Living in the Moment

I've mentioned before that we have this natural tendency to think that all things have been as they are today. Oh, not all things, perhaps. We know of improvements. We wisely eliminated laws that prevented interracial marriage. That sort of thing. But, for the most part, the way people are today is the way they have always been. You can see this in movies. A war movie made during the 40's does not have the same sense as a war movie made during the 60's and 70's. The former offers stirring patriotism and unswerving respect for the fighting man. The latter offers cynical disgust for the fighter and expects constant evil from anyone involved. Movies made in the earlier decades of the art reflected good and evil and honored good and despised evil while movies made today blur good and evil and make you wonder if there is such a thing. A western made in the decade of the 50's with its attendant 50's morality won't reflect the same kind of cowboy that a western made in the 90's. Interestingly, if you take a movie like Eastwood's 1992 western, Unforgiven, the characters have adopted the same moral codes of the 1990's along with their use of modern obscenity. The viewpoint is clearly, "If this is the way we are, this is the way we have always been."

This is a shortsighted perspective. Even without subscribing to Darwin's "Evolution", societies evolve, cultures shift, and ethics change. Suggesting that it has ever been thus would simply be foolish. And surely, when the whole question is asked, "Are you saying that it has ever been thus?", we would give it a thought and realize that we know better. So what should we do?

We live in a media-driven world. Our political views are largely sound bites. Our news is mostly comprised of paragraph-long stories in rapid fire delivery. We are not allowed a long view or the opportunity to examine all the data and come to a well-thought-out conclusion. We live in the now. We live in the moment. We need to reconsider.

Our current mode of living is primarily the snapshot rather than the video. We see scenes of life and draw conclusions from them rather than watching the entire video and getting the flavor and panorama of the situation. We operate largely on the instant rather than the long term. We want sound bite rather than context.

This doesn't work very well. It doesn't offer a view of reality, but rather the carefully scripted vision of the horse with blinders. We're told where to look and what to see and naturally draw conclusions based on that narrow vision. It might be politics. It happens both on the liberal and the conservative sides, both from the Democrats and the Republicans, both from the New York Times and Fox News. They're all telling us, "Look here!" without allowing us a view of all sides. But it's not merely politics. Oh, it is surely politics, but not merely politics. It is in economics and religion, science and medicine, psychology and morality. We all are being told "Look here and don't look there." We're all fed snapshots without seeing the videos. We're all eating up the sound bites while starving from the nutrition of the full story. We're all under the impression that "What is now has always been", not because it's true or even vaguely true, but because we don't think about it. That, in fact, is the problem, isn't it? We don't think about it. We're just "living in the moment". That's touted as a good thing. I'm not so sure it is.