigrants, people with darker skin tones, and federal employees, among others, instead of the real impediments, which are the owner class that is currently sacking and looting our federal government to their own further enrichment. But the only way we are ever going to realize the fact that “there are more of us than there are of them” is if we help each other to remain present, in our own times and places, to see the real humanity of those who are right here with us. That is the expansion of imagination of and the broadening of memory that we need.
Two lines from this piece stand out to me. First, “anxieties over health-care costs, for their children’s education, for job security, for medical leave, for home ownership, and more, are being ignored in the manic flurry of … executive orders.” And second, “we need to expand our political imagination and broaden our historical memory.”
Part of expanding our imagination and broadening our memory is not to get caught up in that manic flurry, but instead to focus on the real problems.
I think, for example, of something that Thomas Merton wrote: “Nine-tenths of the news, as printed in the papers” —or now, as appearing in social media and on TV— “is pseudo-news, manufactured events. Some days ten tenths. The ritual morning trance, in which one scans columns of newsprint” —or now, doom scrolls social media— “creates a peculiar form of generalized pseudo-attention to a pseudo-reality. This experience is taken seriously. It is one’s daily immersion in ‘reality.’ One’s orientation to the rest of the world. One’s way of reassuring [oneself] that [one] has not fallen behind. That [one] is still there. That [one] still counts!”
Merton continues: “My own experience has been that renunciation of this self-hypnosis, of this participation in the unquiet universal trance, is no sacrifice of reality at all. To ‘fall behind’ in this sense is to get out of the big cloud of dust that everybody is kicking up, to breathe and to see a little more clearly.”
(I take those quotations from The Pocket Thomas Merton, which collects his other writings. The ones above are from his 1968 book Faith and Violence.)
Another part of expanding our imagination and broadening our memory is, counterintuitively, to focus more locally—in our homes, our neighborhoods, our workplaces, and our own faith communities. One of the things that happens in a country this big, and in a world this big, is that we end up spending our outrage on things that are happening far away, whether somewhere else in the country, or somewhere in another country, even when we probably do not fully understand those things. And then when we come together in our own lives, we spend our time completely focused on things that are happening elsewhere.
This is something that I see almost every Sunday at my church. It is a particular “sin” of liberal Christians. We gather to study, pray, worship, or just be together in fellowship, and somebody comes in agitated because of “what’s going on in” such-and-such place (and it is a never-ending carousel of other places), or what emanated from MSNBC on the never-off TV in their home. And what that does is that it redirects the energy of the group away from thinking about where we are, and who we are, and what is happening in our own community, to our own neighbors—or even to ourselves—so that what we must do is calm the anxiety of the agitated person by collectively affirming that their anxiety is actually virtue-signaling, and yes, we all agree that “what’s going on in” that place is terrible. And because we are talking about things happening far away, we delude ourselves into believing that we have some broad and generous imagination and consciousness of the suffering of the world, when really what we are doing is using those faraway things as excuses to disengage from who and where we are. But really what we are doing is we are constricting our imagination and our memory, so that the only narrative we really participate in is the one that is foisted on us by a mass “news” media whose interest is certainly not in prompting us to engage in our communities to their improvement, but rather to keeping us on the treadmill narrative that those media companies are feeding to us.
What would happen if we followed Thomas Merton’s advice of “renunciation” from this “self-hypnosis” in this “unquiet universal trance,” but instead were to exit the dust cloud and see more clearly what is going on around us?
And while I confess that it is exceedingly difficult for me to sympathize with the people whose votes for the current regime brought us into this moment, I do believe that all of those people share the same basic needs as everyone else: to live meaningful lives, to experience beauty, to have access to affordable housing, to have access to affordable health care, to be free from oppression, to be able to envision a future for their children. I think their desires for those basic needs have been twisted and distorted by racist and theocratic ideology that makes them imagine that the primary impediments to those things are immigrants, people with darker skin tones, and federal employees, among others, instead of the real impediments, which are the owner class that is currently sacking and looting our federal government to their own further enrichment. But the only way we are ever going to realize the fact that “there are more of us than there are of them” is if we help each other to remain present, in our own times and places, to see the real humanity of those who are right here with us. That is the expansion of imagination of and the broadening of memory that we need.