A reader writes:

I read with interest the piece on the elite escaping civilization’s collapse, and the piece by Osnos in the New Yorker. I say “with interest” because most of my peers can talk about nothing else these days. The total collapse of the world seems imminent, to hear my entire academic social circle tell it. Yesterday a professor colleague of mine lamented “Trump has undone 15 years of progress in four days!” My wife remarked “If you go by my Facebook feed, the end is near.” I can’t be the only one thinking that this is a monumental illusion. Look around at your actual material world: the evidence for collapse is just not there. (I don’t mean social breakdown that necessitates things like the Ben Op. I mean actual, blood-in-the-streets collapse.)

The first problem is a lack of context and unwillingness to go past the headlines. What has Trump actually done? (Let me quickly add that I was, and remain, a firm Trump opponent.) He has returned us to a Bush-era policy on abortion. The world did not collapse when Bush enacted the same policy, but that has not stopped my liberal friends from claiming this move is “unprecedented.” He has signed directives ordering agencies to explore certain policies — he has emphatically not, despite the headlines and the chatter, “approved the pipeline” or “ordered the wall.” He has not done those things because he cannot do those things. Look at the blaring headline on the NYT site right now: “Trump Starts a Crackdown on Immigration With a Wall.” Read just the headline, as most people do, and you get the impression (fairly) that the wall is now becoming a reality. But it takes until the twenty-third paragraph to see this: “Mr. Trump will not be able to accomplish the goals laid out in the immigration orders by himself.” Only then does the reporter explain that, yes, we have this entity called “Congress” that actually spends the money.

The more important problem is total lack of historical awareness combined with a frenzied and alarmist social media world. Lack of historical knowledge has always been a problem, of course, but how many people have said in the last few months that the country is more divided than it has ever been? I would bet every single one of my liberal friends has said this to me. Are these people completely unaware that we fought a Civil War? That the early 1970s saw hundreds of domestic bombings? That anarchists used to plant bombs on Wall Street and assassinate presidents? Anytime I hear someone say we have peaked in division, I immediately conclude he is not worth listening to.

The social media climate is even more troubling. We tend to follow and read people who think like us, and if you entire social media feed is telling you the sky is falling, then of course it feels like the sky is falling. These are the people you know and trust. But if you tune out the frantic atmosphere of Twitter and Facebook, the world seems — suddenly, almost miraculously — more calm. This roving Eye of Sauron created by social media, in which frantic attention is devoted to one thing before the Eye moves on, and hyperbole is the dominant mode of discourse, is making it impossible to think past not just the next election but indeed the next trending hashtag. It is virtually impossible to perform the very slow, very deliberate, very necessary work of governance when every moment feels like a life or death situation because every person you know is telling you exactly that.

Rich people have always had escape plans and means of keeping out the rabble. Look at castles, or private islands, or Biltmore. This is nothing new. If we point to it as some kind of leading indicator of social collapse, we do ourselves no favors. Yes, we will experience another economic crash because that is what capitalism does: it booms and it busts. We had one in 2008, and guess what? The world survived. We will survive the next one, too. But this Chicken Little approach, where things are either rosy or catastrophic, is disastrous for social life. No one can relax when your entire social media world is filled with totally unjustified doomsaying. We’ve had crummy presidents. We have another one now. But it is not the end of the world: it is merely a less than ideal period. Suffering is not a rude interruption in the pleasant existence we all think we deserve; it is an inextricable part of that existence.

Though I remain a Catholic, I’ve found my truest companions these days in the Eastern thinkers and poets, especially Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Li Po, Tu Fu, and Tao Ch’ien. Read these thinkers and you can truly access the circular nature of the world, how good and evil coexist together and for periods outshine one another, and, most importantly, how important it is to maintain a focus on the longer view and the broader term. A new resident occupies the White House, but the Potomac flows on untroubled. Federal lands may be sold, but Old Faithful still hisses and churns. After the Russian ambassador was shot in Turkey, virtually everyone I follow posted a frantic series of “World War III is here!” items. The next day, things were calm again. The dogs are no doubt barking, but the caravan is still passing.

I’ve taken the rather drastic step of eliminating everyone from my social media world who comments regularly on current events. I no longer start the day with the newspaper; instead, I read novels and poetry and contemplative works while I have coffee. I get the WSJ by mail in the afternoon, when the news seems less drastic and more contextual. We need more of this, I think, and perhaps we need to make it a movement. Slow living? Slow news? Either way, we’ve got to detach from this anxious, always-on-and-blaring online world.

I was doing dishes this morning and looking at our bird feeders outside the kitchen window. On the ground were perhaps a dozen song sparrows, noisily squabbling over seeds. I almost teared up at how merrily they seemed to hop around. As I walked to work a deer glanced at me lazily from the trees, unaffected by my presence. A spring breeze blew the conifers, and a woodpecker chattered at me from a pin oak. Clouds rolled on. I exchanged a few remarks about the weather with a campus police officer. This afternoon I will read a Winnie the Pooh book with our son, and perhaps take him to a creek to look for minnows and float walnut-shell boats downstream.

The world, in all its non-collapsing glory, is still there. It is all around us, and in us, and between us. We need to look up and see it.