Confessions of a Heretic

by Roger Scruton

  Indeed, as Christine Rosen has cogently argued, an entirely new conception of friendship is emerging through these networking sites. A person’s friends are posted on his site, in the form of links to sites of their own. And each of these sites consists in a display of tastes, hobbies, photographs, and further links to friends. And that might be all that friendship consists in. The site exists not to exercise friendship but simply to lay claim to it; people strive to ‘collect’ friends, and their self-esteem rises with the number of friends linked to their site. Each site has one purpose above all others, which is to put its owner on display. As Rosen puts it, the Delphic maxim ‘know thyself’, which for the Greeks was the heart of meaningful social relations, has been replaced by another: ‘show thyself’. And friendship comes about simply by showing yourself in the company of another. Little suggests that friendship is a sphere of activity, still less a sphere of duty. This is a duty-free world, in which we all stand side-by-side on display, like chorus girls.

  Of course, friendships formed on-line can also be pursued off-line, in that dangerous world of real activities and real desires. And then the new opportunities for deception and predation reveal themselves. We already know how vulnerable children and young people are to those who prowl around the Internet chat-rooms. Every kind of lie about yourself can easily be made on the screen: the lying biography, lying photograph, lying address, lying statement of intent – none of these can be easily detected until that face-to-face encounter in circumstances chosen by the predator, by which time it is too late. Of course, nothing here is entirely new: dating agencies have always been exploited by those looking for sexual victims, and people have laid traps by letter since the beginning of literacy. Nevertheless, the opportunity exists to create a virtual personality, and to step down into the real world to take possession of assets deceitfully acquired and inadequately protected.

  What we are witnessing is a change in the attention that mediates and gives rise to friendship. In the once normal conditions of human contact, people became friends by being in each other’s presence, understanding all the many subtle signals, verbal and bodily, whereby another testifies to his character, emotions and intentions, and building affection and trust in tandem. Attention was fixed on the other – on his face, words and gestures. And his nature as an embodied person was the focus of the friendly feelings that he inspired. People building friendship in this way are strongly aware that they appear to the other as the other appears to them. The other’s face is a mirror in which they see their own. Precisely because attention is fixed on the other there is an opportunity for self-knowledge and self-discovery, for that expanding freedom in the presence of the other which is one of the joys of human life. The object of friendly feelings looks back at you, and freely responds to your free activity, amplifying both your awareness and his own. In short friendship, as traditionally conceived, was ruled by the maxim ‘know thyself’.

  When attention is fixed on the screen, however, there is a marked shift in emphasis. For a start I have my finger on the button. At any moment I can turn the image off, or flick to some new encounter. The other is free in his own space, but he is not really free in mine, since he is entirely dependent on my decision to keep him there. I retain ultimate control, and in an important sense am not risking myself in the friendship as I risk myself when I meet the other face to face. Of course, the other may so grip my attention with his messages, images and requests, that I stay glued to the screen. Nevertheless, it is a screen that I am glued to, and not the face that I see in it. All interaction with the other is at a distance, and can affect me only if I choose to be affected. Over this person I enjoy a power of which he himself is not really aware – since he is not aware of the extent of my desire to retain his presence in the space before me. He too, therefore, will not risk himself; he appears on the screen only on condition of retaining that ultimate control. This is something I know about him that he knows that I know – and vice versa. There grows between us a reduced-risk encounter, in which each is aware that the other is fundamentally withheld, sovereign within his impregnable cyber-castle.

  But that is not the only way in which cyber-relationships are affected by the medium of their formation. Everything that appears on the screen appears in competition with whatever else might be called up by the mouse. You ‘click on’ your friend, as you might click on a news item, a music video, or a fragment of film. He is one of the many products on display. Friendship with him, and relationship generally, belongs in the category of amusements and distractions, a commodity that may or may not be chosen, depending on the rival goods. This contributes to a radical demotion of the personal relationship. Your friendships are no longer special to you, and definitive of your moral life: they are amusements – what Marxists would call ‘fetishes’, things that have no real life of their own but borrow their life from your interest in them.

  As I said, there is a strong argument for saying that the Facebook experience, which has attracted millions of people from all around the world, is an antidote to shyness, a way in which people otherwise cripplingly intimidated by the venture outwards into society, are able to overcome their disability and enjoy the web of affectionate relationships on which so much of our happiness depends. But there is an equally strong argument that holds that the Facebook experience hypostatises shyness, retains its principal features, while substituting an ersatz kind of affection for the real affection that shyness fears. For by placing a screen between yourself and the friend, while retaining ultimate control over what appears on that screen, you also hide from the real encounter – forbidding to the other the power and the freedom to challenge you in your deeper nature and to call on you here and now to take responsibility for yourself and for him.

  I was taught that shyness is not a virtue but a defect, and that it comes from placing too high a value on yourself – a value that forbids you to risk yourself in the encounter with others. I think there is truth in this diagnosis. But it is a truth that supports an argument against the Facebook experience. By removing the real risks from interpersonal encounters the Facebook experience might encourage a kind of narcissism, a self-regarding posture in the midst of what should have been other-regarding friendship. In effect there may be nothing more than the display of self, the others listed on the website counting for nothing in themselves.

  In its normal occurrence, however, the Facebook encounter is still an encounter – however attenuated –between real people. We are now beginning to witness the next stage in screen addiction, in which the screen finally takes over – ceasing to be a means of communication between real people who exist elsewhere, and becoming the place where people finally achieve reality, the only place where they relate in any coherent way to others. I am thinking of the new ‘avatar’ phenomenon, in which people create their own screen substitutes, whose life on the screen is one to which all personal relationships are consigned, so enabling their controllers to live in complete self-complacency behind the screen, exposed to no danger and yet enjoying a kind of substitute affection through the adventures of their cyber-child. Already Second Life, which offers a virtual world and invites you to enter it in the form of an avatar taken from its collection of templates, has 100 million or more users worldwide. It has its own currency, in which purchases can be made in its own stores; it rents spaces to avatars as their homes and businesses. It also provides opportunities for ‘social’ action, with social positions achieved by merit, or at any rate virtual merit. In this way people can enjoy, through their avatars, cost-free versions of the social emotions, become heroes of ‘compassion’, without lifting a finger in the real world. Some nations already have embassies in Second Life, which your avatar can visit to obtain advice about immigration, trade and politics. In one notorious recent incident one avatar attempted to sue another for the theft of a copyright idea; and lurking just round the corner in the avatar world is the ever-growing temptation of pornography, with avatar sites now available in which
your cyber-child can realise your wildest fantasies, at no risk to yourself. On You-tube it is possible to see a film in which a couple who have never met describe their adulterous affair conducted in cyber-space, showing no guilt towards the victim, and proudly displaying their narcissistic emotions as though they had achieved some kind of moral breakthrough, by ensuring that it is only their avatars, and not they themselves, that ended up in bed together.

  This might be the model that many will follow: no risk adultery. John gives cyber-birth to Johngo, an avatar with all the qualities that John would wish for but lacks: Johngo is strong, handsome, fearless and energetic, though deficient in intellect since of necessity he cannot be brainier than his creator. John stays all day glued to the screen, propelling Johngo through cyber-space in search of the encounters that will test his courage and bring him renown. Mary, meanwhile, has given birth to her own beautiful, graceful and man-killing avatar, Masha, compensating for Mary’s own life as an obese and man-fearing chocaholic by releasing her pent-up yearnings in Masha’s promiscuous lust. Johngo and Masha meet: how could they fail to be impressed by each other? The brainless stud and the manipulating tart begin a relationship which at any moment can be cut off at source, when either John or Mary gets tired of the performance. If it continues, it is only because John and Mary enjoy the fantasy of a relationship that neither of them possesses; if it stops it is without heartbreak, since there are no hearts to break. Yet both John and Mary know that their avatars have no other future. Johngo and Masha have each met their nemesis; and their routine can go on forever, stuck in the groove of fantasies that control the screen.

  I think most people would see this as an unhealthy state of affairs. It is one thing to place a screen between yourself and the world; it is another thing to inhabit that screen as the unique sphere of your relationships. In vesting your emotional life in the adventures of an avatar you are retreating from real relationships completely. Instead of being the means to amplify relationships that exist outside of it, the computer could become the sole arena of social life – but an unreal life involving unreal people. The nerd controlling the avatar has essentially ‘put his being outside of himself’, and the thought of this awakens all those once fashionable critiques of alienation and the fetishism of commodities, with which Marx and his followers castigated capitalist society. It provides us with an opportunity to revisit those critiques, to see whether there is anything of truth to be discovered in them.

  The origin of those old critiques lies in an idea of Hegel’s, and it is an idea of enduring importance, which is constantly resurging in new guises, especially in the writings of psychologists concerned to map the contours of ordinary happiness. The idea is this: we human beings fulfil ourselves through our own free actions, and through the consciousness that these bring of our individual worth. But we are not free in a state of nature, nor do we, outside the world of human relations, have the kind of consciousness of self that allows us to value and intend our own fulfilment. Freedom is not reducible to the unhindered choices that even an animal might enjoy; nor is self-consciousness simply a matter of the pleasurable immersion in immediate experiences, like the rat pressing endlessly on the pleasure switch. Freedom involves an active engagement with the world, in which opposition is encountered and overcome, risks are taken and satisfactions weighed: it is, in short an exercise of practical reason, in pursuit of goals whose value must justify the efforts needed to obtain them. Likewise self-consciousness, in its fully realised form, involves not merely an openness to present experience, but a sense of my own existence as an individual, with plans and projects that might be fulfilled or frustrated, and with a clear conception of what I am doing, for what purpose and with what hope of happiness.

  All those ideas are contained in the term first introduced by the German post-Kantian philosopher, J. G. Fichte, to denote the inner goal of a free personal life: Selbstbestimmung or self-certainty. The crucial claim of Hegel is that the life of freedom and self-certainty can only be obtained through others. I become fully myself only in contexts which compel me to recognise that I am another in others’ eyes. I do not acquire my freedom and individuality and then, as it were, try them out in the world of human relations. It is only by entering that world, with its risks, conflicts and responsibilities, that I come to know myself as free, to enjoy my own perspective and individuality, and to become a fulfilled person among persons. In the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right, Hegel tells many pleasing and provocative parables about the way in which the subject achieves freedom and fulfilment through his Entäusserung – his objectification – in the world of others. And the status of these parables – whether they are arguments or allegories, conceptual analyses or psychological generalisations – has always been a matter of dispute. But I don’t think any psychologist now would dispute the fundamental claim that underpins them, which is that the freedom and fulfilment of the self come about only through the recognition of the other. Without others my freedom is an empty cipher, and recognition of the other involves taking full responsibility for my own existence as the individual who I am.

  In his efforts to ‘set Hegel on his feet’, the young Marx drew an important contrast, between true freedom, that comes to us through relationship with other subjects, and the hidden enslavement that comes when our ventures outwards are not towards subjects but towards objects. In other words, he suggested, we must distinguish the realisation of the self, in free relations with others, from the alienation of the self in the system of things. That is the core of his critique of private property, and it is a critique that is as much bound up with allegory and storytelling as the original Hegelian arguments. And in later writings the critique is transformed into the theory of ‘fetishism’, according to which people lose their freedom through making fetishes of commodities. A fetish is something that is animated by a transferred life. The consumer in a capitalist society, according to Marx, transfers his life into the commodities that bewitch him, and so loses that life, becoming a slave to commodities precisely through seeing the market in goods, rather than the free interactions of people, as the place where his desires are brokered and fulfilled.

  Let me say that I do not endorse those critiques of property and the market, and see them as flamboyant off-shoots of a philosophy which, properly understood, endorses free transactions in a market as much as it endorses free relations between people generally, indeed seeing the one as no more than an application of the other. However, this is not directly relevant to my theme, which is the idea of the Entäusserung, the realisation, of the self through responsible relations with others. This, it seems to me, is the core contribution of German romantic philosophy to the understanding of the modern condition, and it is an idea that has direct application to the problems that we see emerging in our new world of internet addiction. It seems to me incontrovertible that, in the sense in which freedom is a value, freedom is also an artefact, which comes into being through the mutual interaction of people. This mutual interaction is what raises us from the animal to the personal condition, enabling us to take responsibility for our lives and actions, to evaluate our goals and character, and both to understand the nature of personal fulfilment and to set about desiring and intending it. This process is crucial, as the Hegelians emphasised, to the growth of the human subject, as a self-knowing agent, capable of entertaining and acting from reasons, with a developed first-person perspective and a sense of his reality as one subject among others. It is a process that depends upon real conflicts and real resolutions, in a shared public space where we are each accountable for what we are and do. Anything that interferes with that process, by undermining the growth of inter-personal relations, by confiscating responsibility, or by preventing or discouraging an individual from making long-term rational choices and adopting a concrete vision of his own fulfilment, is an evil. It may be an unavoidable evil; but it is an evil all the same, and one that we should strive to abolish if we can.

  And
it is undeniable that there are ways in which we damage or retreat from this process of self-realisation, and that Internet addiction is only one of them. Long before that addiction arose, and preparing the way for it, was the television addiction, which corresponds exactly to the Hegelian and Marxist critique of the fetish – an inanimate thing in which we invest our life, and so lose it. Of course we retain ultimate control over the television: we can turn it off. But people don’t, on the whole, and remain fixed to the screen in all those moments when they might otherwise be building relationships, through conversation, activities, conflicts and projects. The television has, for a vast number of our fellow human beings, destroyed family meals, home cooking, hobbies, homework, study, and family games such as charades. It has rendered many people largely inarticulate, and deprived them of the simple ways of making direct conversational contact with their fellows. I am not referring simply to TV’s ‘dumbing down’ of thought and imagination, or its manipulation of people’s desires and interests through brazen imagery. Those features are familiar enough, and the constant target of despairing criticism. Nor am I referring only to its addictive quality – though research by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Robert Kubey establishes beyond doubt that TV is addictive in the same way as gambling and drugs.

  I am referring to the nature of television as a replacement for relationships. By watching people interacting on the TV sitcom the addict is able to dispense with interactions of his own. Those energies and interests that would otherwise be focused on others, in story-telling, arguing, singing together or playing games, in walking, talking, eating and acting, are consumed on the screen, in vicarious lives that involve no engagement of the viewer’s own moral equipment. And that equipment therefore atrophies. We see this everywhere in modern life, but nowhere more vividly than in the students who arrive in our colleges. These divide into two kinds – those from TV-sodden homes, and those who have grown up talking. Those of the first kind tend to be reticent, inarticulate, given to aggression when under stress, unable to tell a story or express a view, and seriously hampered when it comes to taking responsibility for a task, an activity or a relationship. Those of the second kind are the ones who step forward with ideas, who go out to their fellows, who radiate the kind of freedom and adventurousness that makes learning a pleasure and risk a challenge. Many of these TV-free young people are home-schooled, or products of the Bible belt, used to singing hymns and saying prayers at home: and of course this means that they are often mocked by their liberal professors who despise the Bible belt, not seeing that it is the Bible belt that keeps up America’s trousers. But in my experience these students have a head start over their TV-addicted contemporaries. The latter can, indeed, be freed from their vice, and the purpose of university sport, theatre, music and so on is in part to make the campus a place where TV is marginalised. But in many other public or semi-public spaces TV has now become a near necessity: it flickers in the background, reassuring those who have bestowed their life on it that their life goes on. The correct response to this kind of addiction is not to attack those who manufacture TVs or who stock them with rubbish: it is to concentrate on the kind of education that makes it possible to take a critical approach to TV, so as to demand real insight and real emotion, rather than kitsch, Disney or porn. And the same goes for the iPod.