A serious curiosity derived from something I’ve noticed more and more often lately:
What the hell has happened to nuanced thought? It seems every day- more and more, it’s either this or that, with us or against us, black or white. What happened to the complexity of thought? Why have we come to be so polarized about every single thing that exists? And it seems it doesn’t matter the subject! The moment a topic is brought up. Sides are immediately taken in the War of Being Right.
It used to be that we considered things. We were rational. Logical. Contemplative.
Now? Everyone seems so quick to arrive at hastily constructed arguments that have to be either for or against- where no argument was necessary or even called for to being with!
It seems to me, that we need to relearn what was once so easily understood, and it’s that life exists between the boundaries of one and the other.
I’m actually going to say: stress. In economics as well as education, we’ve gone from a bell curve to a U curve. But regardless of which side of the curve we’re on, we’re almost all of us struggling in some way: rent, food prices, job security, worry about our kids, the environment, politics, end stage capitalism, whatever. And over the past decade, those stressors have built up.
People who are worried about how they’re going to pay rent/mortgage, what they’re going to eat, whether their car will last till next pay period, don’t have the luxury to spend time thinking about nuanced positions. I mean, they will if you push them, but it takes time and energy away from more immediate concerns, and there’ll be an undercurrent of resentment for you taking them away from important things.
People who are on the bottom or much of the right of the curve have niggling insecurities (is my job going to have layoffs, where I can get decent affordable childcare, why are electricity prices rising so much). They may be struggling, but they’re not constantly struggling like much of the lower classes. The hollowing out of the middle class isn’t truly visible to them yet. They hear complaints from the lower classes, but they seem very similar to what those complaints have always been. They know that those complaints have grown louder and more disruptive, but they assume it’s because it’s the same people it’s always been, just being louder and more disruptive. They haven’t realized it’s louder because there’s more people on the other side. And they haven’t realized that they’re at risk of moving to the bottom of the U curve - or even ending up on the other side.
Because of their assumption that it’s the same old group of people being more disruptive, they’re more dismissive of those complaints. And they have enough of their own stressors to deal with - food banks always say they need more (and more nutritious) food, but their primary concern are choosing a healthcare plan or childcare place that covers their needs without bankrupting them. It’s extremely stressful for them and they don’t have the time to spare to consider matters in depth either.
[I have another thought on the matter, but I’ll put it in a follow-up comment.]
This actually feeds into another thought I’ve had, which is covid. We manage our lives, and have time to spare for ourselves and others, because others have had time to spare for us. My job kept me late but my neighbor who works at the grocery store can grab me some baby formula since the sale ends today; her kid is sick but I have a WFH day so I can keep an eye on him while she goes to work. I have an endoscopy but my retired aunt can drive me to and from the medical plaza; she needs someone to check out her roof so I make time on a Saturday afternoon. We all have these little pieces of (what I’ll call) “grace” in our lives, things that make people’s lives easier. But the grace comes from pieces of other people’s lives.
Then covid hits. Something like 1,300,000 Americans die from covid. Yes, a number of them were elderly, but way more were still productive in small ways, providing bits of their time to make other people’s lives easier - the neighbor who picked your kid and hers from the same school, the guy down the block who shoveled your walkway when it snowed, your mom who came and took care of the house when you broke your leg, all helping each other.
Another 13,000,000 Americans, many of them in their very productive years, have long covid. Their focus is now just in getting through their daily lives. Not only do they no longer have bits and pieces of time they can spare to help other people, they require more bits and pieces of time from the people around them.
In my original scenario, if I have long covid, my elderly aunt still drives me to my appointment, but she has to either find a willing helper from a much smaller pool, or pay for repairs herself on a increasingly small fixed income. I don’t have the energy to watch my neighbor’s sick child (or risk getting sick again myself); she needs to work overtime to make up the pay and can’t get to my baby formula. My neighbor with long covid no longer clears my walkway, my mom died so getting help when I break my leg is harder and more personal.
Mr. Rogers said, “Look for the helpers,” but most of us were helpers in our own way, at different times of our lives. But so many people lost those bits of time we could spare other people, lost people who could spare time for us, and it all happened at the same time. [Well, over a couple years, but still … ]
Normally, if you lose a helper, you can find someone else to help; it may be a struggle, but you adjust. But everyone lost their helpers at the same time, any at that exact same time, everyone also ended up needing additional help.
It feels like a less kind world because it is less kind. We’ve all lost bits and pieces of our social support network, and we can’t afford to give away as much time or effort as we used to, and we have yet to acknowledge how much this loss of spare time, of grace given and received from others, has cost us on both an individual and a societal level.
And this loss of grace, especially unacknowledged as it is, has increased the amount of stress that everyone in our society is under. And where there’s increased stress, there’s less opportunity for nuance.