In Antonio Damasiio’s book, Self Comes to Mind (Pantheon, 2010), he painstakingly explains human neuro-development from in-utero to the concept
of self or what some call individuation, which is the organism’s awareness of
separateness from other organisms. Damasio
celebrates this process noting that it is what makes us uniquely human among
the evolved organisms.
But
what if this separateness, what most contemporaries now celebrate as diversity,
rather than being our blessing as a species has evolved into our curse? That is, perhaps, as we become more aware of
our differences, and ponder or dwell on it, we simultaneously become
aware of our desperate-ness. Perhaps, we
are evolving into increasingly insular prongs or nodes the linkages of which
are spinning into finer and finer untenable threads that dissolve or snap
without warning. What if this explains
the currency of the phrase “dissociative behavior” that is used increasingly in
the 21st century to identify lethally social pathology that
increasingly seeps into the headlines?
In Roger Cohen's op-ed today (2/23/16), he writes eloquently of just how much technology has abetted this evolution.
"The smartphone is a Faustian device, at once liberation and enslavement. It frees us to be anywhere and everywhere — and most of all nowhere. It widens horizons. It makes those horizons invisible. Upright homo sapiens, millions of years in the making, has yielded in a decade to the stooped homo sapiens of downward device-dazzled gaze... A world is gone. Another...is being born — one where words mean everything and the contrary of everything, where sentences have lost their weight, where volume drowns truth...How cold and callous is the little screen of our insidious temptation, working our fingers so hard to produce so little!...Technology has upended not only newspapers. It has upended language itself, which is none other than a community’s system of communication. What is a community today? Can there be community at all with downward gazes?"
I say Cohen is eloquent, because he phrases the questions so precisely. He, too, feels that something is going on, and that something just might be more profound than any of us could possibly imagine...especially those of us locked into our downward gaze. And he inserts a cautionary note at the end, a note, which to me, resonates so thoroughly within the popping and crackling of the bonds which previously secured what we think of as community. But, perhaps, that's precisely the point. Perhaps what we think of as community has been changing while we were struggling to understand what has been going on. Is this what's at the core of all the anger that's impelling this election cycle circus? Are we angry not because we feel the center is not holding, but rather because we feel we have no center? Are we already where we fear we have been heading?
"The smartphone is a Faustian device, at once liberation and enslavement. It frees us to be anywhere and everywhere — and most of all nowhere. It widens horizons. It makes those horizons invisible. Upright homo sapiens, millions of years in the making, has yielded in a decade to the stooped homo sapiens of downward device-dazzled gaze... A world is gone. Another...is being born — one where words mean everything and the contrary of everything, where sentences have lost their weight, where volume drowns truth...How cold and callous is the little screen of our insidious temptation, working our fingers so hard to produce so little!...Technology has upended not only newspapers. It has upended language itself, which is none other than a community’s system of communication. What is a community today? Can there be community at all with downward gazes?"
I say Cohen is eloquent, because he phrases the questions so precisely. He, too, feels that something is going on, and that something just might be more profound than any of us could possibly imagine...especially those of us locked into our downward gaze. And he inserts a cautionary note at the end, a note, which to me, resonates so thoroughly within the popping and crackling of the bonds which previously secured what we think of as community. But, perhaps, that's precisely the point. Perhaps what we think of as community has been changing while we were struggling to understand what has been going on. Is this what's at the core of all the anger that's impelling this election cycle circus? Are we angry not because we feel the center is not holding, but rather because we feel we have no center? Are we already where we fear we have been heading?
It is a frightening observation to suggest that human adaption to technology has unlinked us. But if we are essentially just "self" then maybe we are closer than ever to perfection. Lonely, isolated, self gratifying and of course downward gazing perfect selfs.
ReplyDelete