Detail can hurt. Is it presence and proximity that elicit sensitivity: being so close that you might feel the burn, affect, or change. So that, if time heals, time is simply distance – the maturing of the void between you and the sensation.

When I step back and move to get a lay of the land, the pricks, ripples, and scars of detail become calm and smooth and digestible. And though I strive for proximity, I make decisions based on the meta, on what makes sense in the “long run” and at scale. Though it’s perspective, the promised offspring of experience, intimate experience, that facilitates understanding. And when the detail is too much, I easily find solace in the happenstance of it all and write the details off as the irrelevant technicalities of a globe spinning round the sun.

What I’m talking about is consciousness evolved. Having nothing to do with with temporal evolution, I think it’s tied to an individual’s proclivity to consider the broad implications of the things around him. It’s the only way I know how to introduce more pieces to what is arguably an already complete puzzle.  Maybe it’s nothing but maybe it’s the same cerebral gap as between the goldfish and the conscious thinker, the difference between life existing in only the present moment and life being the story of life – over time, over a millennia.  The schism between that which changes little, and that which only changes, and that which both changes and trends. When I consider both of these phenomenon in tandem –the sinuous present and the docile century- I feel better about the incertitude and pernicious facade of the instant.  

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Those brush ups and bruises of the play by play just might be requisite of the passing of time – they always have been.  Read your average high school history book, remembrance is a soft read:  we wrestled with the Brits, we defeated the Nazis, and ended women suffrage.  Yet, read a chapter out of something by Howard Zinn and one realizes that American advancement was costly –costly in ways that we aren’t very good at openly talking about – at least not in any conducive way.  And this is especially true when the topic is retrospect.

That cost is an interesting thing though.  Can we justify human societal progress and the force with which a society or economy advances despite the apparently requisite human and environmental currency paid? When weighed in the moment, these costs are often justified, at least by their perpetrators.  In hindsight these sordid acts can at least be lessons.  And when in motion, though they may hurt, there might be value in considering where each act may lead.  Because maybe you can justify behavior when you count any ancillary advancement.

To get to the point, I’ve recently become hung up on whether I should feel as bad as I usually do about that human and environmental cost of progress.  Can it be, like, chalked up to the banality of man’s movement forward?  So that for every innovation and advancement, I should plan on it costing a certain amount of lives or livelihoods the same way I plan on parting with a few bucks when I go for a coffee or a beer. I’d bet Wendyl Berry would agree with that.  With each technological advancement, each new tractor, chemical fixer, and genetic change we can count on at least a few folk’s income flagged for the chopping block.

The thing is that I’m no luddite.  I appreciate and call for advancement.  I actually believe in it and want to help facilitate it. But struggle to find examples of beneficial advancement that can’t at some point be tied to some type of damage. I struggle though to be sure of whether the cost is necessarily commensurate to the gain.  And that’s the thing. There must come a point when traditional advancement, like the kind you pay for with life based currency, is no longer truly cost effective.  Certainly there is, but the point at which that happens, where lines cross, is a tough line to draw because really, there isn’t much that wouldn’t cross it.

Moreover, winners from whatever traditional system under evaluation could not expect the same positive outcomes from a truly changed system.  So, one would expect that those very winners would undermine and sabotage movement in said direction.  Progress interrupted. What’s the point.

The topic has presented itself to me numerous times throughout my life.  In Paraguay I saw hard working farmers grovel in front of an overfed and over paid politician with the hopes of obtaining medical attention that he personally had promised months before just before his election.  As a consultant in San Francisco, I showed companies how the trendy tank tops and logoed hoodies that they were commissioning were sewn together by the hands of overworked, underpaid, and desperate workers in places throughout South East Asia; a known truth that never disrupted business as usual. More recently I worked with a major food service provider who struggles to justify the “right” decision because it doesn’t make financial sense.  I never once worked with what I might consider a bad person.  Rather, I believe it was the narrowness with which they thought about their professional position that allowed enough space for bad and technically unethical decisions to be made. What is right anyway?

Though this gap is a reoccurring phenomenon in my life, I became wholly aware of this ironic disparity only recently as I searched, urgently, to find resolution to an waste problem in Indonesia.

At the time, the sting of futility was at the same instant, unnerving and a relief.  I was forced to let go – and though I wanted to escape the situation, I left one hand on the ground.