Casualties of a Bloodless Revolution, Part III

I believe that an industrialized worldview affects our concepts of spiritual matters in much the same way as it shapes our thoughts about food, work and other areas of life. Spirituality in America has become something of a competitive marketplace where consumers and suppliers meet to exchange cash or other currency for products and services. Just as goods - from fruit to electronics - travel from around the globe to fill our shelves, so do the world's religious philosophies find their way into our spiritual bazaar. And we have the unique ability and opportunity to pick and choose just exactly the amounts and kinds of teachings that appeal to us.

Thus we are encouraged to think of church or other religious meetings as a sort of delivery-system for spiritual goods, services and information. Sitting in neat rows, we face the spiritual suppliers onstage and wait, if not eagerly, then at least dutifully, for the payoff on our investment of time, money and inconvenience. But spirituality is not about delivering a supply of "God-stuff" to a demanding public.

I don't think that our meetings should be formed into symmetrically-placed and evenly-spaced lines of customers. Instead they should naturally take the shape of organically-imperfect circles of everyday spiritual people bringing baskets of knowledge, insight and experience to share with each other. Inefficient? Yes - in the sense that it is less efficient to craft a beautiful chair with hand-tools than to bang-out thousands of seating-units in a factory. Messy? Undoubtedly - in the sense that there might be a bit of organic, living soil clinging to a garden-grown carrot. Imperfect? Only to the extent that education fails should a music student spend an hour learning why his instructor is moved by Scriabin, rather than counting the number of notes in one of his compositions.

The Digital Revolution seductively offers a promise of renewed community - and not only renewed, but vastly improved. Digital communities are worldwide, immediate, and built around any interest or combination of interests imaginable. In fact, if there is no online community that caters to your own set of parameters for fellowship, it is literally child's play to start one yourself. But beneath the surface, the digital world secretly is at work assassinating those few fragments of true community that survived bloodless slaughter at the hand of industrialization. Perhaps "assassinating" is too strong a word - the damage done by digitization (and by industrialization before it) to authentic community is largely unintentional.

But regardless of intent, the result is unchanged - industrialization and digitization have overwritten historical definitions of community. And the resulting villages based upon these new definitions are often "blessed" with more than their fair share of idiots. And these are the villages that are raising our children.

Digital communities are as impersonal as they are global. They are anonymous, allowing members to hide even the most basic of information - first name, physical appearance, etc. They are isolationist - members of a community may live in the same house and not even know that they meet online every evening. They are artificial in their criteria for inclusion and exclusion - it isn't that we must learn to get along in spite of our differences, digital communities make our differences totally invisible.

Living is often little more and nothing less than moving from accident to accident on a time-tested and traffic-worn course. Technology has served to lessen the number and blunt the effect of life's accidents by straightening, flattening, lighting, cushioning and mapping the track of life. This allows us to view our walk through life as a trip, not a journey. The importance of a trip is wrapped up in the destination; the best part of a journey is the road. And often it is the accidental, unpredictable nature of our progress that makes the journey interesting.

Industrialized and digitized communities tend to extend the extremes of conversation, sometimes acting as censor, sometimes as promoter. Communities arranged around a closely-defined set of criteria often remove the possibility that Uncle Joe will say something totally inappropriate over dinner. On the other hand, anonymity encourages outrageous behavior. Online discussions tend to diminish the chances of accidentally finding, in the midst of a hot debate over politics, that you both love to sit out at night hoping the invisible end of your fishing line will somehow connect with a great big catfish. Virtual conversations fail to teach us that no one, no matter what they may look like on the outside, is any more ugly or beautiful than they are on the inside. And these are just a few, rather obvious arguments.

Science long ago identified three basic ingredients vital to plant growth - nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. It was believed, in classically reductionist fashion, that plants could thrive when supplied with only these three elements. This turned out to be nowhere near the truth - plants require a vast number of "micronutrients" as well. No one has yet identified all of these micronutrients, nor the quantities in which they are required. Similarly, scientists once thought that protein, carbohydrates and fat were the only components of food that were necessary for human nutrition. Again, they were sadly mistaken. And as with plant nutrients, scientists have not yet unraveled the mysteries of human food.

Community and relationships are much the same way - we have not yet even begun to identify the mysterious benefits of feeling a human touch, hearing a human voice, seeing a human face, smelling a human smell. We can't even guess at all of the intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual "micronutrients" absorbed simply by being physically close to other people. But we are beginning to believe that these indispensable "somethings" exist. It is impossible to reduce human interaction or shared experiences to a convenient string of zeros and ones.

Both the Industrial and Digital Revolutions provided and continue to provide a great many measurable and very real benefits, and these gains seduce us into blithely viewing every change as beneficial, or at worst, as an acceptable price for progress. And while neither the Industrial nor the Digital revolutions are necessarily bad things, when we believe that life is industrial or digital, we bleed a lot of blood for a return on a fool's investment.

In "In Defense of Food" Michael Pollan recognizes that not everyone can afford a diet of good foods rather than industrial nutrient-packages. He calls this situation shameful, and I agree. But he goes on to advise that those who can afford a diet of real foods should adopt that diet. In this I see a parallel with technology in other areas of life.

Most of us cannot simply "drop out" of our technological world, nor by doing so would we significantly help ourselves or anyone else. But to the extent that we are able, we need to be aware of and even to draw more boldly the dividing line between lifestyle and life. Life is much more than a list of ingredients that can be synthesized, extracted, rearranged and packaged for superior absorption and enjoyment. Nor is life a series of zeroes and ones that may be stored, manipulated, reproduced and transmitted at will. Life is a strange and wonderful stroll that might be made a little more enjoyable by a nice pair of walking shoes and an iPod. But we lose a great deal of joy and purpose when technology fools us into outpacing or drowning-out our companions.