Today is the first Holly Day of 2022: Unity. It has been a decade since I began this practice of posting daily essays on each Holly Day, 17 years now since we began to develop Holly Days as a family tradition. I start this annual ritual by going back and rereading my previous year’s posts for the day. So many on Unity reflected on and bemoaned the deepening polarization and tribalism I’ve witnessed over the last few years, and especially the trumpism it resulted in. This year I’m seeing some signs of that fever breaking a bit. I have always retained some faith that we clever apes will eventually find our ways back into the peculiar state of grace that has allowed us to dominate this planet so utterly while managing to somehow survive the repeated fouling of our own nest.
Imagine a mother hiding with her children in a basement in Berlin or London in the winter of 1945 as their homes crumbled above their heads in their enemy’s bombing raids. Could any of them imagine the way those men would sit down together, shuffling papers and chart a course that has resulted in the remarkable unity and prosperity among former bitter enemies, now the closests of friends: England, Germany, the US, and Japan. That cataclysmic war followed closely on another; the almost incomprehensible horror of the first followed by the even less comprehensible horror of the second, both of which were well within the memory of all those men. They had personally experienced the way the long tradition of of granting the spoils of first war to the victors had laid the foundation for the second, and knowing by the that the third might be the last, they negotiated a peace that treated the vanquished with a generosity and compassion that had been unheard of in human history.
We’ve been living through another, thankfully much more virtual cataclysm, but still with very powerful and personal shocks as modern media smashes us all into the same digitized box together. But we are not really stuck in our bubbles as is so often bemoaned. Nazi, Soviets, Catholics, Protestants and all the other tribes that have marched off to war over the milenia really were in bubbles. The vast majority of their tribemates knew nothing about their enemies’ perspectives, they were almost uniformly certain of the clear and subhuman evil of their opponents.
Today we fuss frantically and mostly unsuccessfully to keep these bubbles intact, fretting anxiously trying to prevent alien ideas from intruding into them. But intrude they do, resulting in enormous shifts in how we understand who our ingroups and outgroups are.
Other’s perspectives may appear like alien minds living in another reality. It’s disruptive, it’s unsettling and upsetting, but in fact we are all learning, we are all getting glimpses into those other realities in ways we have never been able to before. We’ve seen this in acceptance of variety in gender expression and sexual orientation, of interracial romance, and the increasing participation of every axis of marginalized group into a common culture. Sure there’s a lot of alarm and discomfort, and there are noisy outliers whose fear and anger are frightening. But we can resist reacting to that fear, step back to let it settle down and cool off allowing our profound, deeply seated and insatiable desire to connect with our fellow humans, to eventually close these gaps, integrate these realities, and lead to an unprecedented unity.
When social media began back in the late 80’s on dial-up BBS systems, I was thrilled by the virtual community it created. I could sit in my little trailer at the end of a dirt road in Topanga and swap anecdotes, debate politics, and muse about philosophy with hundreds of like minded folks spread around the city. Most of the members of the BBS’s I frequented were either writers or coders avoiding the terror of their blank screens in casual conversation, but many were teen-aged boys desperate for validation as they geeked out on emerging digital tech. The goals of these two groups were deeply at odds with each other. The boys constantly interrupted profound and satisfying discussions with insults and inanities aimed at goading the writers and coders, who often took the bait, resulting in the whole board devolving into colorful but useless flame wars. Our irresistible desire to gawk at trainwrecks gave a power an prominence to this sort of trolling which came to underlie the whole attention economy. But even then, many of us realized that there were easy solutions to the problem: simple netiquette, and just ignoring the urge to retaliate while cold shouldering the trolls. These features of the attention economy are now well known and strong currents are moving against them which I have no doubt will continue to reveal even better solutions.
It is up to us to decide if we want to fill our coliseums with gladiator battles or ted talks.
So Happy Unity and Merry Holly Days with hopes and wishes that at the end of our next orbit around good ol’ Sol we find ourselves even closer to the more perfect union we we seen to be drawn to as much as we are to those grisly car wrecks.
HOLLY DAYS 