by Oliver Sacks
These gadgets, already ominous in 2007, have now immersed us in a virtual reality far denser, more absorbing, and even more dehumanizing.
I am confronted every day with the complete disappearance of the old civilities. Social life, street life, and attention to people and things around one have largely disappeared, at least in big cities, where a majority of the population is now glued almost without pause to their phones or other devices—jabbering, texting, playing computer games, turning more and more to virtual reality of every sort.
Everything is public now, potentially: one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s movements, one’s purchases. There is no privacy and apparently little desire for it in a world devoted to nonstop use of social media. Every minute, every second, has to be spent with one’s device clutched in one’s hand. Those trapped in this virtual world are never alone, never able to concentrate and appreciate in their own way, silently. They have given up, to a great extent, the amenities and achievements of civilization: solitude and leisure, the sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed, whether in contemplating a work of art, a scientific theory, a sunset, or the face of one’s beloved.
A few years ago, I was invited to join a panel discussion titled “Information and Communication in the Twenty-first Century.” One of the panelists, an internet pioneer, said proudly that his young daughter surfed the internet twelve hours a day and had access to a breadth and range of information that no one of a previous generation could have imagined. I asked whether she had read any of Jane Austen’s novels, or any classic novel, and he said, “No, she doesn’t have time for anything like that.” I wondered aloud whether she would then have no solid understanding of human nature or society, and suggested that while she might be stocked with wide-ranging information, that was different from knowledge; she would have a mind both shallow and centerless. Half the audience cheered; the other half booed.
Much of this, remarkably, was envisaged by E. M. Forster in his 1909 short story “The Machine Stops,” in which he imagined a future where people live underground in isolated cells, never seeing one another and communicating only by audio and visual devices. In this world, original thought and direct observation are discouraged—“Beware of first-hand ideas!” people are told. Humanity has been overtaken by “the Machine,” which provides all comforts and meets all needs—except the need for human contact. One young man, Kuno, pleads with his mother via a Skype-like technology, “I want to see you not through the Machine. I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”
He says to his mother, who is absorbed in her hectic, meaningless life, “We have lost the sense of space….We have lost a part of ourselves….Cannot you see…that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine?”
This is how I feel increasingly often about our bewitched, besotted society, too.
* * *
—
AS ONE’S DEATH GROWS NEAR, one may take comfort in the feeling that life will go on—if not for oneself then for one’s children, or for what one has created. Here at least one can invest hope, though there may be no hope for oneself physically and (for those of us who are not believers) no sense of any “spiritual” survival after bodily death.
But it may not be enough to create, to contribute, to have influenced others, if one feels, as I do now, that the very culture in which one was nourished and to which one had given one’s best in return is itself threatened. Though I am supported and stimulated by my friends, by readers around the world, by memories of my life, and by the joy that writing gives me, I have, as many of us must have, deep fears about the well-being and even survival of our world.
Such fears have been expressed at the highest intellectual and moral levels. Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and former president of the Royal Society, is not a man given to apocalyptic thinking, but in 2003 he published a book called Our Final Hour, subtitled A Scientist’s Warning—How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in This Century. More recently, Pope Francis published his remarkable encyclical Laudato Si’, a deep consideration not only of human-induced climate change and widespread ecological disaster but of the desperate state of the poor and the growing threats of consumerism and misuse of technology. Traditional wars have now been joined by genocide, extremism, and terrorism and, in some cases, by the deliberate destruction of our human heritage, of history and culture itself.
These threats of course concern me, but at a distance—I worry more about the subtle, pervasive draining out of meaning, of intimate contact, from our society and culture.
When I was eighteen, I for the first time read Hume. I was horrified by the vision he expressed in his 1738 Treatise of Human Nature, in which he wrote that mankind is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” As a neurologist, I have seen many patients rendered amnesic by destruction of the memory systems in their brains, and I cannot help feeling that these people, having lost any sense of a past or a future and caught in a flutter of ephemeral, ever-changing sensations, have in some way been reduced from human beings to Humean ones.
I have only to venture into the streets of my own neighborhood, the West Village, to see such Humean casualties by the thousand: younger people, for the most part, who have grown up in our social-media era, have no personal memory of how things were before, and no immunity to the seductions of digital life. What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.
Nonetheless, I dare to hope that, despite everything, human life and its richness of cultures will survive, even on a ravaged earth. While some see art as a bulwark of our culture, our collective memory, I see science, with its depth of thought, its palpable achievements and potentials, as equally important; and science, good science, is flourishing as never before, moving cautiously and slowly, its insights checked by continual self-testing and experimentation. Though I revere good writing and art and music, it seems to me that only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass. This idea is explicit in Pope Francis’s encyclical and may be practiced not only with vast, centralized technologies but by workers, artisans, and farmers in the villages of the world. Between us, we can surely pull the world through its present crises and lead the way to a happier time ahead. As I face my own impending departure from the world, I have to believe in this—that mankind and our planet will survive, that life will continue, and that this will not be our final hour.
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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC: Excerpt of “Into the Sun” from An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, copyright © 1995 by Kay Redfield Jamison. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Excerpts from Wisdom, Madness and Folly: The Philosophy of a Lunatic by John Custance. Copyright © 1951 by John Custance, copyright renewed 1980 by John Custance. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. and Other Press, LLC: Excerpt from Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father’s Memoir of Love and Madness by Michael Greenberg, copyright © 2008 by Michael Greenberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. and Other Press, LLC. Any third party use of this material outside of this publication is prohibited. All rights reserved.