There is this strange problem in my city where streetlights are slowly turning blue. The LED components apparently were cheaply manufactured and the other colored lights that mix together to create the normal white-light have burnt out, leaving behind a neon-blue reminiscent of a dive bar at 2 AM. It isn’t everywhere, but is beginning to become more common throughout the city. Little islands of dystopian blue speckled throughout the night. One street, for about a thousand yards has an unbroken line of them, making it look the whole road is one of those electric fly zappers.

Everyone has a “thing” they are particular about and mine is lighting. I hate a poorly lit room or cold, harsh lighting. So the dingy Bladerunner street lights really irk me. Every time another street light turns blue, I feel an urge to call the city and complain. I realize this is kind of ridiculous and it probably bothers me more than anyone else, so I haven’t. Nevertheless, if our whole city turns into a buzzing beer sign, I surely won’t be the only one complaining.

Now, this is a small problem. It is a provincial problem. It is a problem that directly affects me in the little village I live in. But imagine that I, upon looking at my street light dilemma, began to say with gusto, “The greatest problem facing our country is our over dependence on cheap, foreign made components and a government so ineffective that it literally cannot change a light bulb.”

Are those real problems? Sure. Did my grandiose statement actually have measures of truth in them? Some. But is it helpful? No, not really. Why? Because (1) this isn’t a problem facing our country, just my city. I can make it sound like it is a bigger problem than it is with some stretching, but when I use that kind of language I mostly just mean, I’m really annoyed by this so I am exaggerating for effect. But more importantly, (2) there are even bigger problems in my city and certainly in my country than streetlights, so it is unhelpful and untrue to say that this is “the biggest.”

Now, Imagine…

Imagine someone living in Chicago who has had their child shot by a stray bullet in a gang shootout. 

Imagine someone living in the Rust Belt whose small town has been hollowed out by the manufacturing plant closing down and opioids flooding the streets.

Imagine someone teaching on a university campus and seeing the Pharisaical narrow-mindedness of intersectionality and social-justice politics.

Imagine a mother wondering why her children, who have every material comfort they could ask for, have now become depressed, anxious, even suicidal.

Imagine a father left reeling after discovering that his eight-year-old was sexually abused at the youth camp.

If you are up to it, you could keep imagining. There is seemingly no bottom to the barrel of suffering. 

Now, imagine that each person in these fictitious scenarios gets together to talk. I would bet that each one of them would feel very strongly that the particular thorn that has thrust itself into their lives feels like “the greatest problem.” Their personal experience would animate them to speak, grieve, and maybe act in such a way that addressed their own problem like it was the problem, like it deserved the whole of our collective attention and resources.

But, of course, the mother who is burying their child in Chicago doesn’t think the college professor complaining about woke college students is right in what the problem facing our country is. She may even view the professor’s complaints as part of the problem—his tirades are drawing attention away from the real issue. The professor may respond by claiming that the deaths of children in Chicago is just another branch of the problem he is attempting to draw attention to—the loss of virtue and true masculinity in our society. The mother becomes angered—the real problem comes from those with privilege being fearful they are about to lose it, rather than funneling resources into under-privileged communities. Plus, attempting to interpret her child’s death into his own narrative is deeply offensive. The professor doubles down—You aren’t listening to me—if other mothers of Chicago wanted to prevent their sons from dying, they should see where the roots of the problem lie. And on, and on, and on it could go.

Villagers Lost in the World

The problem (just kidding)—A problem we face today is that in the long span of human history, we have only spent about ten minutes being globally connected through information technologies, and only about one minute being hyper-globally-connected through the internet and smart phones. Our brains and our bodies are glacially slow in adaptation, but our world is mercurially fast (and increasingly so) in change. 

Our brains are made to address the problems of our village, the issues that touch our lives directly, but now, thanks to the World Wide Web we can bathe our attention in everything, everywhere, all at once. We cannot still practice the same kind of simple analysis and evaluation of the village. The amount of information you need to process, interpret, vet, and synthesize as you hear about problems from all over the world is gargantuan. It isn’t impossible, but it is much harder than we often assume. 

I remember hearing a teacher once talk about how his grandfather was a farmer who lived his entire life in a small Kentucky town, farming with a horse and plow, drying tobacco, and going to church. That was his entire world. Whereas now, if the teacher wanted to, at any moment he could check the weather forecast in Yemen—a place his grandfather never thought of and likely didn’t even know existed.

Here’s the question for us: are we better off than my teacher’s grandfather? Has our growth in wisdom kept pace with our growth in knowledge?

I don’t think the answer is obvious. But we should stop and make ourselves aware that we live in a brave new world when it comes to information. And we must take that into consideration when it comes to diagnosing the problem of our day.

The Point

Here’s the big point of all this. Often, the old maxim is true, what we see depends on where we stand. What you think is wrong with the world often has to do with how you have been wronged. You see the problem because it has forced itself into your field of vision, while other problems have forced themselves into other people’s field that you are blind to, while they remain blind to yours. That is, of course, only sort of true. I’m not making an argument for subjectivity or relativism or even “standpoint epistemology,” but a plea for humility. Just because someone has a “lived truth” that “feels” real to them doesn’t mean that it is true or real. You can be deeply hurt and deeply mistaken at the same time. 

But we need some way of acknowledging both the reality of objective truth and the limited perspective we all have (1 Cor 13:12). And it is possible to address a real issue while other people believe that other problems are more pressing. This doesn’t mean that your problem isn’t real, it just means that many different trees can be on fire in the forest at once.