In Greek mythology Tantalus was condemned to
be eternally kept out of reach of plump, luscious fruit dangling overhead. The
fruit was tantalizingly close, a situation that spawned the word “tantalize.” Today, we can get all the
fresh fruit we want any time of year at Whole Foods, so it’s never a matter of
being denied in 21st Century America if you have the means. We can also gather all sorts of “friends” on
Facebook and tweet to our heart’s content, staying in touch with hundreds of
our most tweetable friends.
Rather than host “at homes” or “tea”
for our short list of intimate friends and family as was popular in Victorian
times, we seem to find ways to hide from each other in plain sight. Any packed Starbuck’s Coffee House at any
time of day or night will easily display a group of 30 or so folks busily
engaged with their iPads, iPhones, or laptops even while seated at the same
table with no contact whatsoever with the person most proximate. We have
created the illusion of being social butterflies while wrapping our actual
lives in technological cocoons. We have become politicians with constituents
rather than friends with genuine face-to-face connectedness and intimacy.
The art of conversation has been
lost to “what’s on your mind” postings or tweets rather than real discussion.
The polarization of the country has been accomplished because civil discourse
has gone the way of the parlor and the dining room. They are vestigial aspects
of a former humanity left in the dust by our unwary eagerness to embrace handy
tools as ends in themselves. Words were once tools; now they are ammunition,
fired at will, blasted out at the world from a vacuous void of thought at
distance.
Investment bankers now sit in front
of computer screens and play the stock market with billions of dollars
nano-seconds at a clip. It has nothing to do with “investing,” which by
definition implies a long term commitment.
It is playing computerized pinball with the world economy so that a few
make billions in seconds while the consequences to national economies have been
and will continue to be devastating.
We even fight wars at a distance so
remote, thanks to the technology of drones, that former fighter pilots now sit
in offices with computers directing their drones to destroy enemy targets as if
war is nothing more than a video game played for real stakes.
Our nation’s obesity epidemic is not
just the product of too many calories: it is the result of the loss of real
human contact and intimacy that technology has enabled. We are starved for the
socially fulfilling harvest of real face-to-face relationships instead of
Facebook “friending;” the return of slow food family dinners in the dining room;
the restoration of neighbors stopping by the front porch to chat; and the
Woodstockian reunion of the republic of the United States of America.
Our infrastructure has cocooned us
in gated communities without neighborhoods, automobiles rather than mass
transportation, and rugged individualism rather than cooperation. The higher
fruit of a true civilization is just out of reach, and we have put it there by making
lesser fruits into gods. Those lesser fruits are full of sugar and have no
sustenance. They are full of empty calories that sustain nothing more than
empty lives.
There is nothing wrong with the
technology, per se, it is how we use it and what we expect from it that is
profoundly wrong. Perhaps our abuse is a reflection of our overweening emphasis
on liberty, rugged individualism, and the culture of “me,” lies that serve as
protections against having to look into the face of the other and see the
loneliness that we feel.
