Secular Sage

What is it that has for us so deeply divided? Why are such very simplistic narratives adopted and defended with such ferocity, even by people largely ignorant of the subject?

Social media is surely partially to blame. We have no idea of the full effects of a generation limited to 140 characters, other platforms create similarly micro templates e.g. who much text you can fit into single photo size space in Instagram. These platforms have driven the culture towards implicit over-simplification of nuanced issues which has driven reductionist trends since social media is equivalent to historic, now lost, social environments. We think for social media and as a result social media thinks for us.

Pithy, over simplified ideas and narratives win the day and do not do justice to complex issues that we really face or encourage the sort of nuance required to serve the complexities of being human, and living in a complex world. In fact, as the world gets more complex, the market of ideas has become simpler and simpler. Over simplification is the order of the day.

But is this entirely unique? For over a hundred years, news and before that newspapers, were capturing attention through headlines. In my university days, I caught the news largely from lamp posts where headline after headline was displayed on the side of the road, often in the same typically bias perspective of the respective news corporations.

The volume has certainly increased, faster than we could ever have hoped to have adapted to it, ad this is typical of so much in the digital age. Between my teens and thirties, I saw the creation and elimination of technologies like the CD and DVD. I was taught basic web design in university, friends made careers out of it briefly and today such careers have been made virtually obsolete by web design tools like WordPress.

Yes, the internet has drowned us in information, and social media has enabled instant publication of pithy narratives representing an endless sea of perspectives, only some of them human. This too has occurred before to a lessor extent, the printing press and then radio and television enabled mass creation, distribution and consumption of news, propagating different perspectives. Email circulars allowed Joe blogs to disseminate his ideas out, and the internet itself has now been around for a generation. 

To some extent we always had pithy headlines and a multiplicity of perspectives. These things are deeply human, both perspective and simplification are fundamental to the absorption of information through sight. Without mirror or camera, we can only see what we can see from our perspective. We also have to focus, we cannot see everything with the same resolution at the same time.

To fully appreciate how we got here, I think we have to ask a more fundamental question. Why have the same over-simplified narratives polarised us to this extent?

I do think that one statistic is telling, and that is the decline in Christianity in the West. Nietzsche warned us that the absence of God would cause such strife. Previously, our ideas on politics, religion, race and gender and so on, were somewhat peripheral to the common ground that we all shared as those “made in the image of God.” Yes there were moments where battles needed to recapture this very idea at large, for example the civil rights movement. But for the most part, these ideas lived below the line of the eternal truths that brought us together. These ideas are now primary. Where before we found our sense of meaning, value, purpose in subservience to God and higher ideals. Now we find ourselves grasping at these lessor narratives to define ourselves or our tribe, to have meaning and purpose.

And so, we are rebels without a cause, but we made them, we must make them. We pretend, consciously or subconsciously, that Trump will mean the end of America, or even the world. That the civil rights movement never happened and is required again today, that we ourselves are soldiers in battles in Ukraine or Palestine, though highly selective in our choice of battles one must add. Identity politics goes beyond the race and gender narratives to almost anything that helps us define who we are, how we came to be or where we are going. Truly, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it?”

I do think that one statistic is telling, and that is the decline in Christianity in the west. Nietzsche warned us that the absence of God would cause such strife [elaborate]. To some extent we always had pithy headlines and a multiplicity of perspectives. These things are deeply human, both perspective and simplification are fundamental to human sight and therefore the absorption of information. However, previously these ideas were peripheral, they lived below the line of the eternal truths that brought us together. [One could argue that nationalism plays something of this role as well but maybe not] in 2024, and perhaps for 5 years before, these ideas are primary. Where before we found our sense of meaning, value, purpose in our subservience to God and these higher ideals. Now we find ourselves grasping at these lessor narratives to define ourselves, to belong to a tribe, to have meaning. Identity politics goes beyond the race and gender narratives to almost anything that helps us define who we are, how we came to be or where we are going. These have obvious answers in Christianity.