Almost all of us have experienced, individually and communally, worse times. However, since the attacks on the US, the background hum of life, intensified by the inevitable reprisals against Afghanistan, has become more dispiriting for more people than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis.
It's true that political disasters, such as wars and famines, and natural ones - earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions - have, even in the last 50 years, frequently killed more than 7,000 people in single events. But never before have so many "big questions" - abstractions, really - been in flux for so many.
Arguments about parity of concern, or more precisely, the world's lack of it, are morally incontrovertible. We know that millions have been massacred as we worked, played, planned, squabbled, idled, schemed and dreamed. But in a world shrunk by globalisation, technology, travel, media and the fact that the most powerful country has been psychologically devastated, the ripples have been extraordinarily encompassing. Whether or not the current crisis should dominate as much of the world's media to the extent that it does is a different, albeit worthwhile, issue. The simple fact is that it does.
We can argue about power, propaganda, agenda-setting and all that stuff. Yet it seems beyond argument that never before have so many big questions simultaneously imposed - indeed inflicted - themselves on so many people.
Average Irish citizens, who, in greater or lesser measure, had been turned into narrow-gauge consumers by the Tiger economy, now have to contemplate vast subjects. Some, of course, continue to dedicate themselves exclusively to their own lives - working, playing, planning, squabbling, idling, scheming and dreaming away. Maybe they're realistic and wise; maybe they're selfish and petty.
But for most people it is impossible to ignore the glum background hum.
Even a random list of big issues - issues generally too unwieldy for the mass media which typically likes its stories compartmentalised - demands revision now. How about religion, technology, war, community, leadership, media, terrorism, distribution of the world's resources, colonialism, world order, education, ideology, luxury, affluence, civilisation, culture, history, world-view, spectacle, architecture, capitalism and even such nonsense as "celebrity"? Regularly dismissed as abstractions fit only for indulgent undergraduates, they are firmly on the public's mental agenda now.
Regarding celebrity, for instance, who is of more value to humanity - a $35,000-a-year New York firefighter or a $20 million-a-movie Hollywood actor? How about "luxury" goods? You can still buy, from the Nieman Marcus Christmas catalogue, a Burberry pram for $4,250 (with, of course, a matching nappy bag for $375) or, as the ad says, a "too beautiful to tuck away in a closet" $65 mink hanger. How about black stockings "with cultured fresh-water pearls hand-beaded on the lace border" at $500 a pair? But nobody is buying $500 socks this year. The obscene consumerism required is psychologically unsustainable just now.
There is, quite simply, as Saul Bellow once said in another context (that of proliferating mass media) "too much to think about". Sure, we can all have ideas about moral and proportionate responses, reorderings and priorities. History, politics, experience, intelligence and even common sense can guide us; but against the glum hum, certainty seems more suspicious, even more dangerous than ever. Leaders like certainty or, at any rate, they like to exude certainty. In that regard, Tony Blair appears to have crossed into messianic delusion based on a colonial narrow-mindedness.
No matter what he or anyone else says, there really is too much to think about.
Yet how can you not think about it all - not constantly, of course, but frequently? The question mark, generally with good reason, is not encouraged in journalism ("tell them, don't ask them!"), but surely now is an exceptional time when questions, even naive ones, have more validity than answers rigid in their own certainty. Politicians and pundits, as always, a few profound and even wise, most banal in their predictability and a few transparently idiotic, attempt answers.
But making meaning of what's happened and, now that the US and Britain have bombed Afghanistan, what may happen in response, is fraught with difficulty. In time, the mental climate may return to something like it was. Yet the idea that house prices will soon again be the dominant topic of middle-class conversation in Ireland seems absurd. The canvas on which we live our lives really has been expanded: Shindand displaces Sutton, Kandahar displaces Killiney, Bagram displaces Blackrock as place names to colonise concerns and conversation. Little wonder the background hum is glum.
We know, too, that most of what we read and heard in the build-up to the "war" was pure speculation. Phillip Knightley, author of The First Casualty, a history of war reporting, has written that Western media follow a depressingly familiar formula in preparing the public for conflict. First, he argues, is "the crisis", next "the demonisation of the enemy's leader", then "the demonisation of the enemy as individuals" and finally "stories of the enemy's atrocities". Perhaps there is an underlying naturalness about such a narrative structure, but that's unlikely. At times like this, the agenda is, not surprisingly, moulded.
Knightley may or may not be right. However, he has studied the pattern to arrive at his breakdown and should be taken seriously. But even that, though useful in providing us with one frame of reference when we see, hear or read media, is small beer. There is still too much to think about. It's not as if the abstractions haven't always been posing practically unanswerable riddles. But never so many, simultaneously and so acutely. Given the specialisation of knowledge nowadays which maintains the division of labour in Western societies, we are probably not ideally prepared to ponder the "big picture".
After all, it's quite un-Western. All right maybe for a yogi in the Himalayas, a fakir sitting on top of a tree or a philosopher in an ivory tower. But when the big bucks are being made by specialists in business, law and medicine (trumped only by sports and entertainment hot-shots), narrowness and precision become exalted. Depth, not breadth, is encouraged, and the shock of such widespread psychic disruption, as we are experiencing now, becomes even more traumatic.
Perhaps the most potent single question now is whether the US will be more or less powerful whenever the bombing ceases.
Answers as to how the world will think about the abstractions can perhaps be glimpsed if that one question can be answered. Already, reporting of this "war" seems even worse than the farcical journalism which accompanied the Gulf War. It is, quite simply, impossible to know what to believe.
Certainly, the briefers, bureaucrats and politicians can't be believed. We know that from their track records in Vietnam, the Falklands and the Gulf. Why shouldn't they lie barefacedly to us? After all, their objective is victory, not truth.
All TV footage will be strictly controlled and our impressions moulded. That, though regrettable, is understandable - same as it ever was. But TV news bulletins and other media will report official statements as though position and status ensure reliability and truth. Only an idiot could argue that propaganda is not crucial in war (and perhaps even more so in "war"). But there ought to be, at a minimum, a stress on the sources of information.
You know, don't you, that when you see a powerful person behind a rostrum "briefing" the media and calling favoured journalists by their first names, that PR yarns are being spun? As a result, it is all deeply dispiriting and depressing. Propaganda assails us from all sides of the conflict and, beyond the broadest of outlines, we really don't know what's going on.
Meanwhile, when the early jolts generated by the start of the "war" begin to subside, the great abstractions will remain. Will the US be more powerful whenever the bombing ceases? Who knows? It's hard to imagine that it won't be, and it will certainly be different. But the big issues, for all Blair's speechifying, will remain ready to erupt again.
We can expect them to do so because they can never be placated by lies and bombs. They require the best answers we can find, even if, at present, the hum they generate seems overwhelming and unending.