Last November I had a conversation with a co-worker and what he had to say caused my mind to swell like a hot air balloon. He talked about cars (this was not something I would normally get excited about; however...). He wasn't so much concerned about the bells and whistles and pistons and gears and whatnot. He had bigger things in mind, and what he began to share made me realize just how quickly the context of our lives has collapsed into itself.
Think of our ancestors. They inhabited a world completely other than the world we know today. And don't think prehistoric ancestry. I'm not talking about the earliest ape-man on the evolutionary chart. Instead, think Great Grandpa (I apologize if Great Grandpa looked like the ape-man evolutionary chart guy). Think pre-scientific revolution, if you can. As science began to offer new explanations and technologies, we traded in the old contexts that informed us and bargained them away in turn for freedom, for liberation.
This is where cars come in.
Since the invention of the car human beings have not experienced such freedom of mobility. We can drive anywhere we can afford, whenever we want, and we can do this all by our lonesome. Eliminated the inconvenience of public transportation, cars drove families farther and farther and farther away. The car came at the cost of giving up the small, coherent physical communities they once depended upon.
It wasn't just the car.
The invention of radio and television allowed the unlimited choices of a national or a global culture, but undermined the local life that had long persisted. What ever happened to the "neighborhood"?What ever happened to "visiting" your neighbors, friends, and family on a [near] nightly basis? NBC happened. CBS happened. ABC and Fox happened. "Freedom" comes with a price.
Whether all this was "good" or "bad" is an impossible question, and pointless. These changes came upon us like losing seasons for the Kansas City Royals. They were upon us before we could do anything about them. You can smash your radio and put your TV in the closet, but you still live in a TV saturated society. We live in a world that has welcomed these changes with open arms, and in the process we've traded the context of community for individual "freedom."
Seeking individuality has reduced us to individuals--enabled, empowered, isolated, disconnected, individuals. In the search for freedom and liberation we wound up finding ourselves living lives without meaning, context, or community. Maybe that's why Seinfeld resonated with our culture in such a profound way. A sitcom about nothing will inevitably resonate with a world that leaves us vulnerable to meaninglessness.
Divorced from the context of community, consumption is all that happens because there is nothing left that means anything.
And that's pretty much all he had to say about cars.
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