The Anxiety of Modernity
Created by fossil fuels and industrialism, modernity induced great social anxiety, an ambient anxiousness. Fossil fuels sped up life, creating ever greater need for motion, an incessant need for action, a perpetual busyness. Being in motion, doing something, alleviated some modern anxiety.
One look at the American populous, it is also clear anxiousness has deep pre-human evolutionary roots tied directly to our body's sense of hunger. Eating provides some anxiety relief.
The more recent electronic era created ubiquitous communication at the speed of light, along with an increase in anxiety. This anxiety is not quelled by bodily motion, but the need to be constantly plugged-in, a virtual motion.
In the United States, an all encompassing social anxiety defines many things, especially politics. Faced with any political challenge, spending time contemplating is considered weak, increasing anxiety. Acting, even if the action is detrimental, is considered strong.
Historically, for all established power, acting is a virtue, contemplation a threat. You'll find very little contemplation in the words of any modern politician. Just the opposite, every word is action orientated, āI know what to do!ā In the United States, decades of a total lack of contemplation created a political environment where every action now taken is overwhelmingly a reaction to bad actions of the past, producing an ever swiftly spinning spiral of decline, each new action only increasing the momentum.
In a 1958 speech at the Princeton Theological Seminary, physicist and atomic bomb creator, J. Robert Oppenheimer, offered some sharp thoughts on the processes of thinking and action, thoughts essential for any healthy politics in a world defined by technology. Oppenheimer's seemingly contradictory perspective is founded in a appreciation of the wholeness of any action, what physicist Niels Bohr called ācomplementarity.ā It is the understanding that any specific action disallows a complete knowledge of any event, simply in the taking of the action itself.
Oppenheimer states,
āThere is an element of action in any intellectual activity, even a so marginal one as perception, which means no perception is possible, which does not leave out, which does not lose, all record of a great deal that was going on.ā