We are losing touch.
I mean that literally. As a society, a culture, as human beings, we are losing our ability to touch and feel in complex and interesting ways.
By touch I mean fully being conscious of the texture, heft, and shape of the things, inanimate or animate, we come into contact with.
The reason for this is simple. We live in a society addicted to ease. Ease means having chores done and services provided for you. Instead of making dinner--slicing crisp vegetables, de-boning bloody meat, getting our hands dirty--we tend to microwave or buy fast food. Instead of going to different shops in search of the right wool scarf, rubbing elbows with floor-staff, smelling the different odors of individual rooms and textiles, we log into the website, order online.
We buy new gadgets and appliances of shiny plastic and smooth metal that, when they smell at all, reek sharp of antiseptic packaging and when they fail we don't, we can't unscrew their backs to fix or get them fixed; we toss them out and order the latest version of the same gadget.
We walk the streets shunning contact, and blurt cool disinfectant on our hands when touch, in spite of our most strenuous efforts, occurs.
More and more of us, if one is to believe the surveys and related articles, turn to internet porn sites instead of other humans for sex. A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, logs onto internet porn sites so frequently that he is convinced real women, in all their myriad angles, not all of them flattering, are far less physically attractive to him now than they once were.
Maybe this is part of the 'new gadget' syndrome: when you log on to purchase a new consumer item, it's always perfect and glittering; and the women on porn websites glisten on call, they are lovely and fresh, they don't pout or smell or have pimples. How much easier to visit hotbabes.com whenever you feel like it than put up with the embarrassment of dating, the difficulties of dealing with another human being, in or out of bed.
But what of touch? What of mutual arousal? What of sex, which is, at its best, the most complete possible joining of two people?
This de-touching is true of all our senses, though it happens via different processes.
Three years ago I became conscious of the great noise in which I lived and how it was degrading my ability to listen, or hear properly. To preserve my relationship to the world of sound I opted to search for its opposite, silence. In the process, being a writer, I decided of course to write a book about the quest. I reckoned that by zeroing my personal instruments down to nothing I would be able to start afresh and hear and enjoy the universe of sounds the world provided. I was amazed to discover, while researching that book, to what extent modern Westerners accept levels of noise that harm them in two ways.
Physically, their hearing system is damaged by the constant volume it is subjected to, by machines, by support systems, by the constant rock of electronic communications and entertainment.
In terms of perception, our ability to pay attention: to understand, distinguish, analyze and enjoy individual sounds; is badly hurt by the overdose of noise around us. "Americans are functionally deaf," one of the experts I interviewed flatly stated.
In a chapter on cognitive noise, I cited the extreme case of the Northwest Airlines pilots who missed the airport they were supposed to land in because all their senses were engrossed in a laptop computer as they played with a scheduling program.
It seems the de-touching of our society also works on two tracks: by insulation, as when we lose the habit of intimately fixing, carving, manipulating, the objects (and people) we live with; and through overdose, by a process of drowning out, as in the example of sound, above.
The de-touching happens in other arenas. Visually and informationally we suffer from such massive overdose that, as with noise, we lose the ability to finely distinguish, parse, or take strong pleasure from what we're exposed to. ("Data smog" is one term that has been coined to describe this effect.) My book lists the example of two prime-time hours on Boston TV, wherein I counted an average of 130 stories told in that time slot, through ads, news clips, trailers and the like. 130 stories sounds like a fine idea, until you consider that a good story posits an entire and cohesive world of character, environment, history that the viewer or reader can live in--can touch fully, with his or her imagination. This is true of any film or book that moved or influenced you.
It is not true of the fast cuts of reality shows, Youtube videos, or infotainment. There is no time for deep experience when the relevant event lasts only a few seconds and is accompanied by elevator tunes and derisive commentary and is immediately followed by another flashing, loud event.
But the speed, the shallowness, are addictive. Look around you, the next time you're in a public space: see how greater and greater numbers of your fellow humans are wired to devices that split them from the physical world in which they live and breathe. In airplanes, they don't look out the window at the ongoing miracle of flying three miles above the planet's surface, but concentrate on a quick and brittle electronic interplay with screens.
It's understandable: iPods and video games tell us what to do and how to react. We don't have to think beyond their rules, we don't have to feel beyond their limits. Deep thinking tires, unmediated emotion hurts. Ease will always be more comfortable.
But ease is wasteful. Feeling might hurt, but to anesthetize feeling means we live less fully. Reacting to video games and 24/7 infotainment is amusing and staves off boredom--but it also trains us away from concentration and hard questions. Much evidence now suggests that the recent huge increase in numbers of kids suffering from attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, is due at least in part to their being subjected, with the connivance of parents, to the passive, poisonous babysitting of TV and video screens. The insidious slippage of public opinion from fact-based debate to the micron-deep rants of reality shows and anger broadcasts is, I am certain, another symptom of such damage.
Our planet is beset with grave problems. To survive, we are going to need all the hard questions and harder thinking our species is capable of. By insulating us from hard thought, de-touching threatens us all.
This blog was started to elaborate on the concept of silence, and its use in fighting off the demands of a society that uses noise as a tool of control. With the encouragement of the website's editors I have used the Psychology Today forum to sound off on other topics of the day, not always relevant to the blog's theme: stuff that was in the news at the time. Stuff that would gain readers ... With the benefit of hindsight I think that, through no one's fault but my own, I went overboard in so doing--fell victim, in fact, to the pernicious mindset of a society that values loud noise, and easy titillation, over deeper reflection, over the intellectual equivalent of loving touch.
I would like to redirect this blog, therefore, to the issues discussed above--to de-touching in general: to the increasing, poisonous mediation of everything that should deeply engage our senses and intellect--to steps we can take to regain contact with our senses, and with the real world around them, in all its complexity, its difficulty, its harsh and often painful beauty.
