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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 17, 2007
Staying in touch
Let me quote from what is perhaps my favourite secular reference book: Hints to Travellers, published by the Royal Geographic Society (11th edition, London, 1935-1938). In chapter XI of the second volume we read:“The modern practice of frequent reports by wireless may be essential to finance an expedition, but has many disadvantages. Tends to exaggeration in order to provide news; causes anxiety at home if regular report is not received; and anticipates the interest of proper orderly account on return; makes great anxiety for leader whether to report difficulties, perhaps only temporary, but which may provoke unnecessary organization of relief from home, or on the other hand to incur risk of blame by not reporting at once difficulties which develop into serious danger.” The anonymous author then quotes several expedition reports that touch on the exasperating nature of radio communications. We soon learn, for instance, of Knud Rasmussen, greatest of dog-sledders and father of Greenland anthropology, being chained to his wireless day and night, hardly able to do what he returned to Greenland for; and of his health breaking from his heroic attempts to do his work despite “the relentless tempo, the continual change of plans conditioned by radio: all these tired him with their merciless monotony.” In the annals of human slavery, this makes an especially poignant entry. I’ve been reading a great deal lately on the history of geographical exploration (as I confessed to my reader the other week), and wondering about the mysterious transition from the “heroic age” to the “machine age” that coincided approximately with the passage of the First World War. There are several good reasons for the diminishing returns, after this transition. The first to come to any reader’s mind will be that the biggest discoveries had already been made. Later explorers had to content themselves with the accumulation of detail -- with worrying the small stuff more and more to death. This is a point so plausible, I doubt it is true. To begin with, it belies the actual historical experience. In natural history, for instance, the great accumulations of detail were made not in the later 20th century, but in the early 19th -- before Darwin -- and chiefly by amateur observers. The truth might rather be closer to Marshall McLuhan’s adage, that “the medium is the message,” and that the development of the very machinery of communications, recording, and transport has, in itself, narrowed the explorer’s attention, to the point where he cannot see large things. He has become the sensitive tip of a machine, whom technologists constantly seek to replace with bits that are more durable and precise. So that, were it not for the unmatched human faculty for lateral thinking, there’d be no use for us on this planet at all. But I was trying to restrict myself to the issue of communications, in our “global village” now tied together in “live time” not only by telephone, radio, and TV, but by Internet and email, blogs, cellphones, face books, and Blackberry devices. This on one plane, while on another, the majority of the world’s population becomes “urbanized” -- a misleading term, since most are spread across conurbations which lack cultural focal points, and must spend a large sum of their waking hours stuck in traffic between one non-descript location and another. Verily, the political triumph of a heavily bureaucratized, nanny-state “gliberalism” is easy to explain by those circumstances alone. My own email inbox easily fills from friends who directly, or more often unconsciously and indirectly, attest to the destructive psychic effects of having to remain constantly “in touch.” We are like little explorers so busy reporting back, that we could never possibly discover anything. Few of us can count the wires that bind us, and fewer have the practical let alone spiritual means to detach ourselves. Nothing against communications technology in principle; or nothing I will casually admit. My point is rather a development of the one I was making in last Wednesday’s column, about a media world in which everyone is talking, and no one is listening, and what people are saying is increasingly bizarre. Unlike the ideologues of one stripe or another (especially the environmentalist ideologues), I see no way out of this, except through individual action. And by this, I do not mean political action, but the exact opposite. I mean, the action of replacing social and professional prattling, with the pilgrim’s prayer; and “trying to communicate,” with granting each subject an attention that is perfected by love.rn David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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