Cultural, economic and social relations have become so complex now, so large, so transient, the pace of change has so quickened, that all the old forms of association through which love and wisdom travel have been thrown into disarray. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the family, the tribe, all secondary institutions, religions and social establishments have been transformed by technology, media, mass marketing, capital and government. Indeed the case has often been made that the technological environment itself is almost fatally unbalancing to us, not only through economic hardship, relentless competition, alienation, environmental degradation, disease, etc., but directly by its unprecedented assault on our senses and through them on our brains and minds.
Our cities show the effects through overpopulation, overcrowding, blasting industrial rhythms, vast power grids with ceaseless sixty cycle hum, the drowning of seasonal and annual changes under heat and lights. Our intensely electronic, automated, digitized gadgetry, shows it, with cultural over-stimulation, media frenzy, noise, visual chaos, flashing lights, highway speeds, rapid changes of perspective, leaping time zones, instantaneous global communication. People change jobs, homes and mates faster than ever. Money moves at the speed of light. Ownerships change hands with brutal disregard for social needs. Travel and communication accelerate. It's seen in the fast cutting in TV and films, in sound bites, in media factoids. They'll sell us anything. It's contemporary, it's desirable, it's fun! The quick turnaround time, fast hand-eye coordination, keep us too busy to think, too stressed out to relax into open awareness. We can't get a take on the whole. The very seasons are prettified or Disneyfied with cutsey fashions for which artificial needs are created, so that markers for the movement of the planet around the sun become shopping seasons and the seven day week is a business artifact.
Different parts of our personalities are called out at work, at home, in the social world, in the TV world of the imagination, in Disney World, during vacation time, in sports viewing time, at the casino, in the hospital. The sensory shifts, with their long trains of memory evoked, pull us to separate identity centers inside ourselves. The confusion of shifting identities frightens us. It moves too fast. We suppress it. The commercial interests encourage us to cling instead to the corrupt sense that "I am what I buy, because it makes me look like who I think I should be. "
The sense of dislocation in a time of such rapid change could be shaped and tempered with meaningful rites of passage, but they are under assault too. The old myths and rituals don't speak to our needs very well. We don't to derive meaning and direction from them. They've become twisted, aim-inhibited, commercialized and do not serve as powerful coordinators of turning points anymore. They've been made into "buying opportunities."
We feel the moral vertigo and reach out to each other, which in practice means dialing the phone, but the dramatic speed with which we can reach each other, intended to make us closer, makes us distant and cool instead. We break up a love affair by telephone, for instance, and we don't enter into the full sensory immediacy of the situation. The phone conveys the information, it evokes the passions, but the very paucity of the sensory field generates a new kind of stress to which neither fight nor flight seem to be an adequate response. A genial surplus-serotonin high works much better. With it we can engage in life suffering less alienation. We can wander happily around the mall in our chirpy emptiness without being overwhelmed by the intense sensory fields and vacuous offerings. All things trivial we get in big doses, with bouncy jingles, and clowns trying to sell us things.
Behind all this we experience the thrum of the quickening pulse endemic to life in technological culture. Acceleration itself may be addictive. It reliably creates an adrenaline high, and the physiological rushes with which the body responds to the increased tempo of life are experienced by many as pleasurable and necessary. (Hans Selye's adaptation phase of the stress response playing itself out as an addictive high.) Either we add fuel to it with stimulants or try to damp it down with narcotics. One way or another -- or both ways if we're really skilled and know how to "work our drugs" -- we drive on through life chemically altered to an increasing extent, often pressing the brakes and accelerator simultaneously, plunging ahead in full career, less keeping up with the Joneses than with ourselves. And this adjustment to acceleration (part of Toffler's "future shock") is reframed by the power structure and made to seem a desirable trait. Speed is the essence of things, the spice of life. That's why films "cut to the chase." We are hooked to acceleration even more than to greed of acquisition and power, because it enters lower down in the central nervous system. We have fewer neural routines to override or filter it out.
Living under the influence of a global entrepreneurial, for-profit technological culture, and in the absence of a core connection to love and wisdom, we have made success and failure the crucial measures of a modern life, and success is succinctly defined: make money, get a good mate, build a family, buy the right products, win the esteem of your neighbors, be a winner, not a loser -- get there fast! Except in the area of ambition or drive itself, success is not so much a sign of excellence, skillfulness, arete or goodness, as of raw aggressiveness and dedication to self, and this makes it a source of pain and discontent, a hidden spring of suffering.
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Copyright 1998 - Ira Rosenberg
Last Updated 09/05/98 (rge)