Lost on the Edge

Perceptive Blog Collaborator, :)

I almost hate to post this, thus knocking your thoughtful blog down the page, when everyone should read it (Dear Reader, that is a hint). I have only a few points to make and of course, clarifications! lol

It is sad that boxing now looks like the "civilized" sport by comparison, but it had rules and was organized in a way that remained unchanged for many decades. It was occasionally even used as a way for young men to settle disputes and channel anger in a supervised way. When I run across cage fighting I can't help but wonder how long it will be before someone thinks --Hey this would be so much more entertaining if they had knives!

My reference to "clearing the benches" is representative to me of all the things you mention, yes. Sportsmanlike conduct is becoming rarer and this is unfortunately filtering down even to youth sports where we see adults bad mouth the coach in the tamer examples, and give in to actual physical violence in the worst. I cannot repeat in this public forum some of the things I've heard--mothers (the new shrill version) often behave worse than men and yell from the stands. The oil of good manners and decorum hasn't been tended to and now we see the gears of civilized human interaction grinding and scraping against each other. Sometimes the screeching is unbearable. The thing is breaking down for lack of being operated properly. How did it used to work? We've forgotten.

This concept that we don't know how to behave anymore in any number of settings was a recurring theme throughout the book. Many of the things he uses as examples from reality television to the classroom to politics have this same thread running just under the surface.  Our society now seems to be trying to think up ways to reward bad behavior.


But on to the printed word:


"Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking." ~ Edward Gibbon


One reason for the book buying statistic is, as you point out,  that people are living at a frenetic (and perhaps frantic, although increasingly those words mean exactly the same!) pace, and reading requires sitting quietly, taming the mind, and focusing. But for most the extra time is only filled with feverishly paced entertainment. The mind, never getting a chance to be still and do what I call "processing" (sorting out the information it has and putting it in some sort of context), feels overwhelmed and joins what is an out of shape, exhausted body in vast segments of the population to drag them into a never ending downward spiral of lethargy and sluggish reasoning. "Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion." (p. 49) Ray Bradbury said "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." Once again his words seem prophetic.

I suspect that while people have fallen into the trap of this physically and mentally lazy lifestyle, someplace in the back of our minds we feel that something is amiss. We may not always be able to name it or articulate its effects, but the shifting sand of social mores and truth send permeating waves of unease throughout the culture.  Lacking a stable framework  to process information through, a feeling of "lostness" takes hold. There used to be standards, but the media/ information saturated society is changing so rapidly that many give up and carve out a simplified place of understanding from which to view the world. We boil the information and our thoughts (or more accurately, our emotions) about it down to something we can deal with. We then stop taking in any new facts that might challenge us and make us rethink our positions. It may be one reason those college grads read even fewer books than the high school grads. They figured it all out (or all they want to try to figure out) in college. They're done. 


"When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe."

"The old production oriented culture demanded what the historian Warren Susman termed character. The new consumption-oriented culture demands what he called personality. The shift in values is a shift from a fixed morality to the artifice of presentation. The old cultural values of thrift and moderation honored hard work, integrity, and courage. The consumption-oriented culture honors charm, fascination, and likeability."  (p. 51)

Once we've succumbed to this kind of thinking (or lack thereof), it is very difficult to shake the cobwebs from our minds and re-engage. We will quickly have an entire generation who know only this fractured version of things. What then?