When did we start seeing things this way? At some point, the unchallenged feature of our lives was that we could add it up, in numbers, pixels, dollars…. Anything that was the least bit unknowable, that has characteristics that had no explanation – was taken from our view.
And so all the soft, fluid parts of love – grew less and less present in our lives. The old standbys like trust, loyalty, decency, generosity, gentleness… became a delicate, dirty secret in our private lives, while public love grew into a monster money-makers like industrial pop songs or hall mark cards. Love that we felt together became less like a flower and more like pop corn porn.
This harshness became our national bad habit. We looked to leaders who mastered the realistic. This made possible the swashbuckling brutality of Trump and Musk and Bezos, the triumph of the computer, the bombing of Gaza and Iran. American greatness became killing of things with information and numbers.
Increasingly, as the global heatwave’s death march became unstoppable, the public spokespersons for political leaders reported the planet-wide tragedy like it was a large math problem. The TV anchors reported extreme weather events identically to bombing runs, numbers of windspeed, the number of dead, the number of lost dollars. It was impossible to imagine the real cause of climate change and wars on civilians, because as our fear mounted we took refuge in hard numbers only.
And it was never realistic to report that there is something in all this tragedy that we never knew. Mystery never fit into a three minute news item. So the empire could build 10,000 data centers by 2030, but the question what it would do to us, that is like running a war with a deck of tarot cards. We are committed to our mass suicide because the Information Age has us living virtually, with death edited out. We forget that there is any mystery at all. We can’t imagine our experience before birth or after death, there’s no information on it.
Love would have been the answer. The mystery of death will flood us and yet we will recognize it, because we will remember the sensation of love, of falling helplessly in love. No-one can explain love, no-one knows why it happens. And yet it won’t go away. People will even fall in love working at data centers. We will return to that delicious mystery as the “information” leaves us. We make love, make life and make death. Most of life will always be beyond information. We will decide to live again.
Rev. Billy