NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 5, 2011
The panic cycle
Thanks largely to advances in technology - or more precisely, to the marketing of technology - it is no longer a simple thing to get away from it all. Your average modern urban Canadian is as fully wired as the average occupant of an old-fashioned electric chair. He cannot easily walk away. Houdini could have done it, perhaps; but not even him, while anyone was watching.This was a thought which occurred to me around the beginning of my five weeks' annual leave. And I don't even own a cellphone. (I don't think any freeborn citizen, whose record is clear of Criminal Code convictions, should agree to be electronically tagged in such a way.) Yet my attempts to walk away from mere e-mail came repeatedly to grief. It is not that I don't love the people who write me notes. O Lord, do I love them all. But I have found that, when I don't reply, there may be unfortunate consequences. In past decades, it was assumed that a man who had not appeared for some days, and did not respond to insistent beating on his door, might be on vacation. Today, if he fails to log in to cyberspace by noon, it is assumed that he is grievously ill, dead, or at the very least, suicidally depressed. When instead he might just be studying the behaviour of purple finches. My strategy was finally to surrender my laptop to my techie son, for physical and spiritual renovation. (That is, removal of external grime, and update of internal software.) He took it away, with instruction not to return it promptly. (I was anyway leaving town.) For the first time in several years, I found myself in that happy state, where I couldn't read e-mail even if I wanted, nor check for breaking news, nor consult Wikipedia for shallow and possibly inaccurate information, on subjects of only passing interest. There is a political message in this. Gentle reader may know I am one of those dinosaurs, who care a lot about freedom and very little about equality; who does not look forward to the shining day when the whole planet will be bureaucratically homogenized; who reads verse, and plays with watercolours. A man who seeks, even when he cannot find, serenity. That is to say, a very effete person, by contemporary standards, and unapologetically elitist. I look about me at people who have gratuitously surrendered their freedom, to electronic devices and connections in every waking hour. Is it any wonder that, in the present phase of our mass democracy, when everyone votes on what everyone should do, freedom is "progressively" expiring? Back to the news. On my first day, returned to work, five weeks out from familiar shores, I was desperately catching up. I took a deep suck of air, and turned on my sparkling renovated laptop last Monday morning, clicking anxiously to the BBC. First item of news I see, upon returning to my "work station," is the attack of the killer cucumbers in Europe. It was reported that organic cucumbers from Spanish greenhouses, exported to Germany then re-exported everywhere, were infected with something that causes kidney failure. (I've warned people against organic food before.) I should mention that the story has since "evolved." After threats of litigation from Spain, the source of the bacterial outbreak is now "disputed." Indeed, the clever health minister in Hamburg state, who made the original allegation, announced that a study of Spanish vegetables had shown that while a couple of samples contained pathogenic microorganisms, these were entirely unrelated to the strain that had killed more than a dozen Europeans, and counting. Of course, pathogenic microorganisms can come from anywhere. They do not interest me, per se. Instead, I was struck by the metaphorical value of this news item. One often feels, in the conditions of post-modern life, that one is under attack from killer cucumbers. Meanwhile, I noticed that the Germans intend to close all their nuclear power plants over the next decade or so. All of them. Even though, at zero, or arguably one, the death toll from the "meltdown" of the Fukushima reactors in Japan remains substantially less than the death toll from killer cucumbers. The Germans, whose options are already hemmed by some of the toughest environmental regulations on the planet, have no idea by what means they will generate electricity, once those plants are closed. (But I know! ... Fossil fuels!) We are living, so to speak, in an information-rich environment. And it is killing us. The most extraordinary decisions may be made, by our political masters, under tidal pressure from quickly articulated public opinion. In a state indistinguishable from panic, they may suddenly destroy the entire agricultural sector in Spain. Or begin shutting the lights off, all over Europe. Just before I went on holiday, they had suddenly decided to attack a North African country. They may do God-knows-what in response to the next item of breaking news. I return to work with the distinct impression that the rest of the world is in urgent need of a very long vacation. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top