We come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others.
Christopher Lasch
My Nashville blogger friend Rex Hammock reminded me this week of a wonderful quote from President John F. Kennedy in 1963. My goodness, how those of us alive at the time loved that man and his vision.
“No country can possibly move ahead, no free society can possibly be sustained, unless it has an educated citizenry whose qualities of mind and heart permit it to take part in the complicated and increasingly sophisticated decisions that pour not only upon the President and upon the Congress, but upon all the citizens who exercise the ultimate power.”
We need to think about this today as we gaze upon the sheer madness of the landscape that is America in 2016. And that’s exactly what it is – madness. I know a couple of very sweet Christian ladies who are passing along the most hateful political venom on social media as though it was the most natural thing in the world. I’m talking really vile, hateful stuff. The heartland response to the leftish drift of the culture surpassed anger long ago and now seethes as a horrific rage that threatens peace at every corner.
In the name of God, of course.
I’ve written a book about the role I played in bringing this about, but from my chair today as an observer and chronicler of postmodernity, I view all of it now as an inevitable and necessary portal through which we must pass for humankind to reach its full potential. Hierarchies always corrupt – it’s in their nature – and humankind has had centuries to realize the fruit of powerful institutions with self at the core. Today, however, the very structure of hyperconnectivity judges hierarchies to be inefficient and irrelevant as it routes around them to bring us together. This is the cultural disaster we face through this remarkable cultural shift, and make no mistake, it will be ugly. Of course, there are many of us who don’t view it as a disaster but admit it will have disastrous results.
One of the major shortcomings of humankind is ignorance fed by hierarchies with self-centered motives, especially the elites who write the book of laws. We have a staggering amount of knowledge in the combined library of humanity, but much of it is hidden by those who glean a good living from its protected shelves. Medicine, the law, religion, and higher education, just to name a few, will be judged tomorrow over how well they pass that knowledge along to everybody instead of keeping it from them. This will not go well for modernity’s gasping body, but its inevitability is sure, so long as the network remains free and intact. There’s nothing inherently sinister about it; it’s simply the chaotic, natural evolution of humanity’s desire for self-governance. Those who advance this will be successful downstream; those who don’t will become increasingly irrelevant.
Michael Rosenblum
A great example of this is my friend Michael Rosenblum, who runs TheVJ.com and has led the way in teaching anybody how to shoot and edit video like a professional, including employees of Fortune 500 companies. I’ve no doubt Michael will always be successful in business, for he understands the need to equip people laterally for the video revolution that’s coming and in many ways is already here. The disruption of media is among the most visible in the world today, but it’s only going to get worse, depending on your point-of-view.
So while forces wishing to maintain the status quo fight for their lives, the people are sparring with each other over elemental differences based on what they know – or think they know. This, thankfully, is leading us back to the cleansing power of argument, which is never a bad thing. Historian Chris Lasch wrote about this in 1990:
Our search for reliable information is itself guided by the questions that arise during arguments about a given course of action. It is only by subjecting our preferences and projects to the test of debate that we come to understand what we know and what we still need to learn. Until we have to defend our opinions in public, they remain opinions in (Walter) Lippmann’s pejorative sense – half-formed convictions based on random impressions and unexamined assumptions. It is the act of articulating and defending our views that lifts them out of the category of ‘opinions,’ gives them shape and definition, and makes it possible for others to recognize them as a description of their own experience as well. In short, we come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others.
“We come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others.” This is profound and the most pressing need for the cultural advancement of postmodernism. It’s a natural part of the evolution of global humanity, and a necessary step if we are to learn to live with each other instead of killing each other.
We simply can’t trust ANY hierarchical institution to educate us. We must do that for ourselves – with postmodernism’s deconstruction as our authority and the practice of exploring associative links on the World Wide Web as our tool – and this, I believe, is in the spirit of President Kennedy meant those many years ago.
Nobody else is going to do it for us.
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