Have hope for the hive mind

These days, I look on with all-too-frequent dread as nearly everything that matters to public health is beleaguered at once: social justice, human rights, fields and forests, the dignity of high office and civil discourse, the primacy of truth, equality, American values, democracy, the climate, the oceans, the food supply, endangered species, the modern hopes of humanism.

All of that would fare considerably better in a world where the hive mind in which we have all inadvertently configured ourselves reliably recognized and rejected prevarication and propaganda. Those filters — discernment and sophistication — don’t seem to work yet. That makes sense; this hive mind of our devising, the way we conjoin thoughts and opinions through digital connections, has only just hatched.

And so my thoughts turn to other hatchlings: mourning dove fledglings we named Fifi and Geraldo. They are from the second clutch of the season for their resolute parents, Flora and Jerome, and hatched in a hanging flower pot on our front porch (no, this has not gone at all well for the flowers; but thank you for wondering).

We were privileged with the intimacies of watching Fifi and Geraldo, like their weeks-older siblings from the prior clutch, Felipe and Fiona, develop from blind, wet, sticky spindles exhausted by the ardors of cracking through an eggshell, into the nascent competencies of flight. They left us just days ago. Bon voyage, babies, and may you thrive at whatever it is mourning doves do when not living in a flower pot, making more mourning doves.

My wife and I have been privileged, too, with all the intimate triumphs and disasters of parenting, watching our brood of five develop from a comparable state of helplessness into the diverse proficiencies of adulthood and independence they practice now.

Our “babies” were never dumb — in fact, they are all highly intelligent; but they were, of course, clueless. Like all babies, they started out knowing nothing, and believing pretty much whatever they were told. They heard about Santa Claus, of course, and they believed. They heard about the Tooth Fairy…well, not exactly. My wife is French, and it turns out that in France, the duties of the Tooth Fairy are taken over by La Petite Souris, the little, magical mouse, adept at clandestine operations under pillows. So, yes, my kids all believed in that mouse. They were were naive, innocent, gullible, impressionable, defenseless, as all children are.

But children grow, and ultimately, they turn out a lot like us. They are cautious, thoughtful, careful, understanding the way the world works, the need to separate dross from gold. They can be fooled, but it’s a lot harder. They think like adults, and get better at it with experience. They get there through what experts in child psychology call developmental milestones they could not skip. There are no shortcuts.

Some of what divides us these days is legitimate disagreement, but that’s healthy. We are entitled to be conservative or liberal; religious or secular. We can agree to disagree and still respect one another, even like one another. Why not? And let’s all remember we are most likely to learn something new when listening to someone who doesn’t echo the opinion we already own.

Much of what divides us, and all that divides us irreparably, is misunderstanding born of misinformation. We have, in the relative blink of an eye, invented entirely new ways to disseminate massive amounts of information, and misinformation. The law of unintended consequences applies.

That doesn’t make us dumb; just clueless. We are infantile hive-mind thinkers, toddling social media communicators. Maybe we just need to grow up, and these are unavoidable steps on the way. I don’t know how long this will take. My children matured at the customary pace, from clueless babies to sophisticated adults in roughly two decades. The feathered babies on the front porch took flight less than two weeks after exiting their eggs.

I worry a lot, and often these days. But I hope, too, that the sky may yet be the limit for us, assuming we, too, can figure out how to fly. Here’s hoping we get there sooner than later.