Wild Children And Robot Children

            One of the more interesting deviations from the norm in child development is that of children that have been raised by animals.  These children are called feral or wild children, and they are children who have been lost or abandoned by their parents and somehow adopted by animals who raise them and help them to survive.  Actually, not all feral children are adopted by animals and some are simply deprived of human bonding as a result of abandonment or confinement by their parents.  However, for the purposes of this article, we will focus on the feral children who have been adopted by animals.  Some of these children have been known to have been snatched by wild animals, when their parents weren’t looking.  The animals known to have adopted children include wolves, wild dogs, apes, monkeys and even in one case, ostriches.  It is true that many of the stories about feral children and animals have proved to be hoaxes.  But for many others of these stories, there is definite evidence.

            Children that have been adopted very young by animals become animalized.  They make the sounds of their animal, crawl like their animal and later have difficulty learning to talk and walk when they are among humans again.  Mentally they tend to live more in a world of imperfectly differentiated figures that are partly submerged in a field of grounding, much the way the natural world actually is.  In other words, the children have not been stimulated by a lot of defined discrete stimuli like words to think in clearly defined cognitive concepts.   They pull themselves out of the undifferentiation of their blurry grounded mental base through the shock stimuli of sharp instinctive reactions to impinging external figures that seem threatening to them.  But most of the time, these children live in a state of immediate feeling connectedness to their living environment without the reflexive awareness that would distance them from their environment and help to define them as fully human.

            But isn’t it true that many wild animals have a much more developed sense of smell and a much more developed sense of hearing than humans?  Shouldn’t this lead to differentiation of the sensory realms of figures in areas where humans are normally limited?  First of all, smells tend to have much more blurry boundaries than visual phenomena and tend to be filled with continual stimuli that don’t stimulate clear cognitive thinking.  Sounds tend to have more discrete stimuli than smells, but are not enough by themselves to stimulate the evolution of clear cognitive thinking in non-human animals.  And anyway, a human who becomes feral is not going to develop smell or hearing on the level of the animals that have adopted him.

            At any rate, children that have been adopted young by animals miss the critical windows of opportunity in their development for being stimulated by other humans to develop uniquely human cognitive traits.

            When we hear about stories of feral children adopted by animals, we are stimulated to feel great sympathy and compassion for them.  The idea of a child being abandoned or lost and then being raised by creatures lower down on the evolutionary scale is a very threatening idea to us.  In effect, the child is being denied the opportunity to become fully human.  Part of the human condition is a long period of dependence in childhood during which the child is stimulated to become more fully human through his interaction with his parents and other more mature human beings.  Through mirroring and modeling and later through education, the child evolves out of his natural human incompleteness.  Of course, this can’t and doesn’t happen in the case of feral children adopted by animals.

            Most of us are very protective and wouldn’t allow the opportunity to occur for our children to become feral children.  And in modern technological society, we assume that we are giving our children enough protective advantages that there would be no opportunity for them to grow up in a negative state of abandonment.

            Wild animals are one kind of significant complex behavioral entity.  Not as complex as humans, but complex enough to draw a child into a relationship of mirroring and modeling and to guide a child both directly and indirectly along his path of growth and development.  Of course, as I have pointed out, wild animals do influence human behavior in certain more controlled situations for certain groups of people.  I am talking about the totemic relationships with certain animals which were established in traditional ancient societies and which have been established in preliterate societies.  These are highly symbolic relationships that are significantly activated in certain ceremonial situations.  I discussed previously how the only equivalent that we have today is our relationship to our complex consumer technology.  I am talking about our televisions, video games, computers and smartphones among other devices, and in particular, the different types and brands among which we can choose.  Our loyalty to Apple or to PC in  computers and to iPhone or Blackberry or Android in smartphones.  A type or brand of a particular consumer technology device as well as the consumer device itself as a generic category can be the source of a kind of tribal identity.

            However, the influence of consumer technology devices can be very pervasive and enveloping at ages before strong brand loyalty is consciously made.  The relationship to a consumer technology device is not simply a formal symbolic relationship based on living in the midst of but apart from this entity as is the case of a totemic relationship with a wild animal.  And a relationship with a consumer technology device impinges on the consciousness of an individual much more, in most situations, than the relationship with a pet or a farm animal.

            As parents abandon their children for longer and longer periods to modern consumer technology devices, the best analogy I can think of is that of a feral child to the animal or animals that adopt him.  And just as a feral child is mentally transformed as a result of his sustained interaction with the adopting animal or animals, so a child today is mentally transformed as a result of his sustained interaction with the consumer technology devices with which he spends so much time.

            The behavioral world of a modern consumer technology device is just the opposite of the mental world of a wild animal.  Whereas the wild animal perceives the world in terms of partly differentiated figures in an enveloping ground environment, the virtual world of a consumer technology device is a vacuum filled with vacuumized figures that are entirely lacking in grounded material substance.  To the extent that modern humans spend a lot of time in this virtual world, it spills over into the primary experience world in which their physical bodies live.  Everything that modern children experience in the primary experience world begins to have the vacuumized qualities of the figure entities in the virtual world.  It is hard to bond with vacuumized entities floating in a vacuum.  On one level, lacking corporeal substance, these vacuumized figures just don’t seem to be fully real.  And then even other real entities including people start lacking reality.  And because other people don’t appear to be fully real, one can manipulate them  and even hurt them without feeling pangs of guilt.  One can turn off the TV show or delete the computer e-mail or program in one’s mind, before one has to feel accountable for anything one has been doing to a real human being.

            Very simply, it is very difficult for humans to establish meaningful bonding without the template of some real grounding in the primary experience world.  But a child can become so transformed by sustained interaction with consumer technology devices that he becomes incapable of fully connecting to physical grounding even if it is present.  And he becomes incapable of forming deep-bonded relationships with the people around him.  This explains the scene of a group of children sitting together, each of whom is talking to someone on his smartphone who is not present.  And the meaningful connection is with the smartphone, not with the person at the other end of the smartphone connection.  This situation has significant ramifications for the future maintenance of the organic human family and the organic human community as we know them.  Somehow, we are arriving at a point in our evolution where what we have defined as appropriate human relationships may no longer continue to exist, unless we are able to do something to reverse or, at least, slow down the present trend in people, namely, connecting more and more to machines.

            It gets down to this.  We all know that we would never voluntarily allow our children to be raised by wolves, wild dogs, monkeys, apes or ostriches.  We want our children to be fully human.  Then why would we allow our children to be raised by televisions, video games, computers or smartphones?  Why would we do something like that?

© 2013 Laurence Mesirow

Using Smartphones To Avoid Taking Risks

            To take a risk means to take a special kind of path.  It means to make a discrete decision or a series of discrete decisions in order to guide oneself through a blurry situation filled with blurry continual blendable stimuli.  It is an attempt to take a determinate path through an indeterminate situation.  One can avoid the situation and thus avoid the need to take the risk.  But if a person has to move through the situation, he has to make choices that affirm one possible path to the exclusion of others.

            Normally, when we think of risk, we think of the consequence of taking a wrong path as that of losing something.  If we bet in a card game or invest money in the stock market, we could lose money if we make a bad bet or a wrong investment.  If we promote a marketing plan in the company where we work and it fails, we could get demoted or fired.  If a guy gets a gift for his girlfriend, say a necklace, and the design of the necklace doesn’t appeal to the lady, she could get angry with him and temporarily withdraw her affection from him for not better understanding her tastes.  Or she could simply return the necklace to the store and exchange it for one she would like.  In this case, the negative consequences of the risk turn out to be minimal.

            In some situations of risk, one has greater control over the outcome than in others.  A good risk is one where there are more determinate defined discrete stimuli than indeterminate blurry blendable continual stimuli in the situation, so that there is a greater probability that one’s decision or decisions will lead to the desired results.  In other words, there are more controllable defined aspects and fewer variables.  By contrast, a bad risk is one where the indeterminate blurry blendable continual stimuli outnumber the determinate defined discrete stimuli in the situation, so that there is a greater probability that one’s decision or decisions will not lead to the desired result.

            A lot of times, the negative results of a risk have a more intangible effect.  An artist risks losing a lot of time and energy exploring an aesthetic style that later proves to be  very unappealing.  Furthermore, the unappealing aesthetic style could damage his reputation with his public.  And here, I am not talking about the artist for whom the damaged reputation is temporary and who gets discovered as a genius later in life or after his death.  I am talking about the artist who never recovers from the damage. Unfortunately, some artists never can find out if their artistic risk was worth it in the end. Nevertheless, unless an artist takes the risk, he will not have the opportunity to make an imprint or imprints that will be preserved in society.

            Another way of looking at risk is that it is taking actions for a desired result based on imperfect knowledge.  If a person has control of all the factors involved in a process as a result of perfect knowledge, there is no risk.  It also means that the action is mechanical or routine, and there is no meaningful imprint involved in the result of the process.  Any meaningful imprint involves some kind of risk.  One moves with imperfect knowledge on a path through continual stimuli in order to leave an imprint on a grounded experiential surface.  That surface can be a literal physical surface, or it can be the metaphorical surface of the minds of people.

            But with modern technology, humans are trying to eliminate risk in life.  Not only the bad risks that have a high probability of negative outcomes, but also the good risks that have a high probability of positive outcomes and that can stimulate a person to meet a challenge and be positively transformed by it.  It is like in modern medicine where so many drugs eliminate the good microbes that our body needs along with the bad microbes that pose a danger.  People need good microbes, and they need the challenge of good risks in order to grow and develop and flourish.

            Modern technology tries to eliminate the possibility of mistakes or failure.  But people need to experience mistakes and failures in order to be able to learn and to focus their actions towards meaningful successful outcomes that leave meaningful imprints.  Young people in particular need the opportunity to take good risks in their lives in order to grow and develop.  And yet it is precisely this group that is most predisposed to using the modern consumer technology that eliminates so many risks as well as rich vibrant experiences.  It is this group of people that is most predisposed to buying the newest most advanced computer devices and to downloading the newest apps.

            Young people are seduced by modern consumer technology to live their lives where more and more life tasks can be controlled and manipulated, such that there are always positive outcomes.  This protects them from failure.  As a result, they increasingly live their lives in a bubble, a vacuum bereft of experiential surfaces to make and preserve imprints.  Risk is an element that is intimately tied up with meaningful imprints.  As more and more opportunities for taking good risks in everyday life tasks dry up, many young people recur to taking bad risks in order to feel alive and to make and receive some kind of imprint.  They take drugs.  They become binge drinkers.  They engage in unprotected sex.  They participate in criminal activity.  They participate in extreme sports.  They go off on dangerous adventures.  In short, they engage in potentially self-destructive activities in order to pull themselves out of their experiential bubble.  By losing the opportunity to take good calculated risks, they end up putting themselves in situations where they take bad uncontrollable risks.  And many times, the consequences of these bad risks leave a young person hurt or traumatized or both.  Lasting negative effects that could have been avoided if the young person had only been allowed to grow and develop in a natural flow of primary experience.

            To take a risk means to perform a task with imperfect knowledge as to what is the best way to perform the task.  When a young person uses his smartphone to find out as much information as he can ahead of time in order to gain control of a situation and diminish the risk, he is not only taking the adventure out of a situation, but he is taking the opportunity to test himself out of the situation as well.  Among consumer technology devices, it is the smartphone that most effectively acts to give a young person a distorted control and that prevents him from grappling with uncertainty in the world of primary experience.

            By looking at life as a series of discrete interactions with a machine in order to make one’s actions in the world as risk-free as possible, a young person today is missing out on life.  He becomes like the device he is using.  He becomes a machine.  The only entities that almost always succeed in their tasks in a relatively risk-free way are machines.  It is normal for humans to fail sometimes as a result of trial and error in the world of primary experience.  And in the process of taking good calculated risks, a person generates healthy friction that stimulates him to life, allows him to have rich vibrant experiences, and allows him the opportunity to make meaningful imprints, some of which he can use to preserve and to prepare for death.  In short, one eliminates risk only at the cost of eliminating life.  And humans, in eliminating risk and life, are becoming robots.

© 2013 Laurence Mesirow

How Modern Consumer Technology Is Swallowing Up Our Lives

            When we were very young, we all experienced at some point, parents, teachers, family, family friends and adolescents reading stories to us.  If you were like me, you would find this an enthralling experience.  The stories were bible stories, myths, fairy tales or simply real life adventures. Most of them had one thing in common.  They dealt with rich vibrant narratives that were far beyond the realm of possibility for average people to experience.  They involved adventures in which heroes or heroines were tested in some unusual way.  The protagonists were forced to overcome obstacles by creating their own unique solutions.  In the process, they received the imprint of the total experience and were transformed into wiser more powerful people.  At the same time, they themselves created a strong imprint in their solution to the problem, and this imprint was very stimulating to everyone who experienced it.  Furthermore, the imprint was a very memorable solution that acted as a surrogate immortality – a preparation for death – for the hero or heroine who made the imprint.

            Such stories were inspirations to all of us.  Even if it was very unlikely that anyone of us was going to be able to have such rich vibrant adventures as the stories we heard and later read ourselves, these stories unconsciously taught us the importance of rich vibrant life narratives in order to make, receive, and preserve imprints and in order to have meaningful lives.  These stories indirectly inspired us to the achievements, the involvements, and the relationships that allowed us to feel truly connected to the world.  They were definitely more than just entertainment.  And their capacity to instruct went far beyond their capacity to reinforce a fundamental moral principle of good and evil or right and wrong.  In truth, on a deeper level, the narrative was the message.  Without some kind of meaningful narrative, there is no human life.

            But the narrative in stories we heard and read was never meant to replace our lives.  It was meant to inspire our lives and guide our lives.  Stories are too distinct from an actual primary experience to ever be a real substitute.  Stories are built with words, which are the building blocks of cognitive thought.  We think a story through as we hear or read it.  Granted there are pictures in children’s books.  There used to be more pictures in the novels and story books of adults.  But there is no way that these pictures can lull a human into thinking he is actually living a primary experience in the narrative of his life.

            When we see a story acted out in a play, there is a strong sensory component.  We see actors going through motions, even though there is a limit to the motions that can be performed on stage.  We see the costumes of the actors and the sets that act as backdrops for the interaction on the stage (although for a long time in Western theater, there was no scenery).  Sometimes we hear sound effects and music.  This is very different from the cognitive engagement involved in a story and even from the more minimal sensory engagement involved with story books and novels with pictures.  A play is a little closer to life.  And yet there is a limit to what can be done in the confines of even a technically sophisticated stage.  Most plays are still built primarily around words rather than action, and even when there is action, it is qualitatively different from action in real life as a result of the limitations of space.  And stage sets cannot truly reproduce normal human surroundings, again, because of the limitations of space.  When we sit in the audience of the play, we still are fully aware that we are seeing something different from a normal life narrative.

            When we see a story acted out in a movie in a movie theater, we have now passed into an arena where human primary experience can be reproduced.  There are no limits to the actions that actors can perform, apart from those imparted from censorship.  Far more intricate and convincing indoor sets can be created, and real outdoor backdrops can be used as part of the human surroundings in the narrative.  A story that is far more intense and adventurous than what a normal human can live is portrayed in a movie, and it seduces a person into making a movie or many movies a substitute for his real life.  The cinematic space of a movie, rather than inspiring and guiding a person to live a richer more vibrant life as a play can do, can seduce a person into giving up the attempt.  The only thing that for a time prevented a person from totally escaping through movies was that he had to go to theaters to see them.  In a movie theater, he had to sit with a large group of people, which reminded him that what he was watching was still apart from his own primary experience life and that what he was watching was an escape.  The movie theater created a vacuum environment that separated the free-floating figure of the movie on the movie screen from the flow of primary experience in a person’s life.

            This all changed with television.  With television, a person could watch TV programs and movies within the confines of his home, a major backdrop for much of his primary experience.  There was no longer a separate vacuum space in the external world that separated the virtual narrative of the movies from the real narrative of a person’s primary experience life.  The only obvious separation was the box that held the TV screen.  Now that box is going.  Experientially, now the screen is frequently mounted on the wall with no physical figure boundaries to separate the narrative it contains from the narratives going on in the living room or bedroom in the real world around it, except the screen itself.  So the only other thing now that separates what occurs on the TV screen from what happens in the room in the home is that each space has a separate continuity or flow of action.  Each represents a separate contiguous narrative.

            Nevertheless, because the screen is a transparent wall creating a minimal vacuum space separating the two narratives, in the mind of the viewer, there is a tendency to enter the virtual world of television with its dramatic, exciting, spicy and adventurous narratives and to start mentally participating in the narratives, as if they were part of his life.  And as the person does this, he sees his own life in the real world as bland and boring in comparison.  And rather than focusing on making, receiving and preserving his own imprints in the real world, he starts substituting in his mind the imprints made in the narratives in the virtual world, and starts imagining they are his.  The whole fundamental purpose of life is completely subverted.  Because the imprints involved in the narratives the person is watching are not his.  Through television, it is as if a person slides off the surface of the field of experience in his own world.

            And then along came computers.  With a computer, the screen no long acts as a wall separating the person from the virtual narrative.  The person is able to enter the virtual narrative and participate in it.  The person gives up his own primary experience narrative to participate in a virtual narrative in a world free from organic perishability.  He is seduced into living in a seemingly eternal world where he can live all kinds of virtual stories seemingly free from the consequences that would occur if there were mistakes or failures in primary experience life. Of course there are viruses and malware, but these usually impact the computer, not the person himself.  It is like the way a corporation provides an individual certain legal protection under the law. Now it is true that hackers try to steal money from bank accounts, identities, and company information.  Sometimes they succeed.  These attacks can create serious difficulties in the primary experience world, but they don’t happen often enough to make most people anxious and vigilant.  For most people, life on the internet is a kind of a dream.

            The only problem is that when one lives in virtual stories, virtual dramas, virtual adventures, one is unable to make, receive, and preserve organic imprints in such a way as to have rich vibrant organic life experiences and to prepare for death.  In effect, a computer is the culmination of the evolution of human technology such that primary experiences – the stuff of the stories we used to hear from parents, teachers, family, family friends and adolescents – are being pushed out of human lives.

            Computers started out as fixtures in homes like televisions.  One entered the world of the desktop computer at a fixed place in his living space.  Sort of like Alice falling down the rabbit hole.  But then the laptop was created, and one could go into the virtual world anywhere that one was, as long as there was wifi available.

            And then we went one major step further.  With smartphones, one can carry in a light portable form the source of the virtual narrative in which he lives throughout the primary experience world in which he still physically dwells, with no need to worry about finding a wifi connection.  One never has to let go of the virtual narrative in which he psychologically lives.  One can have an ongoing virtual narrative that almost never has to cease.

            In such a situation, what do traditional stories have to teach us about the virtual lives we are living.  Not much.  Traditional stories inspire people to engage life in the primary experience world.  But people today are more oriented to living in the virtual world.  Traditional stories deal with people grappling to make, receive and preserve difficult primary experience imprints.  In today’s world, most people who live in modern technological environments don’t have the interest or even the opportunity to make many primary experience imprints.  Traditional stories are becoming quaint relics, and real life is becoming an increasingly numbing experience, devoid of the kind of narrative that reminds a person that he is really alive.

(c) 2013 Laurence Mesirow

Life Is Becoming A Magnifying Glass

            The purpose of having a world totally under control by modern technology is, on one level, creating a certain ideal state of mind in people.  When a person lives in a field of experience that is significantly free of organic perishability, free of things that rot and spoil and crumble, he is hoping to live in a state of mind of tranquility associated with eternity.  One does not see decay; so, on one level, one believes that everything he is experiencing will go on, will last forever.  For sure, on an intellectual level, one knows that everything that is alive is supposed to die.  But then he looks around and sees so much that is made of strong steel, concrete, asphalt, stone, and, most important of all, plastic.  These materials all seem so indestructible.  And they were created by humans or, at least, shaped by humans.  And the machines made from some of these materials make life so frictionless.  Many of these machines even move in a frictionless way.  They have the potential more and more to take over human life tasks and leave humans the opportunity to live more and more a life of ease.

            Secure foundations, on the one hand, and frictionlessness, on the other hand.  The result should be tranquil contentment.  Right?  We identify with the imprints, strongly protected and preserved by modern technology, that are around us, and we feel as if we could calmly go on forever in the way these imprints seem to be doing.  And this is how we define our idealized bliss in modern technological society.

            Except is this what people are actually experiencing today in their lives?  I would suggest that something different is actually happening.  There is a pattern of behavior, consequence and reaction to the consequence in the form of new behavior that is taking people in modern technological society into a vicious spiral.  The more we make certain aspects of our experience frictionless, the more we perceive the smaller and smaller levels of remaining friction as intolerably unbearable.  And the more we try to protect ourselves with sturdier and sturdier structures in our living environment, the more we experience any less sturdy structures as intolerably unstable.  Here, I am not just talking about architecture, but about all the material structures in our lives.  All the different artifacts that we use.  And this also applies to the metaphorical structures of our lives.  Our work situation.  Our family situation.  Our community situation.  Our love life.  We want solid stability in everything.  In terms of my model, we want to create a world of perfect figures surrounded by a perfect vacuum.  This will give tangible security and numbing contentment combining to make a mental state of an illusion of immortality here on earth.

            Except that the security and the contentment never really happen.  We can never get rid of all structural insecurity and all life friction.  But as we experience greater and greater levels of structural security and of frictionlessness in life, we change.  We become more and more used to living in an experiential bubble.  Everything must stand firmly or flow smoothly, and those phenomena that don’t fit into this implicit rule make us feel extremely vulnerable.  I talked about a GPS in a previous article.  People now expect a machine to be always able to guide them from point a to point b.  The idea of improvising and of figuring out a path from a regular map or else asking a person on the street for directions seems like an overwhelming task that would draw people out of their mental expectation of security, frictionlessness and, yes, predictability.

            Perhaps soon, we will have a GPS that guides us to work out disagreements with other people.  Because people are developing an intolerance for friction with the people around them.  Rather than continue to experience such friction, people pull out of  relationships.  They quit jobs or fire employees, leave marriages, stop talking to friends and family, and leave communities, rather than really try to work out their problems with the people with whom they are having conflict.  So relationships become more and more transient, as the perception of friction in the relationships grows stronger and stronger.  And many people withdraw into greater and greater isolation in order to avoid friction with their fellow humans.

            If we were to develop a GPS for human relations, it would mean that people, in their quest for greater and greater frictionlessness, security and predictability, had succumbed to becoming robots, operating only from discrete prompts in their environment.  Fortunately, that has not occurred just yet.

            The vicious spiral of magnifying irritation which I have discussed is particularly relevant in modern industrial society, where technology has been somewhat successful in creating a sturdy transcendent security in the living environment and in creating smooth frictionless processes as the basis of the fundamental activity that infuses human life.  In more traditional Third World countries, there is presently a struggle going on between modern technology and strongly entrenched traditional cultural forces for taking over the control of both structure and function in those societies.  People in Third World countries are more resistant to losing the organic friction that is the foundation of more traditional economic activity, more traditional social activity, and a very elaborate cultural activity.

            Many people from the modern technological societies go to these Third World countries and see only chaos and experience only overstimulation.  These visitors desperately want to rationalize the experiences that they have.  They want to streamline these Third World cultures, get rid of all the inefficient activity that seems incomprehensible to them.

            And yet, perhaps these countries, rather than making an attempt to follow in the

exact footsteps of modern technological society, should truly appreciate the value of the more traditional aspects of their cultures that they are being pressured by the global economy to give up.  Maybe there are ways that they can be and should be life models for the modern technological societies that they are supposed to emulate.  Maybe these Third World countries can offer some antidotes that can be applied to help people who are sinking into the vicious experiential spiral that has been discussed.

            That which is considered an ideal state of mind for people – total calm from living with secure structures and the frictionlessness of modern technology – is in truth not so ideal.  It leads to a vicious spiral in which one sinks into deeper and deeper layers of numbness and greater and greater levels of magnified irritation from smaller and smaller levels of friction.  People need significant levels of the organic friction that modern technological society has tried to eliminate.  That friction is an essential part of the life narrative that leads to making, preserving and receiving organic imprints.  That friction is essential to having rich vibrant work and play life experiences and to being able to prepare for death.

            In most Third World countries, modern technology has only partly succeeded in creating living environments that are built with secure structures and that are relatively frictionless.  In Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific islands, there are still plenty of places where life has not been made predictable and orderly.  Plenty of places where nature and natural processes still maintain their dominance both directly and indirectly.  All of these places have been partly disrupted by modern technology.  And in some places, this has provoked reactions among the inhabitants.  Some people become terrorists.  Some become members of drug cartels or other gangs.  Some people become involved with both kinds of groups.  But in spite of these negative reactions, there are people in these places who still have rich primary experiences, grappling with the organic phenomena in their lives, and being stimulated to life by the organic friction in their surroundings.

            And it is not that we people in modern technological society are going to ever be able to go back so completely to a traditional way of life.  But these more traditional people can act as a kind of guidepost of how to live life filled with more healthy primary experience.  Modern society people have to start working their way away from numbness back to a more healthy friction-filled life style.  They have to do it gradually, so as not to be overwhelmed by stimulation to which they are no longer accustomed.  But they have to start doing it, before they lose their human essence.

(c) 2013 Laurence Mesirow

Living In A Garden Of Plastic

            I have spent most of my columns writing about how modern technology affects human experience visually.  I have mentioned in a couple of columns the effects of modern technology on auditory experience – discussing the effects of sensory distortion in noise pollution and talking about auditory consumer technology devices like iPods and MP3 players.  I have talked about the feel of a smooth frictionless ride in a modern automobile, how one feels like one is floating in a vacuum.  But I have yet to really focus on the effects of modern technology on tactile experience, how modern technology has changed the kinds of things we touch with our hands and feel with our bodies.

            Before I go into this, I want to discuss how the different senses fit into my theories about stimuli.  Generally sight and hearing involve a physical separation of the source emitting the stimuli from the person receiving the stimuli.  Most of the things that we see and hear are physically apart from our bodies.  When we look at the clothing we are wearing, our eyes are still separate from the parts of our bodies that are wearing the clothing.  Even when a person is whispering into our ear, the inside of his or her mouth is not literally right up against the inside of our ear.  These are sources of sensation that allow for the emitter of stimuli and the person receiving the stimuli to maintain their respective defined discrete identities.  And, as a result, the sight or hearing stimulus maintains a discrete identity apart from the person receiving the stimulus.  The sight or hearing stimulus maintains a discrete identity, because it has a large portion of discrete stimuli elements within its configuration of stimulation.  Each sight or hearing stimulus that a person receives is actually a composite stimulus made up of configurations of defined discrete stimuli elements and organic blendable continual stimuli elements.  Given the large proportion of discrete stimuli elements in a visual or auditory stimulus, such a stimulus lends itself much more easily to discrete measurement.

            Touch and taste are both senses that require the source emitting stimuli to be right up next to the person receiving the stimuli.  Taste comes from a chemical source of stimuli that, after coming up next to a person’s mouth, loses its discrete identity entirely and merges with the person receiving the stimuli when the food or drink goes into his stomach.  Touch comes from a source of stimuli that comes next to a part of a person’s body and is experienced as merging with the person receiving the stimuli, even though it doesn’t merge and such a sensation of merger is only temporary.  But in both of these sensory situations, the source of stimuli and the person receiving the stimuli blur together and are experienced as losing their discrete identities in the experience of sensation.  There are less defined discrete stimuli elements and more organic blendable continual stimuli elements involved with these senses, and that is why it is much more difficult to develop objective measurement for what a person experiences with these senses.

            Just to finish up with the five senses, smell would probably be classified as in between sight and hearing, on the one hand, and taste and touch on the other.  With smell, chemical elements from the source emitting the stimuli become separated from the source and merge with the person receiving the stimuli.  However, the stimuli are substantive.  They are not simply  insubstantial light waves or sound waves.

            At any rate, I went into this discussion to show why problems with touch are ignored when exploring sensory pollution in modern technological society.  One source of pollution – air pollution – involves a strong component of unpleasant smells.  Noise pollution obviously involves unabsorbable abrasive sounds.  People talk about the visual pollution in the sterile look of a modern skyscraper or the tension pocket in the juxtaposition of disjunctive unrelated buildings in modern urban neighborhoods.  The only place where I can think of that touch is normally discussed is in the brushing together of a lot of bodies on a packed bus or subway.

            But how often do people focus on the effects of touching a lot of plastic or feeling clothing of synthetic fiber?  Or just being away from the variegated tactile stimulation that comes from all the organic phenomena in a natural environment?  They don’t.  I think it has to do with the fact that touch leads to an experience of sensory merger with the phenomenon being sensed, such that there are few discrete stimuli elements involved in the experience.  This means that it makes it difficult to measure the degree of touch distortion involved in being surrounded by plastics.  And touch pollution in this case is not involved in abrasive overstimulation as in air, noise, and visual pollution.  There can be chemical irritation to the skin, but what I am primarily focusing on is the subtle understimulation that comes from constantly coming into contact with materials that don’t breathe.  It is hard for me to even conceive of setting up experiments that test this idea.  But think about the synthetic things with which we are most often in tactile contact.  I am talking about synthetic clothing.  Yes, such clothing keeps its creases.  Yes, such clothing is easy to wash and dry.  But it doesn’t breathe.  And because it doesn’t breathe, it is numbing.  So that it is hard to fully experience such clothing in the same way we experience clothing made from organic materials.

            It is true that some synthetic clothing is made with a loose weave, so our body can experience respiration in the spaces within the weave.  But there is still a large proportion of the space covered by the piece of synthetic clothing that is still covered by the actual synthetic fiber.

            And then, of course, there are all the objects made of plastic that are in our fields of experience.  Plastic cups and plates, plastic forks and knives, plastic pens, plastic jewelry, plastic bags, plastic machine parts, plastic furniture, plastic cars…….the list goes on and on.  It is not just a matter of tactile contact with an occasional object.  Our whole field of experience is permeated by numbing, non-breathing plastic.  Cold vacuum-creating plastic.  And almost all of these objects are smooth, so they are lacking the interesting variegated textures found in more organic materials.

            Yes, plastic is being used for many useful purposes in modern technological society.  It is being used to create new body parts to help people survive and live more fully functional lives.  It is being used for many different machine parts because it is light, durable and strong.  And it is used for many other objects, where the fact that it is light, durable and strong is an advantage.  Nevertheless, plastic is also creating a lot of sensory distortion, a lot of touch pollution  that is contributing to a total experiential aggregation that is deadening our lives. 

            Touch is a sense that we neglect in modern technological society.  We are instead focused on our visual interactions with our video games, computers, tablets and smartphones, and our audio interactions with all of these devices as well as with our iPods and our MP3 players.  But we neglect touch at our peril.  Touch is a very important part of our human nature.  It is a very important component in the way we relate with and bond to our living environment.  Without it, we are one step closer to becoming robots.

(c) 2013 Laurence Mesirow

Even A Robot Could Use A Massage

            One of the aspects of modern life that people most value is that life is easier than it used to be.  Technology has gotten rid of many of the hard labor tasks in which people used to engage in order to survive.  People now have machines that can lift and move heavy loads.  Such machines are important for moving merchandise in warehouses and for constructing tall buildings.  There are machines that can drill through rock, concrete, and asphalt.  Tunnels can be put through mountains, and sidewalks and roads can be broken up in order to put in new cables and pipes.  There are machines that can plant, harvest and process agricultural products.

            There are also machines that can do all the drudge work tasks of maintaining a household.  There are vacuum cleaners, washer-dryers for clothes, dishwashers, and lawnmowers.

            Also, we now have machines to make the long-distance transporting of humans and goods more frictionless.  Trains, modern ships, cars, buses, trucks and planes.

            And machines to help us find, sort and manipulate information for all kinds of purposes.  Computers, tablets and smartphones.

            And machines that can replace humans for increasing numbers of both physical and mental tasks.  Robots.

            In the process of making life easier for humans, more and more of the work of more and more workers is being made irrelevant.  Redundant.  And as people start to fall outside of the daily processes of life, they become increasingly irrelevant to these processes.  And far from turning life into a dream where people can engage in effortless reverie, these machines create conditions where people become disoriented.  Modern people tend to have few meaningful processes to help them stay engaged with, bonded with, and grounded in the external world.  And they become numb from a lack of meaningful activities that are filled with the kind of friction that helps to stimulate people to life.  I want to differentiate this kind of friction from the kind of friction that is so painful or uncomfortable that it leads to a person disengaging from the external world.  A lot of the static friction in today’s vacuum and tension pocket living environments fits into this category.

            Perhaps the best way to differentiate these two kinds of friction is to analyze the mix of stimuli of which they are made up.  Organic friction can certainly be composed to some extent of discrete stimuli.  It is the discrete stimuli that give the organic friction its punch, its sting, its slap.  It is this component that gives the process from which organic friction is generated, its spark, its crackle.  But just because it is partly abrasive doesn’t mean that a person pushes it away.  What allows the person to absorb the organic friction for a period of time is that there is a component of organic blendable continual stimuli.  The continual stimuli coat the discrete stimuli like a cough syrup coats a throat.  The continual stimuli allow a person to absorb the intense impact of the discrete stimuli, so that the person can continue to participate in the activity generating the organic friction.

            It may require an intense abrasive outlay of energy for a hunter in a traditional hunting society to chase after an animal in order to kill it with a spear.  But the running is couched in the feet running on ground that gives as the feet press down, allowing the feet to leave imprints on the soil.  The stimuli of the feet interacting with the ground are at least partly organic blendable continual stimuli as a result of this.  When a person is chopping wood, the axe goes into a log that gives way gradually under the pressure of the logger.  When a fisherman goes out to sea to catch fish, there is the give of the line as the fisherman gradually reels in a fish.  All of these processes have a certain give to them, and that give aspect contains the organic blendable continual stimuli

            This is why no matter how arduous and uncomfortable are the activities that involve organic friction, the continual stimuli allow a person to stay bonded to the activity for as long as he has to perform it.  The person is able to absorb the experience of the activity with the organic friction.  He is able to receive the imprint of the organic friction.  And, as a result, the person is able to integrate the activity with the organic friction into his identity.  Because, not only is he able to absorb the experience and receive the imprint of the organic friction in the activity.  He is, also, as the agent of the activity, able to use the organic friction as his experiential signal or referent point that he is, in fact, leaving an imprint with the activities he is performing.  The organic friction is basically his means for impacting a surface in his field of experience.

            On the other hand, static friction from the tension pocket sensory distortion of modern technological living environments has a very different impact on humans.  Static stimuli are usually the result of two hard figure machine components grating or hitting against each other.  Or else a machine component and a human impacting against each other.  Or else a product of machines impacting against a human.  Because these static stimuli are the waste products in the human attempt to create a frictionless environment, we call them pollution.  There is the noise pollution from machine components grating or hitting against each other.  There are air and soil pollution which are the secondary material products of machines that grate against humans by poisoning them.  There is impact pollution from any modern industrial machine that requires repetitive motion from humans for long periods of time to operate it. Impact pollution from operating certain machinery that requires strength like power drills that break up concrete.  Impact pollution from typing for long periods of time on a computer.  In all of these processes, the configuration of stimuli in the friction involved is almost exclusively discrete stimuli.  What this means is that in all of these static friction processes, there is little experience of give from the phenomena being impacted by the humans.  There are few if any organic blendable continual stimuli involved in the process.  It is as if the humans involved with these processes have no stimuli to connect them or bond them to the machines they are using and so they are constantly bouncing off the machines experientially in the process of using them.  Bouncing into the experiential vacuum that is created by and that surrounds these static-producing machines.

            As a result of constantly bouncing away from these static-producing modern machines, people are unable to leave any meaningful imprints to help them feel more vibrantly alive and to help them to prepare for death.  Organic friction is the means by which people can make and preserve meaningful imprints in the external world.  Static friction just brings sensory distortion.  People become temporarily overstimulated, and then they withdraw into understimulation or numbness to recompose themselves and to protect themselves.

            But constantly ending up in numbness can be very disorienting for certain people.  They are unable to leave their imprints on the world, and they end up feeling psychologically impotent.  Furthermore, the smooth state of frictionlessness that is the result of the experiential states created by static-producing machines also results in people being unable to find experiential surfaces on which to make and preserve meaningful imprints.  Too much frictionlessness, the sensory state towards which modern technological society is constantly pushing toward, is very harmful.  We not only use static friction machines to create frictionless states; we use frictionless computer apps to create higher and higher levels of frictionlessness.  And all that frictionlessness leaves people spending more and more time floating in an experiential vacuum.

            Without organic friction, we are not grounded in the external world.  We don’t have the processes, the activities to bond us to the external world.  We are unable to leave and receive meaningful imprints on the surfaces of our fields of experience.  And some of us feel so impotent, that we lash out at the world, particularly against other humans, in order to jolt ourselves to life and in order to attempt to leave imprints in the only way we know how in a sensorily distorted environment – through dramatic destruction, violence, even murder.  If we keep making daily life more and more frictionless, we are inviting more and more senseless violence against the members of modern industrial society that maintain the structures of sensory distortion.  This accounts for the violence of the shooting spree mass killers who are themselves, apart from their killings, members of modern technological society, as well as the violence of the terrorists and the members of drug cartels, neither of which group could be considered mainstream members of modern technological society.

            So paradoxically, more and more frictionlessness will not lead to more and more peace, but rather just the opposite.  This is why we have to limit our use of modern machines and computer apps.  Too much frictionlessness is not good for anyone, even people who are not becoming violent.  The non-violent people simply feel more separated from the external world, floating in an experiential vacuum, and falling apart into fragments.  In today’s world, we need less frictionlessness and less static friction.  We need more organic friction for healthy lives.

(c) 2013 Laurence Mesirow

Why It's Hard To Keep Your Head Together These Days

Why does it really matter if people become more robotized?  What ramifications does it have in terms of their ability to survive?  The truth is that becoming robotized affects people’s states of mind, relationships and behavior in such a way that they and the groups they are in are impacted in a very negative way.  And the most important aspect within the process of robotization that affects people is the ongoing loss of organic blendable continual stimuli in people’s minds.  As a result of this loss, people don’t have the means to hold their senses of self together very easily any more.  People in modern technological society tend to break up into fragments of self, which means they have several different presentations of themselves to the people in their lives.  There is less and less meaningful cohesion in the way they present themselves, because there is less and less coherence in their senses of self.  Rather than feeling like an organic whole, it is as if people today felt like a series of parts that are contingently held together by different fasteners that could be easily removed.  And it is not individual parts that make a person a unique organic entity.  Even if a person has a unique creative gift, that unique gift has to be fed by the experiences that are had by the rest of the self in order to have the material for special creation. 

And more and more  today, people  have to work very had trying to hold themselves together psychologically and trying to prevent themselves from falling apart.  They go to talk therapy, both individual and group, and take medications to deal with the symptoms that create the suffering they are experiencing.  Working so hard to hold themselves together can lead to a need to isolate in order to be able to do it.  At such times, socializing with others can be a great effort.  In a vulnerable state of working on fragmentation, socializing can lead to a sense of losing oneself while trying to relate to others.

And the fragments fight for dominance within each person, having difficulty living with each other.  In a world of fragmented experience with a lot of complex fragmenting mechanical entities - machines, computers and robots - that have no core self, people have a lot of unrelated experiences, develop a lot of unrelated skills, and become a series of unrelated presentations of their senses of self.

Each presentation is comfortable in very different life situations with very different kinds of people.  In such a situation, to form a sustained intimate relationship with another human being means suppressing some of these presentations of self, some of these fragments of the person.  And yet because there is no natural arrangement of dominance among these presentations of self, the suppression can’t and doesn’t last forever.  As other presentations of self arise to the surface of consciousness, the relationships establish by the first presentation under consideration suddenly seem incompatible, inappropriate or boring.  The intimate attachments are broken, and the person tries to find new people with whom to establish closeness.  New people that are more in accord with the new presentation of self that has attained dominance.  This process is repeated over and over as different highly figured fragments of the person rise to dominance.  Eventually, the person begins to realize that nobody really seems to fit with him, and he gives up the search for strong connections.  He lives with shallow interchangeable connections to others.  And mostly isolates.

A robot is not built to create and achieve the strong-bonded connections with others that are the foundation of friendship, marriage, family, tribe, community, and nation.  And without these connections, none of us has a special place in human society.  All of us are simply like interchangeable parts, the kind one would order from a catalog to fix a machine.

In an age when terms like self-actualization are used to describe the inner journey taken by a person who doesn’t have to spend all his time worrying about economic survival, we must be careful not to lose sight of the fact that we are not at the end of this journey meant to be alone.  If our self-actualization leads to such excessive self-definition and such excessive fragmentation into different personas that we are incapable of forming deep-bonded relationships with other people, then something is fundamentally wrong with our life journey.  Robots are fragmented data, fragmented functions, specific events in the external world without organic experience to unify them into a meaningful narrative.  Robots don’t bond with other robots or with people, because they lack the organic blendable continual stimuli to hold themselves together and to hold the encounters they have with people and with other robots together in continual relationships.

Without continual stimuli, there is no sense of self.  Without continual stimuli, there is no consciousness.  There is no making, receiving and preserving of imprints. There are no rich vibrant experiences, and there is no meaningful preparation for death.

We speak of doing things “mechanically”, which means doing things without feeling and without purpose.  When we live life doing things “mechanically” most of the time, life becomes a living death.  We just move forward in life with our empty actions, because if we didn’t we would be living in total numbness. I have talked of process-oriented violence, violence in which a person engages in order to pull himself out of numbness.  But on a less dramatic level, people, can live a process-oriented life: a life where there are no meaningful goals and where a person simply goes through through the motions of life in order to feel barely alive.

So becoming robotized really is a serious threat to confront.  Becoming robotized becomes a subtle process for killing a person’s spirit.  And to the extent that we continue to immerse ourselves in all of the different devices of consumer technology that are available, we are endangering ourselves.  Sometimes, there is not a close temporal relationship between cause and effect in the life processes in which we engage.  The robotizing that I am talking about does not occur all at once immediately after the use of a consumer technological device.  It occurs gradually over time, after the sustained use of several devices.  As a result, most people do not establish a mental connection between the sustained use of several consumer devices and becoming more like a robot.  But it is there.  And it is the kind of situation that has to be acted upon before a person completely loses his human dimension.  It is like an illness that doesn’t demonstrate a lot of meaningful symptamology until it is already in an advanced stage.

And, in particular, the people who are most in danger of losing their human essence are the young people.  They are the ones growing up, who have never known a time when they weren’t immersed in consumer technological devices.  Already we some effects.  Kids sitting together using their their smart phones rather talking to each other.  Incapacity to commit in marriage, as the percentage of the population that is married continues to fall.  Incapacity of both employer and employee to commit to a long-term work relationship.  In the United States, a country with a lot of robotizing influence from all of its consumer technological devices, an increasing number of mass killings by young people who simply strike out in process-oriented violence.  In my opinion, immersion in consumer technological devices has a great deal to do with mass killings like the horrible killing of twenty students and six adults at Sandy Point Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.  And if my idea is right, then unfortunately the violence will continue, until the lives of children are somehow dramatically reshaped.  Unfortunately, I don’t think this transformation will occur any time in the near future.

© 2013 Laurence Mesirow