On Human Potential
A half century ago, Lewis Mumford made this observation: “Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.”
The evidence of this discord in human progression has, since Mumford’s shrewd comment 50 years ago, become far more pronounced. But the gap between technological progress and self-knowledge has probably developed in ways that Mumford could not have foreseen. In his remark, he seemed to insist that the “gains in power, “the mastery of natural forces,” and the “scientific addition to knowledge,” without a moral understanding of the repercussions of such harbor great potential for harm. The most obvious examples of this potential harm are often displayed during wartime: the atomic bomb, chemical warfare, and the efficiency with which hate is applied in the context of an organized, knowledge-based ethnic cleansing such as the Holocaust.
But surely even Mumford could not foresee the ways in which his rumination would become significant in the social sphere. With the disappearance of front porches and community meetings, also came a decline in general social concern and an amplified fear of the other. Replacing these dilapidated institutions are technologically based forms of inter-connectedness. As the Internet, cellular phones, and other virtual forms of communication become more central to modern life, relationships have become both fortified and detached in unprecedented and disturbing ways.
Instead of congregating in a city square or beneath a church steeple, now people existing in physically detached spaces meet in virtual realms. In a macro sense, this virtual contact acts to significantly increase global contact between individuals. A communication that was once a trickle (limited to international pen pal programs and official diplomacy), is now a raging river of exchanged ideas, thoughts, and emotions. The swells of that river now flood lochs of institutionalism and eddies of assimilation. Globalization is a term that must now be applied to novel social mores, an unparalleled movement of voices and minds every day redefining itself. The influx of electronic communication has worked to connect an international community once isolated and thus vulnerable to the repercussions of ignorance and its logical extension, the genesis of sweeping stereotypes.
Paradoxically, the same technology that has facilitated the proliferation of a shared consciousness within a macrocosm now threatens to destroy any semblance of a regional connectedness. The youngest of the Baby Busters have wholly embraced these original forms of communication. They establish (on sites such as MySpace and Facebook) self-contained social spaces that validate some and ostracize others. Thus, the behavior has not changed. The Internet, in contrast to a socially claustrophobic setting like high school, does not seem to have had a liberating effect on this computer savvy demographic. The virtual experience does not alter behavior. It does not foster understanding. It simply displaces and exaggerates. This displacement, in turn, generates isolation and social discord. The social experience and the human condition are stripped of their flesh, revealing a cold metal skeleton, an infrastructure never meant to be understood in that state. Words are trimmed, phrases docked. Meanings lost. Human touch does not figure into these virtual social stratums.
If the trend continues, neighbors living on the same street may only recognize each other as avatars in a virtual reality, never able to make the worldly association. Parents will meet online, make love while two thousand miles apart, and give birth to a child who will learn, grown, and be emotionally nurtured within the same sterile environs he was conceived. Intrinsically, this does not portend a dystopia. There is nothing amoral or perverted about these consequences. The Internet does not ultimately threaten the Human Condition-positively or negatively; it will simply redefine it, reconstitute it.
Lewis Mumford’s thoughts are especially apropos today. The digital revolution is maintained and furthered by its own weight. Humans, as Mumford insists, must ideologically-socially and individually-progress in order to realize the full potential of our technological advances. As it is, we use knowledge of the atom for war and the considerable power of the Internet for pornography.
