Unity feels a bit like some idealist fever dream these days; a pollyanna’s foolish wish for some other prettier universe. Not only do we see this abyss between these red and blue political tribes, dug ever deeper by the echoing and largely non-overlapping media bubbles they inhabit, but profound schisms between subtribes within these: the intellectual dark web vs. the social justice warriors, postmodernism vs metamodernism, never trumpers vs trumpinistas, anti vaxxers, creationists, neo cons, classial liberals… the tribes seem to grow and build battlements in what feels like a dizzying proliferation of disunity.
But are we doomed to this in perpetuity? Disruption always leads to disarray and dismay, and yet time and time again, if history has any lesson for us, this grand construct that is human civilization is relentlessly self-correcting. It is a manifestation of our ineffable cognition, developed as it was to perfect itself and tweak its environment to be most beneficial to its continuation. What I see in the record or our race is that we always settle back into a state of grace; that however horrific the spasms of disruption, in the end, we are always one species, whose welfare always supercedes our petty squabbles.
That may be little comfort to the ideas, institutions or beings crushed in these reorganizations, but at least it gives me some hope for the eventual reunification of the various warring tribes to which I belong, and whose battles feel as if they might tear me apart. I trust they will not, and can only hope that the turning of the decade, or the shift of the solar cycle, or the Fourth Turning or whatever forces guide our social evolution, bring us to a reconciliation that finds us once again unified.
HOLLY DAYS 