What's New?

What's New?  The inevitable answer is: not very much.

As human beings we're alert to the new: the new threat, the new opportunity, as we have been for thousands of years.  But we have huge enterprises dependent on the illusion of the new, and the news media aren't even the largest.  "New" is the hue and cry of advertising, for instance.

What makes the news is often comparative, a new notch on the scale.  The church shooting with the highest number of casualties is a particularly noxious and ultimately absurd example, a measurement of our failure as a society when none is needed.  But each of the deaths we read about is a real person really dead, leaving behind a hole in families and family members, and in communities.  We bow our heads in mourning and our own common shame.

A different case: Washington Post columnists measure the latest poll: the current US chief executive "has an approval rating demonstrably lower than any previous chief executive at this point in his presidency over seven decades of polling. Fewer than 4 in 10 Americans — 37 percent — say they approve of the way he is handling his job."  Insofar as this is at all meaningful, it's scary on several levels; perhaps the scariest is that it bears no immediate relationship to limiting what this presidency is doing or abetting, like withdrawing from essential international agreements and otherwise risking the future, dismantling healthcare and enabling the imminent threat to totally dismantle the Endangered Species Act.

Other comparatives do seem to leap from differences in degree to differences in kind.  For example, the openness of widespread corruption in the current administration.  On the other hand, the Paradise Papers may "only" be temporary revelations of entrenched practices by the world's wealthiest.

In the larger sense, the passions (for evil and for good) that rule headlines and Internet memes have been described in texts from the beginning of writing, a body of literature all too easily and much too stupidly ignored in the daily astonishment, as well as by self-styled experts who should know better, like the "psychologists" who grab their own headlines with their ill-conceived or perennially known findings.

But on a more historical scale, we can see today's developments in context and as interweaving patterns, instead of headlines so repeatable they could exist as already set type off the shelf, if anybody set type these days.

I am prompted to this thought by the experience this past weekend of finally attacking my old file cabinets.  In them are files of laboriously selected, cut, dated and categorized newspaper clippings and magazine articles, as well as sheets of my own notes and prose on the subject.

Apart from evidence of the jobs I did for the past ten years, the files I went through and largely discarded were mostly from the 1990s and early 2000s.  These bulging folders had subject categories like "income inequality,"  the privatizing of public functions, the heathcare wreckage and various references to political polarization and the onrushing darkness.

There were lots of clippings chronicling the largely forgotten role of Newt Gingrich in representing the kind of politics with which we are now familiar.   There are articles explaining the rise of the new conservatism, the religious Right, and residual racism.  

My own notes were in support of my thesis of a public/private reversal going on, which included sending the unmediated, uncontrolled unconscious outside to work in the public realm.  I collected a lot, and wrote about the enveloping darkness.

Relegating these clippings to the recycling bin is not a rueful recognition of the Internet's transcendence, for retrieving and organizing these clips would still involve serious library time.  (And one set of articles I wish I'd saved are all the paeans to the emerging Internet Utopia by Kevin Kelly and other Wired folk, before international hacker armies, trolls, bots, phishing, viruses, disruptive advertising and widespread identity theft etc. turned the Internet into the Inferno.)  It is rather a recognition that I will not be writing this particular history.

Some of these clippings support another unexpected (or largely unanticipated) consequence of the internet.  In 1995 (which was largely pre-internet) Anthony Lewis wrote a NYTimes column called "An Atomized America."  The idea expressed there and elsewhere, clustering around Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, was that America was becoming a nation of loners.

 In the 1850s the then-journalist Frederick Law Olmstead wrote rapturously about all the associations Americans in cities and towns belonged to, that performed useful services like planting trees, building bridges, creating libraries, starting volunteer civic organizations and debate clubs, as well as engaging in organized recreation such as ball teams and boat clubs, glee clubs and theatricals --all elements helping to build what he called "commonplace civilization."  (All this is from a 1997 New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik.)

Later as a park-builder, Olmstead designed New York's Central Park to accommodate many different kinds of people engaged in many different pursuits. Often they would find themselves playing ball or ice skating or otherwise pursuing recreation in their own group but face to face with people in other groups.  They wouldn't see each other whole, necessarily, but they would see each other, and they had something in common.

This sort of thing still goes on, though it is not so fashionable.  Insofar as Americans are more often bowling alone--and not at a bowling alley but at home on a device--they are less frequently eye to eye.  Though some engage in what seems like overexposure on social media, the medium favors creating a persona, which favors one dimensional interchange, especially in politics.  Atomized becomes polarized.  People become icons and one dimensional stereotypes.  They are their politics.  But you know, actually they aren't.  What they share, what they have in common, gets lost.  And that makes commonplace civilization much more difficult.

These clips in general do support the impression that we are approaching the apotheosis of these patterns, along with other more elongated trends.  But I'm not sure that's new either.