Social warfare demands fresh perspectives

A pair of colliding galaxy clusters about 2.8 billion light years from Earth. Credit: NASA

We need a way of clearing our eyes and mind of the clutter of these turbulent times, says a connoisseur of the riches of the creative world, American Maria Popova. 

Popova would agree that every era in history has its trials and tribulations but from time to time there are peak moments where something deeply transformative occurs, or where the struggle for change foments turbulence that shakes the foundations of a nation, a society or a group of both. This is one those times when the members of many societies feel threatened by those wanting to impose a "new world order" on them.

The turbulence of the present time observed in WEIRD societies in particular, is caused by the rise of a new style of thought that disavows the open-mindedness and readiness to compromise that makes possible the fraternity of a healthy society and the balanced functioning of democracy. The acronym stands for Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic.

Instead, there is a rigid adherence to a thin ideology, that for the time being, has altered politics, economics, religion and literature. What we know as Wokeism is all very disturbing because its underpinning ideology, termed Critical Theory, arose as a Marxist-inspired movement among German academics in the 1920s but which soon moved its centre of study to the United States. (See here and here).

Popova has been producing over many years an online newsletter called The Marginalian, formerly Brain Pickings. Having survived a difficult year personally, and being an observer of the anguish in the wider society, she offered her enthusiastic readers some reflections on how to survive when the world around them is in deep trouble.

Most Western citizens would perceive the trouble in their societies as being provoked by the elitist Critical Theory movement, which is a scourge for society not because of the criticism of social structures and the identification of oppression, but because of the manner of promoting social change. Liberty, fraternity and equality are being undermined by the moral deregulation of society on the one hand, but on the other, the imposition of a set of moral invigilators, high on sanctimony in that a distorted world view is at odds with a sense of the nobility of the ordinary person. 

With academia influencing education leaders, and denizens of the media, especially of the mainstream media, the corporate sector quickly fell in step.

Popova, who migrated from Bulgaria, writes in the aftermath of her year confronting multiple difficulties:

Through it all, I have found solace in taking a more telescopic view — not merely on the short human timescale of my own life, looking back on having lived through a Communist dictatorship and having seen poems composed and scientific advances made under such tyrannical circumstances, but on far vaster scales of space and time.

For perspective of how minor and temporary our troubles are in the larger scheme of things, Popova contemplates the Voyager mission NASA launched in 1977 "with the scientific objective of photographing the planets of the outer solar system, which furnished the very first portrait of our cosmic neighborhood". She continues:

Human eyes had never before been laid on the arresting aquamarine of Uranus, on Neptune’s stunning deep-blue orb, on the splendid fury of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot — a storm more than threefold the size of our entire planet, raging for three hundred years, the very existence of which dwarfs every earthly trouble.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot, a raging storm three and a half times the size of Earth captured in 1979, by Voyager 1. Photo: NASA/JPL

As well as exploration, Voyager had "another, more romantic mission", says Popova:

Aboard it was the Golden Record — a time-capsule of the human spirit encrypted in binary code on a twelve-inch gold-plated copper disc, containing greetings in the fifty-four most populist human languages and one from the humpback whales, 117 images of life on Earth, and a representative selection of our planet’s sounds, from an erupting volcano to a kiss to Bach — and [a] Bulgarian folk song.

Bulgaria is an old country — fourteen centuries old, five of which were spent under Ottoman yoke. This song, sung by generations of shepherdesses, encodes in its stunning vocal harmonies both the suffering and the hope with which people lived daily during those five centuries. You need not speak Bulgarian in order to receive its message, its essence, its poetic truth beyond the factual details of history, in the very marrow of your being.

To capture the environment from which such a song erupts, Popova attaches this photo of a Bulgarian sunflower field:

Popova comments: 

Carl Sagan, who envisioned the Golden Record, had precisely that in mind — he saw the music selection as something that would say about us what no words or figures could ever say, for the stated objective of the Golden Record was to convey our essence as a civilization to some other civilization — one that surmounts the enormous improbabilities of finding this tiny spacecraft adrift amid the cosmic infinitude, of having the necessary technology to decode its message and the necessary consciousness to comprehend it.

But the record’s unstated objective, which I see as the far more important one, was to mirror what is best of humanity back to itself in the middle of the Cold War, at a time when we seemed to have forgotten who we are to each other and what it means to share this fragile, symphonic planet.

When the Voyager completed its exploratory mission and took the last photograph — of Neptune — NASA commanded that the cameras be shut off to conserve energy. But Carl Sagan had the idea of turning the spacecraft around and taking one final photograph — of Earth. Objections were raised — from so great a distance and at so low a resolution, the resulting image would have absolutely no scientific value. But Sagan saw the larger poetic worth — he took the request all the way up to NASA’s administrator and charmed his way into permission.

The "Pale Blue Dot" is a photograph of Earth taken by Voyager at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun. Photo enhanced: NASA/Caltech

And so, on Valentine’s Day of 1990, just after Bulgaria’s Communist regime was finally defeated after nearly half a century of reign, the Voyager took the now-iconic image of Earth known as the “Pale Blue Dot” — a grainy pixel, “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” as Sagan so poetically put it when he immortalized the photograph in his beautiful “Pale Blue Dot” monologue from Cosmos — that great masterwork of perspective, a timeless reminder that “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was… every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician” lived out their lives on this pale blue dot. And every political conflict, every war we’ve ever fought, we have waged over a fraction of this grainy pixel barely perceptible against the cosmic backdrop of endless lonesome space.

Popova has a fitting way to conclude her article, "In Praise of the Telescopic Perspective: A Reflection on Living Through Turbulent Times":

In the cosmic blink of our present existence, as we stand on this increasingly fragmented pixel, it is worth keeping the Voyager in mind as we find our capacity for perspective constricted by the stranglehold of our cultural moment. [...]

I don’t think it is possible to contribute to the present moment in any meaningful way while being wholly engulfed by it. It is only by stepping out of it, by taking a telescopic perspective, that we can then dip back in and do the work which our time asks of us.

I can only add that my wish is that those who are so enamoured of the Christian principles of justice, respect for the poor, weak and marginalised—as in the history of Christian care of the sick, of widows and orphans—should respect the whole body of Christian teaching and act in the spirit of love and empathy, not only for those suffering but also for those who are seen to be the antagonists. My plea is that advocates of the application of Critical Theory social activism absorb Popova's cosmic perspective in the spirit of communion that Martin Luther King displayed instead of thrusting Marxist diktats on a society they no longer understand.

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