Owning up to our internal decay before we rediscover our purpose

A couple that I know mentioned to me their concerns about violence connected with Black Friday. To me the incidence of aggressive pushing and shoving — and sometimes worse — over a deal on the latest electronic gadget or running shoe is a fascinating, yet concerning, symptom. Contrasting that shopping frenzy with the incidents where shoplifting occurs, either in the context of a riot or when a family is desperate for food or clothing, brings up challenges for our society — or symptoms — that are ignored at our peril.

An article in “The Dispatch” by Yuval Levin on November 16, “The Changing Face of Social Breakdown: Pathologies of unruliness are being displaced by pathologies of passivity,” indirectly addresses those symptoms, notes the lack of traditional social restraints, and then going deeper focuses on:

“…a rising generation acutely adverse to risk, and so to every form of dynamism. Excessive risk aversion now often deforms parenting, education, work, leadership, and fellowship in our society. It is intertwined with a more general tendency towards inhibition and constriction — with Americans walking on eggshells around each other in many of our major institutions, and with codes of speech and conduct becoming increasingly prevalent. We live in a time that is prudish yet not prescriptive….”

Larry Little
Larry Little

Mr. Levin has a point.

We can do better. It seems to me that we can address our passivity by owning up to our mistakes, both those in the past and current ones, and then taking action.

Let’s start way, way back — with the dinosaurs. In a sense our long-ago ancestors were large and mostly passive, and it’s obvious that they didn’t have the capacity to address their pending doom.

We have a better chance.

I don’t know whether we face extinction from getting hit by an enormous asteroid, climate change, or like the end of the Roman Empire — getting overrun after internal decay.

As to the first extinction possibility, in a way we are in the process of avenging the dinosaurs by sending a spacecraft to hopefully intersect and redirect an asteroid. It’s on its way.

According to NASA, their “Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will impact a 'moonlet' in the Didymos asteroid system,” and redirect it.

It would be great if they parked it nearby and we could mine it!

However, as to the second possibility for doom, even if we learn to identify and redirect what killed the dinosaurs, we might extinguish human life on our planet through climate change.

Here comes a partial and creative solution, albeit not without some risk. It’s a first step towards fusion power, and we can thank Bill Gates among others.

In an article published by CNBC on June 11, Gates was quoted, "Stop shutting down nuclear reactors and build new nuclear power plants to fight climate change.” It was noted, according to Gates:

“...if we’re serious about solving climate change and quite frankly we have to be, the first thing we should do is to keep safe reactors operating." Gates, the article reported, is the founder and chairman of TerraPower, a nuclear technology company that is planning to build an advanced nuclear power plant at a retiring coal power plant in Wyoming.

Perhaps addressing the threat of asteroids and climate change is actually easier than the third far more subtle and potentially more insidious risk, and what Mr. Levin was addressing — internal decay. It may not result in the end of human life, but might well lead in the long run to some form of dystopian future.

Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow at Stanford University, writing in The Economist’s “The World Ahead 2022” edition, simply comes at the problem from the perspective of our national divisions when he writes about the critical need for the United States to “…recover…a sense of national identity and purpose….”

Perhaps we can also learn from our not-so-distant past how to address our passivity and rediscover our identity and purpose.

While the 1960s and 1970s were a tough time for the United States, we learned a lot about ourselves and what we were capable of. We engaged in a social revolution and largely restructured our society. We also reached the moon in 1969.

We can do it again, with a twist.

We need to continue our social revolution to address the deeper divides that separate us, beyond such surface issues as gender and race. My sense is that we are entering Social Revolution 2.0 and we can save ourselves from ourselves only by taking some tough steps and looking at what unites us. Really talking about Black Friday is a start. It's been reported that the pistol used in the recent school shooting in Oxford High School in Michigan was purchased four days before — on Black Friday.

With some real effort we can avenge the dinosaurs, save our planet, reach for the stars (at least Mars) and find our identity and purpose.

Contact Larry Little at larrylittle46@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Larry Little: Can America rediscover its purpose