The Zeitgeist of America

                                                                                                        Earth Manifesto Insights

                                                                                                              Dr. Tiffany B. Twain  

                                                                                                             November 2005

The Zeitgeist can be defined as the general intellectual, moral, and cultural state of an era, the "spirit of an age".  It is a kind of tenor of the times, a sort of essence of the collective unconscious.

As with any generality, the description of the Zeitgeist of a country at any particular point in time involves an elusive and simplistic and subjective projection upon enormous complexities.  Generally it takes historians decades to gain perspective that is good enough to adequately define the Zeitgeist of a nation and its people.

Yet it is interesting to try to visualize the perspective with which those in the future will regard our actions today.  How will history view the opening decade of the 21st Century, when the United States began transforming its post-Cold War superpower economic and military supremacy into an aggressive, neo-conservative, inequality embracing, Big Brother intrusive, preemptive-war supporting, neo-imperialistic regime?

How will people in other countries and the future be impacted by America's culture, its Hollywood films, its regressive political initiatives, its rapid technological change, its embrace of religious traditionalism, its resource wastefulness, and the cultivated growth in the disparity between rich and poor?

Certainly there are regional differences between Americans in the culture wars.  There are particularly distinct contrasts between the more educated and sophisticated urban areas and the more God-fearing, government-suspicious, gun-owning rural areas.

How will the attitudes influenced by the Big Business, the media, political spin, religious extremists, neoconservatives and progressives play out in the world several decades hence?

Will we be more pragmatic?

How will a necessary "green" Zeitgeist evolve?  Will it be through intelligent planning, or by default through desperate shortages, conflict, and terrible changes in circumstances?

I have been contemplating these ideas, and instead of elaborating on these ideas here, I have written everything in Parts One, Two, Three and Four of the Earth Manifest sice this Evolving Understanding was written.  Check them out!!

Thanks for reading!

    Truly,

       Dr. Tiffany Twain