The New Normal
Years ago I posited the ramifications of people's thoughts being audible. While we have not developed telepathy, the ubiquity of cellular towers has allowed our digital appendages ((smartphones) to create platforms by which all of our mental meanderings or machinations, no matter how mean-spirited, can spill out like a tsunami as tweets, posts, blogs and hi-def pictures. Our bandwidth has expanded beyond the daily atrocities of murder, mayhem, and geopolitical tragedies to include a drastic reconfiguration of the now very subjective term normal.
Maybe we have misdiagnosed normal all along. Greek historian Herodotus wrote,'The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing." The Age of Enlightenment was supposed to be the epiphany, the birth of consciousness of rational men and women in control of their own destinies. The Age of Science purportedly expunged the reliance on superstition, god(s) and religion. The Promethean promise of progress as humanity dismantled the shackles of ignorance would usher in a Utopian construct by which the endemic challenges of the human condition would be superseded by new insights and technology.
Well............
Few could have imagined that the pace of technological advances could have accelerated the opening of what is essentially Pandora's Box. We have this strange dichotomy of good and evil, which have always co-mingled, battling for dominance not just in the public square, but in the hyper loops of social media platforms. Bill Gates is fond of quoting statistics from one of his favorite researchers that empirically demonstrate that things are getting better using the metrics of global poverty, average life span, access to healthcare, clean water and reduction of hunger. Yet with the calculus that created all of these innovations, we can't create an algorithm that explains the surging spiritual drift in our culture. To what do we attribute this current malaise that seems to be ushering in an apparently rhetorical question: what kind of world do we live in?
If we constrict our focus to the natural at the expense of the spiritual, we limit solutions to merely heritage, biology, sociology, politics and economics. Christ summarized the issue with this simple pronouncement, "It's a heart issue." Russian philosopher Fyodor Dostoevsky said,"Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he can not find anything to depend upon either within or outside of himself."Christ expanded his narrative by saying in Mark 7:1," It is not what goes into your body that defiles you, you are defiled by what comes from your heart." (New Living Translation)
The new narrative of our nation, a hodge podge of moral relativism, New Ageism, secular humanism and atheism is not a reflection of new modalities of enlightenment. It's just symptomatic of the heart disease we have suffered with since humanity's fall. This new normal is neither.
