Noonan credits this to the idea that
“The writer and philosopher Laurens van der Post, in his memoir of his friendship with Carl Jung, said, 'We live not only our own lives but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time.'"
“Of our time,” meaning that we have come to a concurrent conclusion that we are all witnessing a Black Swan event. The concept of such a thing was popularized by Nassim Taleb in his book of that name: Once in a while something totally unforeseen happens. Taleb elaborates on that idea on his website, Fooled by Randomness. Taleb asserts that there are some kinds of events (Black Swan events) that you essentially cannot foresee, even when the warnings are there.
Noonan says that we have a collective unintended common belief shaped by our time (that Black Swan event). Today, the event is the serious near-Depression and the common belief is that it won’t get better very soon at all. Noonan describes a “wall street titan” she interviewed five weeks ago, asking him what people should do next. He said: “Everyone should try to own a house, he said, no matter how big or small, but it has to have some land, on which you should learn how to grow things.”
Now to my supermarket checkout line conversation. A middle-aged woman ahead of me was buying a bunch of pussy willows, and we got to talking. She said that once she’d stuck a branch in the grown and it rooted, almost damaging her plumbing with its growth. I mentioned I’d done something similar by cutting some tomato branches last October before the first frost – I’d put them in water, they’d rooted, and I expect to plant these now 2’ tall tomato plants in a few weeks.
She responded that she didn’t have much land in the back of her house, but was seriously thinking of digging up the front lawn to grow some vegetables. In Northwest D.C. you just don’t do that. It hurts property values, and neighbors complain. (Unless you are a wealthy heir of a food company, then you dig up all you want and plant sunflowers and potatoes out front… I’ve
seen that too.)
Taleb and Noonan are both right. The Black Swan event happened, and we were all caught by surprise. Noonan was right that we are all gripped with the same kind of pandemic fear, sharing the life of our time.
Maybe good will come of this. We’ll all get down to our roots, back to basics, and that will be part of our shared recovery. And we’ll collectively stop our blind consumption of resources of all kinds, including fossil fuels, buying some time to figure out sustainable alternatives.
I hope so.
