I’ve always consumed the news of the world, because knowing what’s going on has always seemed something that an informed citizen should be doing. How can you do your duty to a republic if you’re oblivious? You cannot.
Only there’s a cost.
Like, say, this last week, when across my consciousness came news about dolphins and porpoises. I’ve always loved cetaceans, because, I mean, who doesn’t? They’re remarkable, intelligent, social creatures, with brains as complex as ours. Human beings have always recognized their playfulness and their curiosity. They inhabit a similar place to us in the ocean, as an apex hunter, but there’s another similarity: they’ve got a problem with screens.
It’s not that they’re on their screens all day, because that’s harder without hands. It’s that our screens are in them. Liquid crystals, specifically, the tiny little electrically reactive elements used in dashboards and calculators. When those are disposed of, liquid crystal monomers don’t go away, and studies of deceased dolphins shows they’re building up in their muscles and fatty tissues, and are so small they’re crossing over cellular membranes into their brains, where…like nanoparticles of plastic…they just accumulate, because they can’t be digested or dissolved.
That’s been shown to mess with brain function, and hormonal function, and it’s a problem for large brained animals at the top of their food chain.
Can you name another large brained mammal at the top of it’s food chain?
And I think, great. Another thing. Because Liquid Crystal Monomers might be a problem, but are they front of mind right now? The drums of war have deepened into the thunder of bombs. AI is angling to take every single job. There are rising seas and dying bees and sickened trees and Jeez Louise, how do you save such a world, a world that’s such a sprawling, relentless, irreducibly complex wreck?
It’s easier to stand at a remove, to just look at it from a critic’s distance and judge it, or to give up on it entirely.
And I think, great. Another thing. Because Liquid Crystal Monomers might be a problem, but are they front of mind right now? The drums of war have deepened into the thunder of bombs. AI is angling to take every single job. There are rising seas and dying bees and sickened trees and Jeez Louise, how do you save such a world, a world that’s such a sprawling, relentless, irreducibly complex wreck?
It’s easier to stand at a remove, to just look at it from a critic’s distance and judge it, or to give up on it entirely.
Or to rush about madly, consumed by every new crisis, flitting and flailing from urgency to urgency and accomplishing nothing.
We must act, as moral agents, and yet at the same time acknowledge that all of it is larger than we can possibly influence.
It's a peculiar advantage of faith, I think, that allows us to act right where we are, as we know we must, trusting that the rest of it is out of our hands.
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