The Way We Live
CMM December 4th, 2009
I love to read. It’s probably no surprise that my job requires reading dozens of business plans, industry reports, market analysis, and other professional literature. I’ve almost always got a book or two by the bed, and I try to read for 30 minutes to an hour every night before going to sleep. The office closet in my house is packed full of boxed up books because we don’t have the book shelf space in the house (yet). My wish list for Santa this year (yes, I said Santa… got a problem with it?) includes Thunderstruck by Edward Larson, Dante Club by Matthew Pearl, and What Goth Hath Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe. I think you get the point… I love to read.
I stumbled across a list of 50 Books for Our Times from Newsweek. I’m not really a fan of most media outlets, and certainly not your watered-down-for-the-masses types, but my love for reading pulled me to this page. The number one book they recommended was a satirical novel from the 1870’s– The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope. I wasn’t familiar with the book or the author, so I did the normal thing. I googled it.
The book is written to capture the general dishonesty of British society during the Victorian-era. The reviews call it a satirical criticism of the commercial, moral, political, and intellectual dishonesty of the age. The more I read, the more I thought about current events. Do we live in an age of rampant dishonesty? I’m not sure, but I can say that I personally feel so disengaged because of the sheer complexity of things. From social to economic to environmental challenges, I’m having a difficult time discerning fact from fiction. Frankly, I feel that so many issues are driven by disinformation, often in the form of hidden agendas or conspiracies. How do you take your news? Bias parading as fact? Or opinion-driven with a factual grounding? In the digital age, the exchange of information has increased, regardless of value or quality. It’s like the old saying that a lie makes it halfway around the world before the truth even gets its shoes on… Take national security, institutional religion, health care, global warming, the financial system, etc. You spend most of your time digging, looking for something that you can build on. In the end, you’ve got postulations, theories, and eloquent speeches… but do you really have substance? Or just some well constructed theory? So much of it is just smoke and mirrors.
Life deserves to be lived with a sense of honesty. Honesty comes from the truth. Truth comes from questioning.
