Read or watch the media about the
elections in France or the soon-to-be elections in Britain. Cast your mind back
to the U.S. and the coming of President Trump, or if you’re in India trace
every news article on Prime Minister Modi.
Fake news, left and alt-right media
notwithstanding, for a student and analyst of history it’s all fascinating. And scary! From the points the media makes, no matter which end of the extreme (or even
perhaps dead centre) that you believe in, there are subtle sub-texts to be
understood, interpreted and applied. They go unapplied as historians of the
future may well conclude!
At one level, if
the media reflects what we are that reflection is truly disturbing. If Trump is
an indication, the reflection we see for ourselves is “Mirror, mirror on the
wall, who’s the most beautiful of them all”. And in some senses this is about ignorant,
shallow vanity, even narcissism, which in its own way can be dangerously
destructive. Yet if some sanity around prevails, it can be overcome.
If the indication is
Le Pen, Bannon or the tragicomedy of Brexit and Farrage, then the reflection is
Dorian Gray. Cover the mirror, think of yourself eternal, until you’re forced
to look at the reality of your reflection. And then face the finiteness of
reality… with the immaturity of it all.
Or worse still,
the reflection is a duality of both “Mirror, mirror…” and Dorian Gray.
The nature of
media today, across its extremes whether left, conservative, alt-right, corporate-agenda-driven,
etc., leads it to make the instant moment the imperative time to interpret everything, as
one would interpret history. And interpret everything as not just history in the making
but the history of the past. For thanks to the power of the instantaneous
digital, every moment, is a history past. And every moment has the chance to
influence our thoughts in ways that allow little true consideration, reducing our
minds to an almost primeval level.
The lessons of
this instantaneous history are often sub-texts, subtle and hard to decipher,
for every moment reflected in the media is living, yet promptly past, each to
be really understood not in itself but in a context of the continuity of time— past,
present and future.
The media looks at
the singularity of the moment and offers explanations either promptly or as a few moments go by, struggling at each phase to offer elucidations based on
whatever lens it employs, whichever audience it caters to or whoever pays it for
eyeballs.
These explanations
of the singularity of the moment through one specific lens are dangerous for they only
serve to influence and reinforce beliefs, false or otherwise. They do nothing
to expand the canvas of our understanding and knowledge nor do they empower us
to obtain new lenses to clarify and widen the scope of our vision.
The immediacy of
the moment offers explanations that analysed in themselves seem truisms. Yet
analysed in the longue duree through the continuity of time through the past,
the present and the future they are truly disturbing, as one may conclude from the
events in the U.S., France or Britain or, perhaps, even India.
Deeper analysis of
this phenomenon by historians of the future may well lead them to conclude that
our world, struggling with its ability to cope with technological
disruption in media, was one of raw superficiality, driven by the
short-sighted, emotional, intellectually ignorant and ill-equipped, often sadly
refuting wisdom gained by generations previous.
They may conclude
that humankind of the second decade of the 21st century with its
inability to cope had retreated into a past, perhaps akin to a Stone Age. The
men and women were always emotionally and factually needy since the economic,
social and psychological systems they employed were incapable of delivering both
goods and the happiness they sought. Leave aside the philosophical!
This humankind had leaders,
they may assume, who remained fundamentally greedy for power and needy of goods, recognition
and adulation! Their leaders were reflections of their society.
Of the men and women who chose them to high office!
It's a world that will
seem akin to what we believe the Middle Ages or even the Stone Age to be, from
our lens of our present, frightening and confusing. All the more frightening, given
that human kind seemed to struggle with the disruption caused by the very technology
it invented and the consequences of its own actions like the quest for
globalisation, economic freedom and even climate change! A disruption of
everything that humankind had come to accept as familiar and comfortable, a
pace of change through the industrial revolution in its various forms that once seemed acceptable to cope with!
To the historians
of the future, it may well seem that this was a consequence of the lack of true
leadership. For the so-called leaders, themselves, lacked the ability to link
through the continuity of time, leaving them and their followers intellectually,
emotionally and morally stunted remnants of a past, long gone past. These
leaders lacked both capability and knowledge. They were ignorant of the
need to look at the longue duree… ignorant of ignorance itself!
These humans, the
historians of the future may argue, were incapable of understanding that their
problem was interpreting everything through the singularity of the moment,
which in turn warped their minds, through lenses that were worse flawed by ignorance.
Their minds were either incapable of understanding what the emerging world needed
or they deliberately chose not to recognise it, given their short-sightedness which in turn was exacerbated by their needy and greedy tendencies.
They lacked,
future historians may conclude, maturity-- the kind of maturity that empowered
the ability to be open and holistic, to understand the interconnectedness of
everything on Earth through the ceaseless continuity of time, the remorseless
eventuality of the far-reaching consequences of each action on the present and
the future, the ceaselessly dynamic complexity of perennially consequence-driven
continuity in the systems that made and will always make humankind.
We, who once
exhibited the traits of maturity in a post-World War II world to craft a peace and a
system that no matter what its flaws, (and contextual though they might be),
served reasonably for a time, will be condemned for our inability to exhibit
similar maturity and thinking to craft a new system called for by the present.
One based on what we know now; the knowledge that there will always be consequences for the future!
We will be
condemned by the generations of the future!
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