Aporia

Henry David Thoreau, critiquing “most men.” It is a characteristic of the age of mass media that preoccupation with news is taken to mean precisely the opposite of what Thoreau asserts; that is, in circles of the intelligentsia and of the ordinary, attention to “news” is respected as an indication of depth, erudition, sensitivity, even moral engagement.

Indeed, nothing is more offensive than to declare that you are disengaged, that you do not follow news of the latest war, election, swindle, crash. Perhaps you care only for the very local -those who exist for you as named and known individuals and their doings- or the universal -problems of human nature, love, death, not in mere instances but in general, or both; best to keep it to yourself. You will be accused not merely of apathy but of complicity in the greatest evils.

Thoreau, in suggesting that the news is the “froth & scum of the eternal sea,” recalls the previously mentioned Goethe: “All that is transitory is but a symbol.” Both seem hostile to the ephemeral, not solely because it is faddish or fleeting but because it distracts from the permanent.

We enjoy this distraction because the verities masked by the detritus of current events and the narrative we make of it all contradict the central story of our civilization: that history is a linear progression towards a brighter future, and that each generation is better than the last.

I think the appeal of this story is clear: it suggests that we’re all part of a global perfecting, a unifying process that imbues our lives and cultures with meaning. Just as we are rarely aware of the present moment because we think always of the future, as though life is ever-preparatory until the moment of death, so we may think of our age as a chapter in a book with a narrative, plot, and the sort of ending we pay to see in multiplexes. That life is unchanging in its most important experiential dimensions is an unwelcome assertion; what’s the point of it all, then? What are working for if not the future? What do we suffer for if not the future?

I am not sure what to think of Goethe’s claim or Thoreau’s eternal sea, but I do find myself discomfited by our manic obsession with news -breaking, developing, analysis, commentary, punditry- which seems more like intellectual anesthetization than awareness, more like distraction than attention.

And what a phrase: “…the froth & scum of the eternal sea.”