On the eve of this midterm election day 57 million people have already voted. That huge number, which is but a portion of the electorate, is greater than the population of many countries. Once that registers you realize just how vast this country is. It is a continent even more than it is a nation, with several states exceeding the size of whole countries. Taking it in from the perspective of this scale you also realize the immensity of the rich, diverse detail in a myriad of localities.
Unless you make a deliberate effort to seek this out, much of it is lost to the observer due to the way it is all perceived, via venues that provide a warped, artificial image of who and what we are. Today most people see this through screens, on television and cell phones which provide the narrowest possible perspective of the world while obscuring the whole. This marks a great change from the way things once were perceived, via spoken or written words, which afforded the possibility of imagining and visualizing things in one’s own mind, allowing for a broader perspective than what we perceive from a flat image that is all “filled in” and seemingly complete.
So it is that it is only when we step back from these images we find the room to perceive much more. It is only then that we perceive the vastness and complexity of the land we live on, of millions upon millions of distinct localities, each with its own individual characteristics and perspectives. We live much of our lives within one of these that is the most familiar, comprehensible place we can ever inhabit; what is home to us.
That being the case it is best that that be the place where most of the decisions that directly affect our lives be made. The more remote decision-making is, the more detached it becomes from the particular day to day realities we must live with. The very worst case is that which is imposed remotely from the top, with little understanding or interested in the local specific realities on the ground. But that is what is virtually enforced on us by the screen world, as that comes to replace our primary perception of the reality we actually live with.
This in turn leads to a warped intensity of conviction that bypasses the immediate real world around us, because the stakes are apparently much higher, yet our influence is so much smaller. In a free republic, when it is healthy, politics shouldn’t matter so much. The question then is whether that applies to the half of the public who don’t bother to vote. What does matter is that our most important institutions are not national ones we hear from all the time, but those in the local community we live, and various entities situate there, be it church, clubs, team sports, special interests, etc. etc.
What is more telling is the significant decline in these kinds of activities and connections, which many studies have pointed to. Participation in such activities was one of the unique features that de Tocqueville found in the emerging American republic. That included spontaneously organizing, volunteering, and otherwise participating in community activities. Instead we find ourselves increasingly alone staring at screens, and meaning in our lives in turn is transferred there, which effectively “nationalizes” everything. But it is an illusion. What truly matters is the life we actually experience with others immediately connected to us. It is likely that were we to return to those characteristics and traditions that once predominated amongst us, our lives would be happier, our political notions less intense, in a richer more rewarding state of being. This is not something that can be addressed from the top down, but must percolate upwards from the people and it is up to each of us to make it so once again. For that will lead to a happier republic than we seem to have now, when it is all in our heads.
