The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [5]
Understandably, we enjoy watching a good dustup of an evening when, by day, service-industry culture demands niceness to order. Shouting at reality TV’s latest Punch and Judy is sort of fun. But is it any wonder we fear confrontation, or prefer to hide behind our screens?
We may be in touch, potentially, with anybody, anywhere on the planet. Nevertheless, what kind of existence is lived 24/7, ever on-call? Naturally, we offset our accessibility with portable solitudes and head-space expanders, first Walkmen, then iPods—to compensate for being packed cheek to butt in overcrowded trains. But while a soundtrack makes life seem more exciting, it also takes you out of it.
It’s hardly surprising on-line activity should be addictive (and it is: in South Korea, the world’s most plugged-in country, up to 30 percent of under-eighteens are thought to be at serious risk, with government-sponsored boot camps to wean them off). Like the Latin utopia, the Internet is a “nowhere,” and, like all drugs, it is unsatisfying, whetting appetites that it cannot fulfill, stimulating the mind’s eye as it starves our other senses. In so doing, it depletes users’ sensibility and intuition, skills that may feel instinctive, but, like language, are acquired through being together. That is, in conversation.
Arguably, this saps social confidence. Certainly, unlike the pixellated peacocks that strut the cyber-playgrounds, out and about, face-to-face, even in innocuous situations, growing numbers of us seem so scared of saying the wrong thing that we say nothing. We think we’re shy. We don’t realize how arrogant, selfish, and idle we seem.
It is glib to blame media scaremongers, drugs, images of violence for rising antisocial behavior. Something deeper yet simpler is happening. Talk less and we understand each other less.
In 1958 philosopher Hannah Arendt pondered how bizarre it was that men could journey into space, yet few could discuss these Promethean powers sensibly, because science had leapt ahead of human intelligence, the spectrum of its possibilities beyond any single person’s ken, let alone everyday conversation. For her, the fact that this development coincided with rising rudeness—complacent “thoughtlessness” being “among the outstanding characteristics of our time”—was no coincidence:
It could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do. In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking.
Unable to discuss the machinery that manufactures our human conditions, we’re forced into blindness, an innocence that she feared would brutalize us:
If . . . knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.
An atomized society, returning humanity to a mental Eden, but in a world of atomic bombs?
What worried Arendt was that we’d lose the ability to question: Ethics, after all, derive from our feelings, and if we don’t understand something, it is harder to sense whether it is right or wrong, let alone argue against it. How many of us can comprehend, never mind democratically vote on, nanotechnology, or genetically modified food, animals, embryos? Arendt may have been thinking nuclear. But how about brain death by iPod?
Actually, you’re more likely to be flattened if you cross the road talking on your cell phone, according