A Gaping Lack of Insight

It seems, as the 2012 election looms before us, that within the incredible amount of talking that's going on there is very little being said. The candidates all have strong phrases in their arsenals, penned by speechwriters. But there aren't any big ideas to back those phrases up. We are stuck with pundits endlessly opining on issues like the Obama mortgage plan, the bank bailout, and healthcare reform. What we need is for quality minds to take a step back and understand what is happening in our world. And it's not just big abstract ideas that are missing. Big engineering projects, which once helped to define the country, are sadly lacking now. The spirit behind the construction of the California Aquaduct, the Hoover Dam, the Hood Canal, and hundreds of other major public works projects across the country enhanced America's capability by expanding its capacity. That is what turned a colonial outpost into a global superpower. And what do we have in its place today? Highway repair. The fact is that big projects and big ideas have gone out of style. We have lost our sense of time, due in a large part to the omnipresence of the media. Our age has no forward thrust, only a whirlwind-type perspective that tries to make tomorrow into a high-tech version of yesterday. Because of the rapid pace of 21st Century American life, our attention span has necessarily shortened in order to keep up with everything that is going on around us at any given time. Today, if it can't be said in 160 characters, it isn't worth hearing. And so we skid along on the surface, broadly informed with sound bites but not understanding anything. In order to make sense of things, we try to force our experience of today into the philosophical models of yesterday. Times didn't stop changing when people stopped taking time to digest philosophy, however, and however hard we try to make connections the big ideas of a century or two ago don't apply to our lives today. We evolve by changing the world around us, and philosophy comments upon our relationship with the world we live in. Applying an 18th Century thinker's ideas to today's world is like applying studies of chimpanzees to humans. There is similarity but not similitude. For example, the global economy defies the intellectual models that gave us Socialism, Communism, or Capitalism in philosophical form. Still, we use these archaic ideologies and labels as ciphers, as can be seen anytime a political commentator talks about any issue related to money. "That's Socialism!" they'll say. Or "Runaway Capitalism." Those terms really don't even mean anything anymore. In reality, our future will be defined by important changes that will have major impacts on our ways and quality of life. Increased interconnectedness, increased population, increased scale, and increased speed will erode some social traditions we hold dear and empower excellence and accomplishment in ways we can barely imagine. To stay on top of those changes, we need to understand them. To understand them, we need to digest them. To do that, we need real, concerted thought. But for now, we don't seem to be getting any kind of depth. Instead, we're getting the kind of political punditry that goes nowhere. One talking head calls the Obama mortgage plan "Socialist" while another calls it heroic, and the 2012 election rhetoric sounds like the mud that's flung up by spinning wheels.