I was born in 1969.
On July 20th, when I am eight days old, Neil Armstrong becomes the first human being to set foot on the moon. He manually pilots the Eagle past strewn boulders, amid the sounding of alarms, to land in the Sea of Tranquility with 30 seconds worth of fuel to spare. 240 thousand miles away, his voice reaches through the television sets of half a billion people, including ours, to proclaim: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
I was born straddling two worlds.
I have heard it said that context is decisive. I take this to mean that all our impressions of reality — the world we see and touch, the thoughts that occupy our minds, the feelings that swell our hearts — do not exist absolutely, in and of themselves. They are manifestations of deeper premises. It is not just that context is the lens through which we see the world, nor that context shapes content, but that together they form a discrete whole. They are, quite literally, one. It follows, then, that all creation happens not at the level of content, through a change of circumstance, but perceptually, through the shifting of context.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Armstrong later said, of seeing the earth from space, “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”
He had experienced a shift in context.
I am not the first person to observe that technological revolutions transform our perceptions of reality, our values, and our understanding of what it is to be human. Consider, in admittedly broad strokes, the evolution of Western civilization. Feudal, agrarian societies experienced life as cyclical, like the seasons, and reality as immutable, fixed in a hierarchy between peasant and God. One did not rise above their station. Authority was conferred by one’s position in the hierarchy, which was codified in scripture and administered through the church and feudal state. Morality was quite literally written in stone, but its import could only be reached by resort to the hierarchy’s interpreters: the priests. The dominant metaphor was world as organism, in which each organ must fulfill its function for the whole to survive. Wealth was land; conquest was its agent; God was a king.
The industrial revolution introduced the idea of progress, of unlimited, directional, linear growth. The value of the natural world, and that of a human life, were reinterpreted in terms of their utilitarian value, as were the norms and morals of the time. The end justified the means; the exploitation of resources became an end in itself, and its own justification. The fixed, centralized hierarchy, validated by a universally accepted script, was replaced by a Darwinian hierarchy in which the winners were presumed to be the fittest; predestination was reinterpreted as self-determination, and yet the rich still enjoyed the whiff of divine approval. Rationality usurped God; and the dominant metaphor was world as machine, hypothetically knowable, if one only had the blueprint. Wealth was capital; competition was its agent; reason was God.
And the digital age? No longer fixed, nor even linear, time and space proceed exponentially; shifts are immediate and tectonic. One image, one tweet, may intersect with unknown variables to produce wholesale changes in the global mindset. Experience, divorced from both natural cycles and indeed physical reality, is mediated; one knows what one thinks, feels, and is through the process of packaging it for others. Form defines substance; the message is the meal. Gratification is instantaneous, stripped of both time and effort. The power structure is again subverted; authority is now conferred by influence. Self-determination is reinterpreted as self-invention. In this new game, perception trumps factual reality, and truth itself becomes irrelevant. Fame, be it notorious or meritorious, is its own accomplishment, stripped, like gratification, of its underpinnings. Knowledge is global; mystery, like God, is dead. The dominant metaphor is world as, not computer, but the computed; it is world as soundbite, world as meme. Wealth is display, influence its agent, and God is a new kind of machine, with digital, rather than analog, capacities.
A wide-open world in which everything is up for grabs, everything is at stake, and everything is possible, for better or for worse. May you live in interesting times.
My fellow Gen X-ers may feel this shift more keenly than any other generation. We passed our formative years in analog time, before the rise of the personal computer, came of age with the internet, and entered our productive years with the smart phone, navigating realities essentially foreign to our upbringing. We have more in common with the Boomers before us, yet share sympathies with the Millennials who came after, sensing our complicity in a disaster not quite of our making. We were latch-key kids, the fulcrum generation, and if we didn’t believe in anything, it was because we sensed the old world had died, but the new one had not yet been born.
My heart still lives in the old world, even while my imagination is captured by the new. Perhaps that’s why I feel compelled to dig its treasures out of the trash bin and hold them up to the light, share them with others, chase people down the street and force them to look up from their phones. I sense there is something important to remember, even if I cannot remember quite what it is. We articulate in order to know; we share in order to have. And if I go searching for the spirit of the analog age, perhaps the search itself will be the finding. For context is decisive, or so I’ve been told.
Like Neil Armstrong, gazing at a world I’ve left behind, perhaps I will discover it for the first time.
Photo attribution: From “Space Colony Art of the 1970s” NASA ID NUMBER
AC75-1086-1; CC BY PD GOV; no additional rights; obtained from www.publicdomainreview.com
Thank you Julie, for taking me on an extraordinary journey through the evolutionary history of my culture and for helping me to see the more recent changes through the eyes of the generations that came after me. As always your writing is so beautifully crafted and flows. And your keen and transformative insights make one settle and think for a long time after reading.
I’m so glad you came along for the ride! Your unconditional support has made a world of difference in the development of my own world view. Crafting this entry helped me to clarify, for myself, just what I’m exploring in this blog, so it was useful to me as well!
After your squeaky-wheel entry into my world, my second distinct memory of you is watching you spread out on a blanket in front of Walter Cronkite as Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. Thanks for recalling that wonderful memory. Happy birthday, indeed!
I am stunned by the breadth, depth, richness and complexity of your thinking and writing. And I feel honored to be one of the first people to read this blog. I’m so proud to be your father!
I love you
I thought this entry would have special resonance for you and Mom! I’m proud to be the daughter of two exceptional people. Everything I express in this blog is a reflection of my upbringing, which included not only unconditional love, but a profound spirit of inquiry and a deep love of art and culture. Thank you to you both!
Julie, the idea that creation happens at the shifting of context resonates both personally and also as I see and participate in a world right now demanding that the context shift radically. I think of us in this moment to be at another metaphorical straddling of more than one world. I hope so anyway. We long for this, if differently and with different tools. I include here that lithe generation born after those of us who were birthed in 1969: a generation that seek alter-realities, virtual realities within platforms less tactile perhaps than we’ve known. But we lack imagination for it, fundamentally. Or perhaps more precisely, we have unlearned our own imaginative possibilities. How we got to this lack is a conversation that circles around many of our institutional structures, and we’ve launched these among us before. But for now, a piece I am taking from this week’s entry is what I hear to be a call for more imagination. Whether it be in the ability to re-purpose and recreate that old item you wrote about, pulled out of the trash and held up to a discerning light, or something newfangled, speedy and clever with its touch id capabilities… I hear in your writing the need for more/new kinds of creativity and thus the possibility of tilting ourselves and that context – and doing so right here planted in the old dirt of this small pea, earth. Thanks for this. I love the sensation of your words when you write of the “feelings that swell our hearts.” The image for me is of both generous fullness, and also painful inflammation. The two swells are perfect together. I have always thought of them in terms of their content. And I’ve considered the task (for me anyway) to involve sorting through that content. And doing so in a judge-y sort of way. Cleaning house, purging, expelling etc. But you’ve suggested here that the swelling is, rather, our own sharply beautiful, horrendous context, and this is what we must shift: if we are wanting to feel alive, we must be ready to enact our own unraveling. xo
I would like to explore this more with you, Liddy. I got excited, reading this, because I think it just starts to tease out something that is pivotal right now — our age old instutitions are collapsing, for worse, but more so for better, if only we can invent something to take their place. And to do that, we need both “digital” and “analog” capacities. That’s concerning the meta — as for the personal, it’s connected to the meta, isn’t it. What’s taking place in the world is taking place in our backyards, and even in our heads and hearts. It’s all connected within “context.” Can’t wait to explore more!
Beautiful, flowing, eloquent and thought-provoking, this moved me deeply when I read it in the stillness of this summer morning, another morning of pandemic-imposed isolation. I immediately identified with the feeling of straddling two eras, analog and digital, but others as well, times of dramatic shifts in our “context.” (Pre and post-pandemic?) There will continue to be tectonic, before/after events in life, and we will continue to wonder where we are headed and what it all means. I am grateful for talented writers such as you who strive to “pull treasures” from the “trash bin” of life, for I, too, am fascinated by history, those who came before and our connection in this strange, wonderful, challenging journey of life.
Thank you so much for this, Nancy. In this shifting times, it seems to matter even more that we connect, and to know you resonated so deeply with these words means the world to me. I look forward to exploring what this shift means over the months to come with you — thank you for reading, and for taking the time to comment, and I may be picking your brain for your thoughts on these subjects for blog posts to come!
Your eloquent, thought-provoking essay gives words to the profound changes we’ve experienced in our world. As information is instantaneous in the digital age, we can lose sight of truth and critical thinking skills are not always at the forefront. My heart yearns for the slower pace of simpler times, but you’re right, our imagination is captured by this new era. As an elementary teacher, I saw dramatic changes in children’s attention spans as they became increasingly captivated by fast-moving visual stimuli. Bring Mr. Rogers back! Julie, you help us put on wide lenses to look at our beautiful, lush earth, and our place in it.
Thank you for this, Angie! As an educator of children, you have a unique and important perspective to offer. It seems to me that childhood itself is very “analog” in nature. It is immersive, experiential, and it thrives through connection. It’s never been more important to question what truly sustains our children, and in doing so, remember what truly sustains us. Please continue to share your insights here, as they come to you — I feel like you have a special connection to the wonder of what it is to be a child.