I have to be honest and confess, although I have covered the topic in the past, that I grow increasingly fagged off with the arrant foolishness, lack of thought and downright nastiness of a good deal of human interaction with this whole Interweb thingamajig.
I, as a sub-optimal, profoundly ignorant penguin, understand that the web is ephemeral, of little lasting value and transitory. I understand that it appears to have little value attached to it, Twitter is a prime example, but why must it always, repeat always, descend to depths lower than even the lowest common denominator? Is this just a symptom of the dumbing down of discourse, journalism and literature? Is 'Fifty Shades of Grey' or Dan Brown to become the highest pinnacle of achievement of humankind? Is the web to blame or is it, rather, some deep manifestation of a more general ignorance and unreason to which humankind now aspires to? Is the world now too complex for you to think in anything other than 'black' and 'white'; fifty shades of grey notwithstanding. (What a publishing non-event that SHOULD have been - von Sacher-Masoch was much better written, although not without its literary faults, and far more erotic! A juvenile pastiche, and I do mean juvenile, should not have made the author rich!).
You, as a species, are the heirs to Plato, Eratosphones, Aristotle, Socrates, Hesiod, Herodotus, Descartes, Leibnitz, Bentham, Hobbes, Russell, Popper, Planck, Einstein, Feynman, Mandelbrot, Magritte, Picasso, Stuart Mill, Maynard Keynes, Marx and Mao Ze-Dong. You are the inheritors of Virgil, Homer, Pope, Roget, Johnson, Dickens, Scott Fitzgerald, Goethe, Hamsun, Sartre, (A) Huxley and Orwell. You carry the burden of Darwin, Lyell, Chomsky, (T H) Huxley, Gould and a shedload of other characters, far too many to mention, besides. And yet, how many of these have been read by the post-baby-boomer generations, unless forced to by adolescent education and then only to be forgotten as fast as you learned it once the all-too-easy examinations had passed!
Oh, it has no relevance, I hear you cry! This is a modern world; the age of smartphones, Twitter and the Internet! This is the age of technology, the age of limitless innovation, the age of the new and the exciting; long-discarded pronouncements have no place in the modern world. And you may be right. But, in your zeal to encompass all that is new, is novel, you have forgotten a fundamental truth. We, you and I, stand on the shoulders of giants. Humankind possesses what it has, hegemony over the entire planet, only because of what it has built, on what has gone before; it has always been thus.
Ever since Cro-Magnon 'man', with the rudiments of language, slunk out of Africa 40,000 years ago, you have built on the experiences of your predecessors; with the coming of a codified, written script some 4-6,000 years ago, you have been able to impart knowledge without a direct dialogue between 'father and son', 'mother and daughter' etc; and that knowledge is, in part, lasting. It carries through the centuries without loss; or largely without loss. (The [Mycenaean] Linear Script A remains to be deciphered to the best of my knowledge.) And yet, you humans want, as far as I can determine, to forget the wisdom accumulated in the past and wish to, almost, start afresh; as though the preceding 6,000 years had not happened. How else to interpret the past 20 or 30 years?
Predudice, bigotry and self-opinionated beliefs will never be eradicated from the human condition; it is what makes YOU what you are! You may plaster over the cracks in your psyche but you, at root, cannot forget what you are. You are a tribal, self-centred, egotistical species. Just like me; or the whales, the lions, the gnus or the hyraxes. But you possess thought, self-awareness, conscience, faith. Why can't you apply this, as a species, to the world around you?
I have little problem with the concept of 'free speech'. Everyone, whether penguin, human or orca is entitled to their opinion; however perverse. But it seems, from what I read, that, although this may be paid lip service to, in essence, one's opinion is at best ignored or, is at worst, subject to the worst kind of insult and abuse. And this I don't understand.
Still, I read the most awful comments. 'My opinion is worth more than yours'. 'I am right (completely) and you are wrong (completely)'. 'I do not have a cogent argument to convince you, so I will resort to insult and abuse'. 'I do have a cogent argument but you will not listen, so I insult you, your intelligence, your capacity to think'. Why do you this?
Me, I think anonymity. Humans can 'get away' with posting 'acid' because there are no repercussions; no slap, or worse, round the face for your impertinence. You are protected. And this is the main danger of so-called 'social media' which is media but is scarce 'social'. Social implies interaction; there is no interaction in 'social media', which cannot be ignored completely (because you must). And therein lies the rub. (Read Shakespeare, for goodness sake! 'Hamlet', if you need a clue!)
Johnson once said that 'patriotism was the last resort of the scoundrel'; it is difficult to see that, in modern terms, the 'last resort' is unrestrained, unsubstantiated, uninformed vitriol and that is equably unjustifiable.
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