News, civics and the Great Forgetting

One of those snooker balls, bouncing off the cush, is the public domain itself. It's a societal space or forum where public discourse over the dinner table, near the water cooler, in cyberspace and in our heads, helps us construct reality – although inversely, it also helps ossify our rusted-on attachments to ideas, which may be invalid, incorrect or simply bonkers. But we hold on to them like a favourite teddy bear.

Today, the public domain resembles the attack charges of baboons in zoos, just before feeding time. It not only comprises 'the news' and political commentary, but also Cancel Culture assassins, anti-populationists, anti-vaxxers, 5G conspiracy theorists, celebrity victims of abuse, reality TV cooking shows and real estate porn, all making noise at a volume Noah would have heard on the Ark.

People now inhabit completely different worlds, which do not merely object to each other. They fail to comprehend how each other can even exist. There's no middle position, no finesse in argument. You chose which narrative suits you and stick to it with evangelical fervour. The result is to replace a political culture of disagreement with one of contempt. This is writ large in America, with the Republic the most divided it has been since President Abraham Lincoln.

These contradictory and polarising forces are arising during a most dangerous time, as the great liberal experiment, born from the American and French Revolutions is dying.

Trust in politicians, financial institutions, the media and the church, is at an all time low. Collective ideals such as equality and fraternity, which have been the bedrock of western societies and democracy for more than 200 years, buckle beneath our feet.

Now a new phenomenon has arisen and it manifests itself more like Alzheimer's Disease. I call it the Great Forgetting.

Living in these post-modern, relativist and ahistorical times, much of our daily tasks are performed by mobile phones and computers. There is little need to remember phone numbers, addresses or understand sentence tenses (grammar check will do that). We've contracted our memory out to hard drives but that's only part of it.

The Great Forgetting is the ever present, present where like dandelion seeds, we have floated free from the cause and event of history, it's documents and interpretations and it's knock-on effects through the generations. Instead of exploring commonalities, we have consigned history, it's lessons and warnings, to the back blocks of cyberspace or Hollywood remakes of remakes.

One of the strangest phenomena living in these post-fact times, is trying to remember what happened last week, let alone the terrible recession and unemployment of 1991 or the GFC of 2008, which still enervates the economy today.

The news media has trained us to think in discrete or singular events ('and now this') and not on the culminative effects of rolling recessions, the GFC and now the government-induced Covid-19 recession, which has crushed whole sectors of the Australian economy.

I have predominantly focused on problems with the news media but these issues won't be stopped by turning off the TV or shutting down the Internet. The barbarians are on the loose and they are us.