Fear For The Future

Our faith in technology is close to absolute.  Almost without exception, we embrace almost every technological innovation without reflection.  To the extent we are aware of the consequences of technology, we accept them as necessary ones.  Whoever raises questions about the impact of technology on society and culture will not command a significant audience.

Our latest embrace of technology - going back about thirty-five years, one could say - has to do with the benefits and convenience of personal computing and communications, but even from the very beginnings of industry, the benefits of industrial technology and capacity have always outweighed considerations of the costs.  Even today, the voices of concern about economies based on production and consumption are scattered.

We may be proceeding headlong towards - or have even passed - an environmental and technological point of no return, yet our day-to-day concern is not yet visceral, far from it.  This lack of urgency is in contrast to the fantastic predictions of doom that preoccupy popular culture and stem from a seeming fear of the eventual impact of environmental degradation and the ever-expanding reach of technology (forces that can barely induce a shrug in present-day real life).  The permanent degradation of the human condition, brought on by the very same technology and consumerism which have become the principal elements of today's secular religion, has become one of Hollywood's favorite themes.  This may just be a way of projecting onto the future our concern for the present. By foretelling disaster in our popular literature, films and many video games, we obliquely assuage our guilt over our present lack of resolve in the face of trends that, in obviously a very real way, really do threaten the life most of us take for granted.

When I was young there were also disaster films.  But they were generally not about environmental cataclysms and technology run amok. In most cases they were about one-time events beyond human control: earthquakes, air and sea disasters, fires.  They also dealt with the aftermath of nuclear war - again, a one-time event, though obviously of human origin. The "dystopian" scenarios envisioned in many of today's films, on the other hand, have to do with the demise of civilization over a long period of environmental or social decline.  Technology, while not as often the main subject of dystopian cinema, is often portrayed as a malevolent force employed to keep humans under strict surveillance and control.

Complacency would seem to explain our unwillingness to contemplate the consequences of our unceasing development, except in fiction.  But it might be more precise to describe it as displaced fear.  As it is too awful to look seriously at the real signs pointing to what our eventual fate might be, it is much easier to imagine the future implications of our present inaction and leave things at that.

Where Are All The Pseudointellectuals?

I have imagined a scene of which I am perhaps inordinately fond.  The year is 1960 or thereabouts and the setting is the Hungarian Pastry Shop on West 111th Street in New York.  A group of six to ten Columbia students are seated around a table.  Some of them are wearing oversize sweaters and scarves, as it is the dead of winter.  The windows are foggy.  While the students are talking animatedly, the proprietor - the original one - is working behind the counter, studiously indifferent to the youths' loud declarations and accompanying gestures.

The students are debating some issue of the day, such as civil rights or the future of the newly independent nations.  Or they are discussing what existentialism is or the merits of a title published by The Grove Press.

For argument's sake, let us suppose that with our hindsight we know that most of what these students are saying is jejune nonsense, because the point here is not that whether these undergraduates possess or lack perspicacity.  What is noteworthy is that they are so engaged by ideas.

Today I'm not sure whether you could recreate this gathering and its intellectual ferment.  I know you might say, first of all, that they might be too distracted by some sort of mobile device to maintain their engagement in a lengthy public discussion.  That is as may be.  What I wonder about far more is whether large ideas would hold anything like the same appeal to today's undergraduate patrons of the Hungarian Pastry Shop.

Of course, the Columbia student of today is most likely a somewhat higher "achiever" than his counterpart of fifty years ago.  His degree of engagement with learning is equal, or at worst, only slightly less.  Specific things - as it happens, very important ones - might inspire him: locally-grown food, alternative energy, penal reform, and so on. 

But does the student of today embody the same amalgam of innocence, reckless intellectual enthusiasm, and lack of self-consciousness?  More tellingly, does the broader culture, even at an elite university, foster far-ranging intellectual inquiry any longer in quite the same way as it might have 50 years ago? You might object and say it does, but I am afraid it does not.