The focus on how divided we are as the nation does us no service. The reality is we are all suffering from varying degrees of the same malady, a society swamped by a tsunami of change.
Today’s society is experiencing change in our core understanding of how the world works that is exponentially greater than even a single generation back. There can’t have been any generation in human history that has had so much change to digest. And, yes, there are people who are working hard to divide us politically, but with a physical/emotional/intellectual landscape in constant change those folks have very fertile ground for sowing distrust. It is more out of that flood of change that all the commentary about how divided we are arises than the other way around. When we are swimming in uncertainty about so many other things in life it is easier to convince us that facts too, are variable or irrelevant.
To some extent the variation across a population in willingness to face very disturbing realities must be driven by how much chaos in our understanding of the universe one can handle. Whether it is supporters of Mr. Trump’s alternate views of reality or people who cannot see the problems with the violation of physical laws presented by the three symmetrical skyscraper freefalls at the World Trade Center on 9/11, many people seem to have decided: "I've had enough. Just let the guy who claims he has simplest and least-challenging answers handle it." Perhaps then, it is our seeming loss of control over what tomorrow might bring, not our ability to operate on a factual basis, that is at the core of our political differences. Perhaps we aren’t in the unreconcilable simplistic dichotomy that we’re fed by newspaper headlines and talking-heads.
One might object that, really, change has always been with us, why is today different? And, change has always been with us. But, consider how much different one day is from another now compared to a couple of hundred years ago. How disturbed would forefathers George, Thomas, or Ben have been to wake up one day and find out that human sexuality wasn't really binary or that intelligence can be reasonably mimicked by a machine or that trees communicate with each other through a roots and fungus network. At some point our hypothetical forefather recipients of these "revelations" would have no doubt just shut down. Sooner or later processing and finding a place for so many of them in their gestalt would be just too much. I don't doubt that--in spite of the scientific evidence that could be put before them--at some point there would just be a laugh, a dismissal of the lot, and a return to a pre-revelation world without giving these notions another thought.
How, one wonders, are we any different. Yes, our increasing drumbeat of change has arrived over centuries, but these adjustments in our understanding of the world haven't been matched by anything like a similar pace-of-change in our social institutions or our ability to digest new information. And, that centuries-long build up in the pace of change has moved exponentially higher in just the last fifty years because of computers.
There is, of course, a parallel and related set of events that makes the current situation even worse. Over the last fifty years because we’ve entered an information age we—as a society—have begun to see more clearly the reality of how governments work (i.e. the messy deal-making, conniving, and propagandizing that is inherently a part of governing is more visible now). And, we haven't had time to figure out how to react to that either. The result is—even though there probably hasn’t really been a change in the way humans govern—there is a loss of trust for government in general. This loss of trust, when added to the laughable levels of general daily change, makes our current seemingly-bipolar political predicament not as unreasonable as we are led to believe.
It is the normal distribution of variation in our ability to handle the fire-hose volume of change coming at us regularly that separates us, not an innate disability in some segment of the population to comprehending our situation. That being said, the answer to the problem of our “division” may be making this shared problem visible. It turns out that, as always, we are in this together. Seeing that what moves the other guy is likely also moving us may make finding solutions together easier.
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