FUTURE-FEAR - PART III - Facing the Future

WHAT IS.

If you have been following my posts on Future-Fear, you have probably noticed a pattern with regard to my discussion on time.  The past cannot be replicated in the present and the present cannot be understood without dealing with the past at some level. As such, the future cannot be prepared for without coping with present as the present.  This may all sound rather mundane and obvious on the surface, yet I would suggest that there are subtle nuances at play regarding how we understand and utilize the concepts of past, present, and future in dealing with "what was," coping with"what is" and  facing "what next."

The nuances I am referring to is related to our capability to be objective and our proclivity in being subjective with "What is."  They are subtle because we rarely stop to assess whether our thinking and our observations are objective or subjective because we feel so much about the things that are currently swirling around us.

The further one looks back into the past, the more objective one is likely to become, as the further back one looks into history, one has no personal recall of the events nor a personally vested interest in them and must rely on data that has been subsequently supplied over time.  Any subjectivity regarding the past can only be accomplished through a current ideological perspective of it. 

The present is more likely to be a subjective experience.  Nevertheless, it can be viewed objectively if one can calmly step back and take the time to look at things for what they are ("What is") at the time without giving them an ideologically-based meaning or judging them strictly in the light of past events and experiences. This is much easier said than done.

One of the benefits of the current age is we are familiar with scientific approaches to understanding things and occurrences which are likely to be objective.  The science of the present may not have all the answers, but it does have the methods and the means to make us more objective about what is happening at the time.  Science, in all of its forms (physical, medical, social, economic, etc.) can identify patterns in the current and give a sense of an immediate trajectory as to where things are headed at present.

Looking ahead to the future is almost a totally subjective endeavor and depends on where one is at in life at the moment as to how one envisions it.  In reality, the future is a blank page; there is nothing there to be objective about. Subsequently, we largely view the concept of the future ideologically.

A time in which one no longer exists is almost unthinkable at a younger age, but it quickly becomes increasingly thought about as one gets older  As mentioned above, we deal with the future largely along ideological lines as a surrogate means to conceptualize the future "objectively."  In other words, we entertain beliefs that have been handed down to us or that we acquire through speculation about what the future beyond us would be like, but there is very little to be objective about adhering to beliefs and speculation about something that has not occurred.

We do this because we, like nature, abhor a void, the blank page that the future really is.  As such, we tend to talk about the future in terms of feelings - of feeling despair or hope regarding it.  Both despair and hope share a common denominator, fear.  We fear the blank page we face when looking toward the future.   Fear gives way to despair if hope is not factored in.  Without fear there is no need to despair or to hope.   The irony is that these are projected feelings that only exist in the present about something that does not yet exist.

We project these feelings based on our understanding of the past as it relates to the present and in seeing how events of the past led to or are connected to the outcomes we are currently experiencing.  We cannot help but think in terms of cause and effect and to conceive of an endless chain of events  that will be linked to one another well into the future, and herein lies the source of our fears about the future.

WHAT NEXT?

Humans long for that which is reliable.  That which appears reliable is also considered under control; primarily under my or our control.  We think less about the future when things are under our control.  Lose that sense of control and the future becomes an  immediate concern; as expressed by the question, "What next?"

We fear things that threaten the reliability to which we have become accustomed to or we fear that some form of  chaos in our lives will emerge and threaten our way of life, if not our very existence.  In the first case, we tend to resist change.  In the latter case, we seek it.  In both cases, we become very focused on what links in the chain of continuity are being broken and what links are being forged in the immediate future.  In the first case, the urge is to preserve an immediate past that seems to be disappearing or is perceived as having disappeared.  In the latter case, the urge is to escape an imminent chain of events that threatens the very notion of having a future.

Our current world seems to be caught in a clash of these two perspectives as change is always upon us. Change is rarely sought on a substantive level, and most often substantive change is thrust on us by events beyond our control.  In this sense, the ancients were correct that the future comes from behind and sneaks up on us.

We can readily grasp this when it comes to natural disasters. We can make limited preparations to mitigate their impact, but we never are sure what type of natural disaster will occur. The most devastating are likely to be the ones we don't see coming.  As a whole, we tend to be more empathetic towards victims of natural disasters than those created by humans.  I can think of all sorts of evolutionary reasons why that is, as you can also deduce, but I will leave that for a future post.

Fearing Displacement as Replacement

Human caused disasters are viewed insidiously by most.  Disasters that become prolonged, such as, wars and organized terrorism against civilians results in displacement of these populations who have no choice but to leave or face the real threat of death to themselves and their loved ones.  Ironically, there is a sense, at some level, that whatever caused their plight at the hand of others is somehow connected to what they, themselves, have brought about.  As such, the victims of wars and human violence of all sorts are likely to be treated less empathically than victims of natural disasters for the simple reason that getting involved risks being linked into a chain of events that will change the course of our future.

Sadly, the victims of war and violence frequently end up further victimized because the change that is forced upon them is frequently viewed as a contagion that threatens the comfort of those who could help the most.

This has been played out for some time in the civil strife throughout the African continent and in the Middle East.  Few nations want to get directly involved unless compelled to do so for reasons of national security or the security of one of its allies.   If there is no immediate economic or military advantage to becoming involved, the victims of these war-torn, violent areas are largely left to fend for themselves and often find themselves corralled into the leper colonies of our age, the refugee camps that are on the remote outskirts of normalcy and the threadbare fringe of civilization; where facing the future is either a luxury one cannot afford or a curse one cannot bear.

This is also being played out in Central America where the atrocities of organized gang violence threatens civil and family life that has motivated thousands to flee their homelands to seek the security of more stable nations like the United States.  In the United States, we have engaged a self-protectionist approach to their plight.  We fear the contagion of chaos that has brought them to our borders as something that threatens our way of life and has prompted voters in the United States to elect an administration that has promised to build a wall to protect "our way of life."

The "way of life " being protected in the United States can be largely understood as a romanticized version of the dominant white, protestant culture prevalent in the United States during the early 1950's.  Here the fear of a losing a lifestyle that for the most part consisted of sham displays of civility and morality has warped the present through the distorted recall and futile attempt to regain a past that no longer exists. "Make America Great Again" is an apt hashtag for the fear it expresses and a meme of the desperate who fear of losing a past lifestyle and are engaged in willful blindness as a futile means to regain it.

One wonders if and when there is a mass migration of people from areas struck by the human caused natural disasters resulting from global warming that those who have will be willing to welcome and help those who do not. At present, the emerging tribalism that is being expressed in the nationalistic trends seen in some industrialized nations indicates that nations will be reluctant to do so.  The underlying angst that appears present in the reluctance to aid the displaced is the fear of being replaced; that in welcoming the displaced there will be a clash of cultures, that the displaced will not assimilate, but dominate, replacing the current status quo; replacing the reliability of "what is" with the uncertainty of "what next.

The irony in all of this fear leveled at the displaced is that it is the displaced who have been replaced.  The fear that is felt regarding them is largely fomented by those who are in no real or tangible threat of being replaced, who do not see that it is the causes of displacement that pose a threat, not the displaced themselves.

Fight and Despair

As mentioned above, future-fear produces two reactions despair and hope.   The primary response to immediate fear is the familiar fight or flight response, but since there is nothing immediate about one's fear of what the future holds, the response elongates from fight to despair and from flight to hope.   One might be tempted to reverse this order but bear with me as I ponder how the future shapes our response to fear.

What we can't immediately fight or contend with opens us to the domain of despair and acts of desperation.  The temptation is to become preemptive, to strike first before the other side sees it coming - to head off a perceived enemy, to block their way, to build a wall.

Flight and Hope

The other response to immediate fear is to flee, to avoid a fight, to save one's self for another day.  In the animal world, animals instinctively know when they're overmatched and will seek a way to avoid a fight.  We see this as a smart move on the part of such creatures.   The human animal's response to fear is more complex. Unless the perception is that one is completely outnumbered, flight as an immediate response is seen as either being cowardly or devious. 

Weaponry has increasingly enhanced the human ability to act preemptively.  In recent times, the capacity of a single weapon to cause massive casualties has deluded some with feelings of invincibility and grandeur.  As such, they do not see a reason to hope as they become paragons of despair.

Flight, in relation to future-fear, elongates to hope because there is nothing to flee from other than flee to the refuge of longing for better tomorrow.  As such, hope serves as a stopgap to becoming preemptive.   Hope is an admission that the future is a blank page; that the current trajectories do not necessarily result in given outcomes; that things can change in hopefully good ways. We see hope exercised on an international scale as diplomacy and on a personal scale as collegiality and negotiation.

Hope permits us to put our fears of the future in check so that we can  address "what is" without trying to address a speculated what's next.  In this sense, hope affords one the ability to be proactive in addressing the present rather than being preemptive in addressing a future that does not exist.  Hope appears to allow one to seek the potential for goodness that can emerge from facing and working on the current challenges that are present.

To effectively face the future, one has only to be present with what is.

Until next time, stay faithful.

FUTURE-FEAR - PART II - Coping with the Present

Presently, we live in a time when there is so much information being thrown at us on a daily basis, that it is almost impossible to process everything that is currently happening.  References to the past as being relevant to what is current abound and prompt us to use such references to project future outcomes.  As such, it is hard to stay present in the present; in what is currently going on in our lives and in the world around us.  In this post, I will examine the challenges that exist in coping with present.

BEING CURRENT

As defined in my previous post, the present is made up of moments that quickly decay into the past.  As such, it is difficult to talk of the present in a strict linear fashion.  In terms of time, what we consider the present is a generalized collection of moments that are measured in days, weeks, months, and years.  We also conceptualize the present in terms of ongoing activities or functions. For example, we talk about the current administration, current economic indicators, current weather patterns, and current events.

Given this generalized understanding of the present, the past becomes defined as that which is no longer current or ongoing.  The present, however, cannot be strictly understood as isolated from the past or the future.  Most see and treat the present as a bridge between past and future and herein lies a difficulty in coping with the present.  We cannot make sense of the present without referencing the past and projecting that reference into the future. What poses a problem in our doing so is that  our recall of the past, our memory of it, is imprecise and in many cases incomplete.

Ironically, the recent past is more problematic in this regard than the distant past.  Recall of the distant past is a product of collective distillation.  By that I mean, over time, the distant past takes on meanings that are generally accepted and readily applicable to current situations which are similar in nature. On the other hand, the recent past is raw, has not been subjected to the distillation of time, and has not acquired the depth of meaning that events of the distant past have acquired. 

In many cases there exists general disagreement as to the interpretation of the recent events being recalled.  This is particularly evident in the times we currently live in; where facts are mutable and recall tainted with creative interpretation, if not wishful thinking.  One has only to listen to the  political pundits on various news networks interpret and speculate as to what current events mean to understand this reality. 

Frequently, it takes a century or more of fermented thought before distilling and settling on a general interpretation of events begins because meanings are derived from the outcomes; the future events caused by or related to the initial event which are not readily understood until a significant amount of time has passed to enable one to objectively see the connections and the disconnects.  Distillation removes many of the factors that are deemed irrelevant to an event's meanings and that is why the past can never be completely or fully replicated.

CURRENT DISTORTION

Coping with current events frequently results in coping with personal and societal angst, particularly where there is confusion about what has taken place.  When facts are skewed to fit a particular agenda motivated by politics, for example, societal angst increases and there is a sense of collective disorientation regarding what is reliable information. History is full of such moments which cannot be fully understood until the passing of time; until the passing of a generation or two lessens the subjective reaction evident at the time of an event's occurrence. One only has to recall the recent Balkan wars to see how sublimated ethnic conflict quickly exploded after more than seventy years of that area being under one nation rule first as kingdom and then as a communist state.

Subjective awareness is always a concern in coping with the present. Individuals going through a particularly stressful current event are prone to find solace in seeking a collective opinion that matches their subjective views; to engage in groupthink.  In doing so, we often fail to recognize that such opinions are themselves subjective; that a number of people sharing similar opinions or viewpoints does not make such opinions or interpretations about something objective or accurate. While this appears readily observable in a group that doesn't share one's subjective viewpoint, it is less noticeable in seeing it in one's self and the group that one personally identifies with.  Subjectively, we are all prone to think of ourselves as being objective in our ideological views.

This is observable in the current political scene occurring within the United States and it is why so much of what is occurring is due to political polarity that is both fostered and perpetuated by intransigent thinking by individuals who are deluded with the idea that they are objective while being in the grips of a societal angst that is largely subjective.  Populism is frequently the offspring of such occurrences, and in the last presidential election, populism was evident in both political parties.

Populism appears to arise when there is a sense of disorientation about the present, when there is movement towards something different, a societal shift or a change that appears to be a break in continuity with the past.  Depending on one's ideological perspective, one can view such changes as something to fear, as in losing something in the present, or as something to welcome, as in moving away from something perceived as currently hindering progress.

UNPRECEDENTED

The term we hear reflecting this sense of disorientation in the news media of today  is "unprecedented" which often leads to skeptical reaction by news commentators.   What becomes evident in this sense of disorientation is the inability to find meaning in what is occurring at the time. The temptation, however, is to assign meaning based on past reference. Nothing illustrates the imprecision of the past than when it is strictly applied to what is currently happening.  As mentioned in my previous post, occurrences may have a similar flavor but are concocted differently.

A current example of this would be the scandal surrounding the hacking of the Democratic National Committee's emails by Russia and the alleged collusion by the Trump Campaign in this matter.  The immediate past reference is, understandably, Watergate because they share the same flavor; subverting a presidential election, but that is where the reference ends or should because they are concocted differently.  In other words, the details are different.  Currently, the jury is still out with regard to what is now being called the "Russian Investigation."

Watergate (an unprecedented event at the time) acts as a gold standard when it comes to election tampering in the United States.  Events evoking its flavor are naturally measured against it as being like it or being worse than it or not measuring up to it. This is similar to the gold standard of a presidential administration's first one hundred days set by FDR's first one hundred days in enacting many social changes as president (unprecedented at the time ) in measuring within that timeframe the effectiveness of every administration since that time.  It is assumed that every presidential administration will have one hundred days to demonstrate its effectiveness which is then used to predict and project its effectiveness or lack thereof into the near future.

What can become lost in past reference and future speculation regarding current events is the experience of the present.  If the experience of the present invokes so clearly the flavor of a past event, the present experience can be subsumed by the recall of the past.  As such, understanding the current experience, as it is, becomes lost or hindered.  The risk inherent in such situations is the tendency to engage in self-fulfilling prophecy that will result in the same outcome as the referenced past.

The past, however, is not prophetic.  While a current and past event may share the same flavor and the current situation may appear to be headed in a similar direction, the situation is circumstantial rather than prophetic.  Past and present circumstances, however, are rarely, if ever, identical.  The past cannot be replicated and current events possess enough nuance that over time the outcomes, traceable to a current event, will become increasingly less like the past being reference.

CURRENT DENIAL

Another challenge in coping with the present is when there is nothing in our collective memory of the past to reference. Historically, this is a recent phenomenon that is the result of science, particularly, theoretical science's ability to understand the present in ways humans have not been able to before. When new knowledge is presented as theory (as unprecedented), the initial reaction is to treat it with a great deal of skepticism even if there is mounting evidential proof of it.

As mentioned in previous posts, most human beings are experiential learners.  That is one of the primary reasons why the past is so readily referenced.  An experience in which there is no past to reference tends to disorient us to the present and cause us to scramble to find some semblance in the past to reference.

A primary example of this is climate change and its connection to global warming.  This has quickly moved from being theoretical to experiential as every continent is experiencing its effects.   Yet, there are many, especially in the United States, who deny the science behind the experience.

Living in the State of South Dakota, where people are use to experiencing dramatic changes in weather quite frequently, occludes the realization that these dramatic changes are becoming more extreme and common place elsewhere and have a human fingerprint as to their causes.  During a recent, early spring  blizzard in which the temperature was winter-like I heard two gentlemen say to each other derisively, "So much for global warming" - a common statement amongst individuals in this part of the county which belies an unintentional awareness and fear that cannot be spoken of directly because that would be considered politically incorrect in a red state.

If we didn't have access to global news, I might have found myself agreeing with them.  I too have experienced throughout my life the periodic extreme of South Dakota weather, but while these gentlemen were talking about the extreme cold for the time of year they seemed totally unaware that two states south of us, in Oklahoma, people were experiencing wildfires that threatened whole communities.  The fact is scientists, with almost uncanny precision, warned us almost to the year when such anomalous weather would occur and that it is linked to human activity. The scientists' ability to do this was due to being able to assess the present for what it is from a strict scientific analysis of the elements involve; that was independent of the need to rely on historical knowledge of the past.  In fact, their discoveries in the present clarified the history of Earth's weather in the past.

In this case,  being able to recall periodic extreme weather experiences of the past has numbed many to the growing reality of human activities link to global warming's effect on weather by relativizing constant extremes with extremes that were, just a few years ago known as a once-in-five-hundred-years events. Such increasingly frequent events are becoming normalized and, in this case, the recollection of past experiences is leading some to a denial of the present thus inhibiting doing something now to ensure a future.

The past is always before us. The past has always been the yardstick used to measure the present, even though science is offering other means to understand what is happening now.  Coping with the present then becomes a matter of knowing how to use the past correctly; knowing its limits in defining the moment we're in.  Coping with the present is also benefited by sincere consideration of knowledge that seems new to one's ears, accepting that we are learning new things from science, to  engage in  truly objective analysis that is independent of historical experience regarding unprecedented occurrences involving ourselves and the world we live in.

Coping with the present is also benefited by letting the moment  be just as it is (for the moment) in order to step away from the angst, and to orient one's self to the immediate present without measuring it, adding to it, or subtracting from it without analysis; to experience in the moment what goes unnoticed, the sun shining, the breeze, the temperature of the air, the sounds of nature, one's own breathing and being right now.

Until next time, stay faithful.