THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS
Alienation: Technology & the Soul, Part I
We are threatened, not by a sudden atomic conflagration, but a slow, ever-increasing poverty of soul
Many years ago, a friend introduced me to an essay by the German philosopher Josef Pieper by the title of “Learning How to See Again”. It opens with this startling statement:
Man’s ability to see is in decline. Those who nowadays concern themselves with culture and education will experience this fact again and again. We do not mean here, of course, the physiological sensitivity of the human eye. We mean the spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality as it truly is.
To be sure, no human being has ever really seen everything that lies visibly in front of his eyes. The world, including its tangible side, is unfathomable. Who would ever have perfectly perceived the countless shapes and shades of just one wave swelling and ebbing in the ocean! And yet, there are degrees of perception. Going below a certain bottom line quite obviously will endanger the integrity of man as a spiritual being.
Searching for the reasons, we could point to various things: modern man’s restlessness and stress, quite sufficiently denounced by now, or his total absorption and enslavement by practical goals and purposes. Yet one reason must not be overlooked either: the average person of our time loses the ability to see because there is too much to see!
There does exist something like “visual noise”, which just like the acoustical counterpart, makes clear perception impossible. One might presume that TV watchers, tabloid readers, and movie goers exercise and sharpen their eyes. But the opposite is true. The ancient sages knew exactly why they called the “concupiscence of the eyes” a “destroyer”. The restoration of man’s inner eyes can hardly be expected in this day and age — unless, first of all, one were willing and determined simply to exclude from one’s realm of life all those inane and contrived but titillating illusions incessantly generated by the entertainment industry.
This passage triggered within me a profound sense of recognition. It was one of those delightful moments when someone consciously articulates something you have only subconsciously felt.
If I had come across the essay just a couple of years earlier, I’m not sure this critique would have resonated. But this was 2014, and I had just gotten my first smartphone. (I tend to be a late adopter of new technology. Not on principle, I’m just woefully unattuned to popular culture — I only just discovered Better Call Saul). I was also working full-time for the first time, and was becoming fully acquainted with the lot of the modern office worker: sitting in a cubicle and staring at a computer screen all day.
The smartphone and the constant exposure to screens were quite new to me. I grew up in a “crunchy conservative” family in which technology and media consumption were limited. Two decades before “get rich and get off the grid” became a cool “trad” thing to say on Twitter, my parents fled Midtown Manhattan and ended up in rural Pennsylvania, homeschooling and attempting to grow their own food. Lest this conjure up images of subsistence farming, let me assure you my Dad continued to work from his PC at home, which was ironic for a man who heated the house with coal and liked to use 19th-century oil lamps, but fortunate considering that the rocky Appalachian soil yielded little in the way of produce, particularly when tended by a family of urbanites whose last farming experience was several generations and an ocean behind them in the Old World.
Only recently removed from this sheltered environment, I became fully ensconced in the digital world of web browsers and Netflix and Youtube and Facebook, and I began to experience a creeping feeling of disconnection and flatness. It felt as if I could no longer experience the full richness of the world around me, that there had grown up an invisible yet palpable wall between me and physical experience. And it didn’t feel as if this were occurring only when my attention was broken by technology. There was an actual change in the way I processed the world, even when my attention was directed wholly toward it. It was more shallow, more rapid. I was scanning the environment for a hit of something interesting, and then moving on, much as we scan a website and rapidly scroll.
And in walked Josef Pieper, from 60 years ago, to describe exactly what I was experiencing and why. There was an invisible wall growing up between me and the world, and it was made of 1s and 0s. What is shocking now is that Pieper wrote his essay long before the advent of the internet, in a world that, in retrospect, looks almost boring. We are now exposed to stimulation the sheer volume of which the German philosopher couldn’t have imagined. We don’t need to drive to a movie theater or buy a magazine to sate ourselves with the “inane and contrived but titillating illusions incessantly generated by the entertainment industry”; we are practically attached to devices from which an endless source of such titillation pours, and we can barely take our eyes from it. Software has eaten the world, but, more disconcertingly, it has also eaten our minds.
Nor must we wait for the media to produce inanities for us. We increasingly spend our days producing an endless array of them for the consumption of others. No longer passive observers of what Richard Weaver called “the great stereopticon”, we are part of it — cogs in the machine, nodes in the network — almost literally, our smartphones glued to our hands and hips. To return to Pieper’s time — to wait a whole month (!) for the latest issue of our favorite magazine — would be a welcome respite, a refreshing return to a quieter time when we didn’t feel mentally shackled to the digital hive-mind.
We have created machines of superb efficiency, digital drugs that are simultaneously more stimulating and less emotionally, physically, or cognitively demanding than anything short of an actual narcotic. This leads to a gradual disengagement from the world outside the screen, because the ratio of effort to reward is so much higher. Reality simply does not yield up her delights as easily. She requires patience, attention, effort.
And it is our activities, our interactions with physical reality, as much as our DNA, that make us human. Our faculties do not grow in a vacuum. They develop through interaction with the world. As we increasingly check out with digital distraction, it seems that our faculties — for thought, for creativity, for social interaction — may be decaying. Thinking is difficult, relationships are difficult, mastering a craft is difficult, because these activities require us to restructure the raw material of our psyche into something more and more defined, unique, and conscious — which is to say, more human. When we avoid this rewarding yet difficult process in favor of cheap and easy digital dopamine, we are cutting ourselves off from the living forces which propelled human nature into existence, from which all civilization emerges.
Much, indeed, has been made of the phenomenon of “stuck culture” lately. Movies are reheated leftovers from 20 years ago. Fashion likewise seems stuck looking back to the past. Could the smartphone and social media be contributing to this not simply because they destroyed the centralized media “monoculture”, but because they are destroying the necessary preconditions for any culture? When no one is capable of sitting quietly and daydreaming, of marveling at the intimate details of a wildflower, of getting lost in a novel — who can create anything? What kind of thoughts and emotions can we have, when the storehouses of our minds are furnished with the “tawdry, empty stimuli” of Instagram reels and TikToks and Twitter? How many people, who at this moment could be writing something that will become the plot for the next great film or having an inspiration for a new fashion trend, are laying in bed watching a string of insipid reels until they fall asleep?
This is the reason, in the minds of many, that our technologies really will destroy civilization. We are threatened, not by a sudden atomic conflagration, but a slow, ever-increasing poverty of soul. The final denouement is announced not by the roar of the machine, but the eerie silence of a roomful of people mesmerized by the blue glow of a multitude of tiny screens.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
But while digital addiction does damage the faculties that make us human, immersion in technology has an even deeper impact on man’s psyche, an impact, which, I think, Pieper hints at when he claims that “visual noise” endangers the “integrity of man as a spiritual being”. And to understand what this might mean, we have to go back further in our technological development, all the way back to the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the West.
The Industrial Revolution: “For this, for everything, we are out of tune.”
Neither Pieper nor we of the digital age are the first to recognize the negative effects of mass media on human consciousness, nor is mass media the first or the only technology that has been called a threat to nature, human or otherwise. Man innovates by his very nature, and yet he discovers, to his dismay, that his relationship with his creations is reciprocal. Man shapes technology, and technology shapes him. For this reason, man’s fear of it runs deep in history, perhaps as deep as his impulse to create it. Some 400 years before Christ, Socrates wondered if the invention of writing were dangerous, as it caused memory — hitherto an indispensable skill for the acquisition and transmission of knowledge — to atrophy.
It will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.
But with the pace of innovation slow (and occasionally running backwards) during the first epochs of man’s existence, widespread historical anxiety about technology is difficult to find — until the Enlightenment and the subsequent Industrial Revolution, when the pace of advancement exploded, bringing rapid and disorienting change. In 1812 a movement appeared whose name would later become a catch-all term for all anti-technological movements: the Luddites, a band of unemployed English textile workers who sabotaged the machinery that had made their occupations obsolete. But the Luddites were not the first to engage in technophobic terrorism. Two decades earlier, in 1791, the Albion Flour Mills — the first major factory in London, immortalized as the “dark satanic mills” of William Blake’s poem — burned to the ground in a suspected act of arson. The factory — depicted in a local newspaper with the devil perched atop it — had been the target of a campaign by local millers who feared it would destroy their livelihoods.
But it was not simply economic anxiety that precipitated resistance to industrialization. The triumph of science and technology seemed to induce a profound spiritual anxiety. At the same time as the Luddites were rampaging across England and newspapers were depicting flour mills as temples of satan, William Wordsworth was writing poems that would launch the Romantic movement in English poetry. The Romantics expressed something that man was for the first time feeling as a result of the extraordinary progress unleashed by science: an alienation from the natural world, a feeling that mastery over nature had brought him into conflict with it, both physically ruining the landscape and spiritually severing him from the ground of his being. A deep sense of loss permeates the works of the Romantic poets, and they are perhaps the first moderns to explicitly long for a “Retvrn” to the pre-capitalist, pre-industrial, pre-scientific past, a longing put poignantly to verse by Wordworth:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; —
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
“A pagan suckled in a creed outworn” is one of the most notable lines in the poem, because it reveals that, while Wordsworth is emotionally a Luddite (in the broad sense of the term), he is not one intellectually. The typical opponent of modern technological society tends toward some version of what I’ll call, “traditionalism”, an ideology that believes that modern society is the product of a wrong turn, a giant mistake, and that the solution is a great Return to man’s past. Which particular tradition offers man salvation depends on the ideological bent of the speaker. For the left-inclined, it is often primitive societies that live what is rhapsodized as an Edenic existence, untouched by the evils of property, pollution, and patriarchy. For the right-inclined, it is generally some version of Western Christianity. Wordsworth, however, does not fit neatly into either of these ideological camps. He recognizes that man’s technological progress is a natural product of an advance in human consciousness. Scientific knowledge of the inner workings of nature has fundamentally altered man’s relationship with the world. It has liberated him physically by giving him the power to manipulate nature, and it has liberated him psychologically by de-sacralizing the world. Nature is no longer a mysterious force inhabited by spirits and gods that act upon man; it is a straightforward — even prosaic — system of cause and effect, which man may act upon as if he were a god. Both the previous economic order (agrarian society) and the previous psychological order (enchanted nature) cannot stand in the face of this growth in human understanding. The impact is irreversible.
But, of course, Wordsworth is a Romantic, not a member of e/acc, and he does not greet technology’s triumph with joy. On the contrary, he believes that man is in danger. The factories have roared to life, and man’s encapsulation in the womb of nature is over forever. The depths of the sea have been illumined, and the gods of our spiritual imaginations are nowhere to be found. The old ways that suckled us in our childhood are obsolete. And yet, they did suckle us. The music of nature maintained the tone of our being; what will become of our humanity in the discordant roar of the great cities? Our gods imbued the universe with narrative structure and meaning; how will we orient our souls in a meaningless dance of atoms?
There is a commonality here between Wordsworth’s lament and Pieper’s warning — that technology is ruining man’s ability to see something in nature, something that is vital to man as a spiritual being.
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
What exactly are we losing the ability to see? And what exactly are we to make of the category of “spiritual” now that science and reason have revealed our spirits to be illusions? As a former Catholic myself, I can imagine the answer that Pieper (a devout Catholic whose philosophy stands squarely in the Thomistic tradition) might give, though he doesn’t actually specify in the essay. But Wordsworth’s answer — in this poem — is simpler, and, I think, truer. We have lost the ability to see…Proteus and Triton. But they aren’t real, and Wordsworth knows it.
Or are they, in some way?
Continued next week in Part II.
