One of the apps on my phone routinely serves up old photos, so I can look back at what I was doing on any given day a few years ago. Which is why last week I was awestruck by a shot I remember taking a couple of years back, as I looked straight up the trunk of a giant red cedar, toward its canopy of branches perhaps 20 stories overhead – a reminder of a memorable visit to the temperate rainforest of southeastern Alaska.
I remember placing my hand inside a foot-deep blackened gap in that cedar trunk, way above my head — the gap likely caused by a lightning strike generations back. I wondered about the last person who might have touched this tree, maybe centuries ago, before my Puritan ancestors arrived on the other side of the continent. What worried those people, I wondered; what comforted them? How did they measure progress, and cope with the uncertainty that marks human existence, then as now? Did they ever think about who would follow them here?
Thinking all of that in the company of those trees, and in the context of our fleeting time on this earth, it’s hard not to be humbled. And that’s got to be good for us. “Humility,” after all, like “human,” derives from the Latin humus, which comes from the ancient words for “earth.” Our DNA molecules are the same as you find in the soil that supports those giant cedars: We are quite literally one with the trees above us and the soil below.
Unlike the forest and its inhabitants, though, we’re blessed with the intelligence to sustain the life cycle of this planet. It ought to humble us, then, to consider our poor record in the face of that opportunity. For our refusal to take the bold steps that we know could make a difference in protecting our climate is leading us into irreversible and tragic consequences of global warming. That stand of great cedar trees I stood beneath in the Alaska wilderness will surely not survive.
But it’s not only in relation to our changing climate that we’re victims of a devastating sort of cultural cockiness. A lot of our contemporary problems arise from a narrow-mindedness that gives more weight to our presuppositions than to what science and others’ experiences may teach. Social psychologists call it “motivated reasoning” – people being likely to arrive at conclusions that they want to arrive at.
After more than four decades in journalism, I’d say that an antidote to this mental myopia is honest storytelling, which may be found in powerful journalism (and in great fiction, too). Ancient humans had only personal experience and the myths and legends of their ancestors to draw from; we have the benefit of science that explains much of the natural world, and channels of communication unimaginable in prior generations.
This provides us the ability to grasp the reality of how things work and what’s likely to lie ahead – and to understand what other humans are experiencing. But a lot of political discourse nowadays, and plenty of the propaganda that purports to be journalism, doesn’t expand our view, but rather plays to our preference for what’s known. That keeps us comfortable.
Neuroscientists interested in politics have published studies tracking the differences in brain activity between political conservatives and liberals. Brain science suggests, unsurprisingly, that liberals are more comfortable with ambiguity, while conservatives are hostile to uncertainty. And people are pretty much good with that. A few years back a team of neuroscientists at South Korea’s Seoul National University reported research showing that even in the face of evidence that conflicts with reason, conservatives seem better able to remain happy – displaying neurobiological mechanisms that act as “buffers that enhance psychological well-being,” in the scientists’ words.
So even if Fox News and other voices in the right-wing media were to suddenly change course and offer up some hard truths about the key choices of our time — on economic justice, climate change, the threat to our democracy and racial inequity — it might not matter, since so many of us, on both the left and the right, are willing to believe that something is true only if we already believe it.
That reaction applies beyond issues in the political realm, and it doesn’t take a scientist to tell us that. The Buddhist nun Pema Chodron wrote, “The truth you believe in and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.”
Which is frustrating to people who care about truth-telling in journalism and in politics. And that’s why it is good to sometimes turn away – perhaps to someplace like a deep rainforest, where the damp earth underfoot and the redolent scent of plant life may inspire our imagination, and where those strong cedars reaching far into the sky might remind us of how fleeting is our time here. In such a place, there’s a great deal to learn. If we pay attention — if we look and listen and breathe deeply — we may be rewarded with wonder, humility and gratitude.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.