Courthouses archive plat maps available to the public. These cadastral maps show property dimensions and owners, information that makes determining taxation, resolving disputes, and surveying easy. Need a reference point or line? Unfold a plat map. They are “plat” because they are “flat.”
There’s another public archive that makes life easy. It’s the storehouse with shelves of platitudes. They are “flat” representations of common knowledge. Platitudes make thinking easy. They are off-the-shelf ways of understanding the world. About 100 billion predecessor humans have stocked the platitude shelves for at least 200,000 years. Here’s one: “There’s nothing new under the sun.”
Really discouraging, isn’t that? You want to declare your individuality, but 100 billion humans have beaten you to such a declaration, and, well, there’s nothing new. How, then, do you achieve your individuality?
You are probably dependent upon platitudinous thinking for much of what you think or do. A tornado rips through a town: “It was like a war zone.” A killer walks into a club. “Our hearts and prayers go out….” Frustrating, isn’t it. Tragedy strikes, and we are left with flat thinking, expressing platitudinous thoughts that, like plat maps, make thinking easier when comprehending and consoling are impossible. In the depths of emotion, we speak flatly in easy-to-understand words.
Maybe the losses and tragedies of 200,000 years weigh on all of us regardless of our historical awareness. Maybe all those previous moments of suffering are bound to our DNA. Maybe we have just been worn down by what appears to be an inevitability of loss and tragedy. We go into the archive, find the readily marked dimensions of feeling, and rely on a two-dimensional representation of a 3-D feeling.
We can’t fault ourselves for being born the most recent humans in a 200,000-year history. All those who have preceded us had 200 millennia to express the inexpressible. They said what they could and laid the verbal base for how we deal with loss and tragedy. It’s not that we don’t feel; it’s that we just can’t come up with many new ways to deal with the same feelings that our ancestors felt.
We pride ourselves on being Homo sapiens, a wise species capable of reason. But reason does little to express how we feel during and after tragedy. The archive’s shelves of platitudes, filled by 100 billion relatives, provide some ease in expressing what we feel. And everyone, because we are all descendants of those 100 billion, understands what they expressed before us—and for us.
There’s another public archive that makes life easy. It’s the storehouse with shelves of platitudes. They are “flat” representations of common knowledge. Platitudes make thinking easy. They are off-the-shelf ways of understanding the world. About 100 billion predecessor humans have stocked the platitude shelves for at least 200,000 years. Here’s one: “There’s nothing new under the sun.”
Really discouraging, isn’t that? You want to declare your individuality, but 100 billion humans have beaten you to such a declaration, and, well, there’s nothing new. How, then, do you achieve your individuality?
You are probably dependent upon platitudinous thinking for much of what you think or do. A tornado rips through a town: “It was like a war zone.” A killer walks into a club. “Our hearts and prayers go out….” Frustrating, isn’t it. Tragedy strikes, and we are left with flat thinking, expressing platitudinous thoughts that, like plat maps, make thinking easier when comprehending and consoling are impossible. In the depths of emotion, we speak flatly in easy-to-understand words.
Maybe the losses and tragedies of 200,000 years weigh on all of us regardless of our historical awareness. Maybe all those previous moments of suffering are bound to our DNA. Maybe we have just been worn down by what appears to be an inevitability of loss and tragedy. We go into the archive, find the readily marked dimensions of feeling, and rely on a two-dimensional representation of a 3-D feeling.
We can’t fault ourselves for being born the most recent humans in a 200,000-year history. All those who have preceded us had 200 millennia to express the inexpressible. They said what they could and laid the verbal base for how we deal with loss and tragedy. It’s not that we don’t feel; it’s that we just can’t come up with many new ways to deal with the same feelings that our ancestors felt.
We pride ourselves on being Homo sapiens, a wise species capable of reason. But reason does little to express how we feel during and after tragedy. The archive’s shelves of platitudes, filled by 100 billion relatives, provide some ease in expressing what we feel. And everyone, because we are all descendants of those 100 billion, understands what they expressed before us—and for us.
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