Becoming Out Of Touch With The World

            The kinds of things we touch today are considerably different from the kinds of things people touched before the coming of modern technology.  In more traditional times, the natural environment was a more integral part of people’s lives, and people’s hands, bodies and feet were constantly coming into contact with organic textures.  When people weren’t walking barefoot directly on the ground, their foot coverings like sandals and shoes were usually made out of animal skins and leather.  There were exceptions as with the wooden shoes of the Dutch.  But in general, humans, when they wore feet coverings, used materials that breathed and that provided a variety of organic sensations.  The same holds true for their clothing and, when appropriate, their hats and their gloves.  The flowing blendable continual stimuli that were the foundation of the organic sensations that humans experienced with their clothing helped them to feel more fully alive.  Without the use of modern technology to refine the materials, the materials used were often more coarse and rough than people today are used to.  People obviously lived with these materials, because they had nothing else to which to compare them.  Coarse wool and animal skins.  Sometimes fur was used as lining.  In the tropics, garments could be made out of leaves and leaf fibers. These were the materials that a lot of people had.  Cotton was a luxury for many people initially.  And before modern technology, people didn’t have plastic shoes and polyester clothing, items that didn’t breathe and that didn’t provide organic sensation.

            In the external world, people walked on dirt or cobblestone roads and wooden and fiber rope bridges.  They lived in animal skin tepees, igloos, mud huts, log cabins, textured stucco homes, wooden houses, elaborate stone castles.  They rode animals and felt the animals bump against them as the animals walked, trotted or galloped along.  People used implements made of stone, wood, bone, horn, or shell.  And they created all kinds of textured products that were interesting to touch: pottery, masks, bows and arrows, spears, baskets, jewelry, musical instruments that had to be plucked or hit against.  And wooden furniture and plates.  Knives, spoons and forks and other metal implements were developed as metallurgy developed.  And rope, hemp, and leather thongs were used as the organic connections to tie things together.

            I know that I am blurring together different cultures and different historical stages prior to the impact of modern technology, but what these different cultures and stages had in common was the great variety of organic tactile sensations available for people to experience.  What can be said about these diverse tactile sensations is that they are verbally difficult to describe.  This can also be said for sensations of smell and taste where many different kinds of flowing blendable continual stimuli blur together to form a particular sensation or a particular group of sensations.  They are more immediate sensations where the sources of stimuli come close to us or even inside us.  This is distinct from the more mediated sensations of hearing and vision where the sources of stimuli can be at a greater distance from us.  Because the sources of hearing and vision stimuli can be more apart from us, we can distinguish and identify them more easily with defined discrete labels.  On the other hand, touch particularly creates so many unfocused flowing blendable continual sensations, that it is difficult to effectively label them verbally.

            However, it must be said that, in the modern world, in which the configuration of stimuli in our modern field of experience is composed of so many defined discrete stimuli from modern technology and what it fabricates, it is much easier to find words to define the more simplified tactile sensations that it produces.  Of course, the opportunity to experience many tactile stimuli has been taken away from us as a result of modern technology.  Because of sensors, all sorts of mechanical processes occur with no touching at all.  Doors open in department stores as we approach them.  Faucets turn on when our hands approach them.  Toilets flush by themselves.  And then there are the processes that require the minimal touching of pressing a button or buttons.  Press some buttons and get a car washed or an individual cup of coffee.  Press more buttons and turn on a television to a desired station.  Press a button and turn on an air conditioner.  Button touches are defined discrete stimuli that have none of the interesting texture of more organic surfaces that are full of flowing blendable continual stimuli.

            Then there are the screen swipes that are an integral part of the interaction of humans with smartphones and tablets.  Again one is dealing with cold hard smooth textureless surfaces that don’t breath and don’t commune with the human user of the consumer device.  There is no give in a smartphone or tablet surface, no cushion, no grounding for the fingers of the human user.  One slides over the plastic screen and receives a minimum of tactile stimulation.  Now by sliding over the plastic screen, one does generate a kind of two-dimensional flowing blendable continual stimulation from the pressure of the movement of the fingers, but this is only a pressure stimulation.  This is done over a cold hard smooth surface which maintains very strong figure boundaries, so the flowing, blendable continual stimuli from the swipe don’t generate any bonding with the plastic screen or the device upon which the fingers pass over.  These smartphones and tablets are devices upon which many of today’s humans spend hours on end.  These are the phenomena in the world which many of today’s humans touch the most.  Passing fingers on a cold hard smooth ungiving surface is a metaphor for being behind a clear wall, and on the other side of the wall there seems to be life which one can’t really touch.

            But at least with a plastic screen, one is touching something.  When one deals with sensor devices, one ends up touching nothing.  One is in a tactile experiential vacuum that contributes to making a person feel numb.  Numb and incapable of leaving a tactile organic imprint on some experiential surface in the world.  Not only do these sensor devices make one feel numb at the moment and unable to leave organic imprints at the moment, but they contribute to an ongoing numbness and incapacity to leave organic imprints even when organic surfaces should present themselves.  To a kind of generalized psychic impotence that contributes to reactions like the desperate murderous rage of certain young men that has been discussed in a previous article.

            Another tactile phenomenon in the modern world is the attempt to imitate organic sensation through technology.  I am talking about the chairs, beds, and other machines that give massages and, of course, vibrators.  Disconnected from their organic bonds with other people, so many humans today have to rely on machines to give them intimate organic sensations both of nurturance and excitement.  But machines are limited to doing what machines can do.  They display a predictable discrete rhythm of stimulation that makes human response predictably mechanical as well.  None of the great variation in human hand movement or human bodily movement is available in these devices. We gradually and subtly become programmed to the focused defined discrete pattern and rhythm of movement and touch in these devices, and even as we attain different degrees of tactile satisfaction from them, we become as robotically predictable in our consumer responses as the devices are mechanically predictable in their methods of stimulation.  The hybrid mechanical organic stimulation that is produced leads to hybrid mechanical organic people.  But as these devices represent among the few sources of even quasi-organic stimulation around, people flock to them as though they were sources of sensory enlightenment.

            One final areas has to be touched (no pun intended) and that is what our feet feel today.  In the old days, people used to feel the pressure of their feet sinking into the ground a little, every time they took a step on dirt paths and floors.  They would actually feel the dirt through their toes if they walked barefoot.  Furthermore, they would feel either directly the touch or indirectly the pressure when they walked on pebbles and stones and grass and branches as they passed through forests and fields.  They would feel directly or indirectly the uneven surfaces of cobblestone, when they walked on cobblestone roads.  In short, there used to be a great deal of sensory variety for the feet.

            Today, people primarily walk on the smooth, even, ungiving surfaces of concrete and asphalt.  It is basically a frictionless sensory vacuum that does not leave a person feeling bonded with or grounded in the world.  One could just as easily walk off the surface of the world.

            In terms of floors, dirt floors, for all their imperfections, certainly led a person to feel grounded in the floor.  Wood floors are smooth, but they give a little, they breathe, and they creak when one walks on them.  Carpeting and rugs, of course, provide a great deal of texture and give.  But more public buildings have concrete, tile or marble floors – smooth, cold and ungiving.

            For the most part, organic tactile sensation is very scarce today compared to the past.  And as has also been pointed out in previous articles, sex has become practically the only reliable source for organic tactile sensation in modern technological society.  With the lack of organic tactile sensation in their fields of experience, it is no wonder that so many people today seem to unconsciously look at serial sexual relationships as the only possible solution for organic sensory variety.  But even serial sex cannot really substitute for the global variety of tactile stimulation that existed before modern technological society.  It becomes a challenge in today’s world to find even some of the variety of organic tactile stimulation that we used to have and that we truly need to keep us human.

(c) 2015 Laurence Mesirow

On The Road With A Robot

            Traveling by thumbing for a ride or hitchhiking, as it is commonly known, has just taken on a whole new dimension with the invention of a hitchhiking robot.  This hitchhiking robot or hitchBOT, which is cute and adorable at least in robot terms, in order to obtain rides, is discussed in an article in the online magazine Live Science by an associate editor, Elizabeth Palermo.  Just look at the title of the article:  “Pull Over, America!  This Adorable Hitchhiking Robot Needs a Lift” (7/21/15).  This robot has already crossed Canada hitchhiking, and is now in the process of crossing the U.S., where it will visit places like Times Square, Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon.  It is the foundation for an experiment exploring “the culture (and limits) of human kindness, as well as the current state of artificial intelligence.”

            The notion that how humans treat robots is an index of human kindness is an interesting one.  Are humans supposed to be good to a robot the way that they would be good to a human?  HitchBOT has been programmed to be able to engage in small talk with humans.  This sounds like a fairly complex programmed capacity.  But the fact that the hitchBOT can process basic social statements and come up with appropriate somewhat formulaic responses doesn’t mean that it has a core sense of self.  A hitchBOT turns a statement from a human into a defined discrete stimulus, a denotation without any secondary blurry connotations and flowing blendable continual stimuli.  Then its complex software comes up with a statement that is a direct response to the denotative literal meaning within the human’s statement.  It is like the hitchBOT is mentally solving a puzzle to come up with an answer that falls within a narrow gamut of denotative correctness.  No multiple meanings, no layered meanings, no blurry meanings.  None of the kind of statements that give human communication its richness, subtlety and depth.

            Being kind to another human implies having communication on multiple levels, layered levels, levels that blur into one another.  This is how flowing blendable continual bonds are formed between humans.  Kindness implies a flowing blendable continual expression of goodness to another person, an expression of goodness that is at least partly based on an understanding and appreciation that is built on communication and that consists of connotations as well as denotations.  Without this broad gamut of meaning within a communication, it would be hard to create the foundation for kindness the way one would display it towards another human being.

            One might ask how this squares with the kindness that humans show towards animals, particularly pets.  Dogs and cats don’t have complex verbal communication, but they have a broad spectrum of emotional communication that they display, based on their vocal sounds and their body gestures.  They create flowing blendable continual stimuli with their behavior and as animals, they use this behavior as the basis through which they draw humans to bond with them.  Also, dogs and cats do have primitive senses of self.

            As previously stated, the experiment with the hitchhiking hitchBOT was also meant to explore the current state of artificial intelligence.  Artificial intelligence is another way of saying the ability for a robot to solve the problems that a complex behavioral entity might have to encounter during the course of its daily activities.  For the hitchBOT, there are primarily social and linguistic problems with which to deal.  A human hitchhiker has a lot more mental activity going on than simply the social and linguistic skills involved in engaging in conversation with drivers.  The hitchBOT has a camera that takes a few pictures every twenty minutes to record where it has been, but a human hitch hiker is constantly observing a flow of imagery from the windows of the vehicles in which he rides.  This flow of imagery can stimulate associations in his mind – memories of places he has been in the past, experiences that he has had.  For that matter, different drivers can stimulate comparisons with other people he has known.  This mental capacity to juxtapose images, present and past, represents an ability to make symbolic connections.  The past place and the present place, the past experience and the present experience, the past person and the present driver or other passenger – in each of these parings, there is a tendency for these images to blur together into the present image.  The present image somehow starts to represent the past image in the hitchhiker’s mind.  This ability to make sophisticated symbolic connections is a fundamental part of human consciousness and something that is not a part of the digital functioning of a robot.  In addition, a human hitchhiker is constantly strategizing about where he wants to travel, what he wants to see when he arrives different places, and what he plans to buy and to eat.  In other words, he is planning for the future in a detailed way.  This is also something that is not a part of the digital functioning of a robot.

            The article mentions a second set of purposes apart from the focus on human kindness and artificial intelligence.  The second set of purposes is designated as the mission of the Canadian researchers who created the experiment with hitchBOT.  The mission consisted of the exploration of the effectiveness of robots as companions for people and what the researchers perceive as a “growing aversion to adventure and risk” in modern society.  Whatever the researchers may derive from their interpretation of the data provided by the hitchBOT on its travels, the question will always remain as to how a robot can be a useful companion, when it lacks a coherent organic sense of self and a flowing continual consciousness.

            As to the second part of the mission, I am not sure how the travels of the hitchhiking hitchBOT connects to the perceived aversion to adventure and risk among humans in modern society.  Without a coherent organic sense of self, how can a hitchBOT find meaning in the flow of experience it has, including a real awareness that it is having an adventure and taking risks.  The recording of experience as a hitchhiker by photos every twenty minutes symbolizes how the digitally activated hitchBOT deals with the world through isolated disconnected events rather than through a flow of experience.  This series of isolated events do not get bundled together as a completed adventure by the hitchBOT.  This series of isolated events do not form a meaningful narrative for the hitchBOT.  A meaningful narrative, of course, does have events interspersed within it.  These events stand out as defined discrete situations and they are connected together by a background flow of more continual experience.  An adventure is a life narrative in which some of the events are a significant risk of some kind to the person who is participating in them.  When a person takes a significant risk with his actions, he has the opportunity to make and preserve a significant imprint on the field of experience that surrounds him, including the people who are in that field of experience.  This imprint helps him to validate his life and to prepare for death.  A very fundamental example of such an adventure is when preliterate tribesmen go after a dangerous wild animal to obtain meat.  The tribesmen can spend hours or even days hunting a big dangerous animal.  They can try killing the animal with a spear or bow and arrow.  The spear or arrow wounds the animal and the animal can turn on the hunters.  The hunters have to then send more projectiles at the wounded animal in order to kill it, before it wounds or kills one of the hunters.

            Modern adventures include such activities as climbing mountains, rafting on fast-moving rivers, exploring exotic cities and rural areas and yes even long distance hitchhiking.  A lot of long distance hitchhiking is just a boring flow of travel in different vehicles.  But there is always the thrill of thumbing for a ride and never being sure when the next ride will come.  Although one can meet nice drivers hitchhiking, there is always the risk of encountering a driver who is not nice or who even is dangerous.  Completion of a long distance hitchhiking trip is an important event.  If one has somehow recorded his trip, it becomes a potential imprint that can be communicated and left on other people.  But the important thing for a completed adventure, for a meaningful narrative, is the reactions of the adventurers with their flowing continual consciousnesses and their coherent senses of self.  Many famous explorers have written detailed journals of their trips of exploration.  A robot that reacts only to defined discrete stimuli is incapable of such flowing awareness and incapable of registering that he has made what seems to be a meaningful organic imprint.  

            This is why it doesn’t make sense to think of robots in terms of such human categories as kindness, companionship and adventure.  The latter three terms are human terms that relate to human behavior.  Robots are just too different from humans, unless and until humans start behaving more and more like robots.

© 2015 Laurence Mesirow

Becoming A Part Of An Organic Computer

Up until recently, the basic assumption was that, for a person to become a cyborg, a human-machine hybrid, it would automatically mean that the person would be fusing with machine parts.  The whole romance behind becoming a cyborg is that by becoming to a significant extent non-organic, a person could escape the dangers of organic perishability, and somehow live forever.  Particularly, to the extent that the mechanical parts of the cyborg would start to break down, the cyborg person could then replace these parts with other new parts, something that would be so much easier to do than trying to regrow parts organically.  And anyway, there is something that seems hard and impervious and enduring about the substance of a body part made out of metal or plastic.

            But I was recently acquainted with another notion of what it means to be a human-machine combination by an article in the online magazine Live Science.  Live Science contributor, Charles Q Choi has written an article about a relatively new approach to solving problems.  The article: “Real-Life Mind Meld?  Scientists Link Animal Brains” (7/9/15) deals with experiments carried out by neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University and his colleagues that link the brains of rats together through implanted microscopic wires, little electrodes, and allow for direct communication between these rat brains even though separated by large distances.  So the brains of the rats aren’t literally wired together and, in experiments of Nicolelis, actually are on different continents.  The wires allow for the exchange of data among rats leading to the solving of problems.  It is like the linked rats become one large organic computer.  In one experiment, rats found that if they synchronized the electrical activity in their brains, they could succeed in obtaining water.  In another experiment, wired groups of rats – or brainets as they are so cutely called – developed a heightened capacity for basic recognition of patterns.  They learned to somehow synchronize their brain activity when one kind of stimulus was given to them and desynchronize their brain activity when another kind of stimulus was given to them..  This heightened sensitivity is somehow supposed to have a useful application in predicting the probability of rain.  The sensitivity relates to different patterns of electrical stimulation corresponding to increased and decreased temperature and increased and decreased air pressure.  Brainets of rats predicted rain in North Carolina with a 41% accuracy, which is a rate of accuracy that goes way beyond a chance prediction.

Rhesus macaque monkeys – animals much closer in evolutionary development to humans than rats – have also been used for some of these brainet experiments.  In one experiment, either two or three monkeys were teamed up to operate different functions of an artificial monkey arm.  Each monkey in a team was actually in a different room, so the only communication was through the brain wires.  Each monkey was in charge of different functions in moving an arm (up and down, left and right, in and out).  The team of monkeys would get a reward of a little juice for moving an arm together towards a target.  They were able to do this after a long period of training.

            The question is why is Miguel Nicolelis interested in creating brainets, and ultimately in creating organic computers.  Nicolelis has discussed connecting paralyzed people with healthy people, so that the paralyzed people could learn how to activate their bodies again.  He also feels that the notion of brainets could help stroke victims, people with epilepsy, and people with various other neurological problems.

            This all may be true, but it involves a person losing the personal boundaries of his consciousness.  And in most other life situations, this loss of personal boundaries can be very threatening to a person maintaining his personal sense of wholeness.  Even a serf or a slave that is worked terribly hard under wretched conditions maintains his personal mental boundaries, his sense of being a coherent figure, if nothing else as a result of the discomfort and pain that he feels.  The builders of the pyramids of Egypt may have operated as one large organic physical entity, but not as one large organic mental entity.

When a person becomes a cyborg as the result of fusion with machine parts, he is diminishing the coherence and integrity of his organic sense of self, but he is not temporarily losing himself in blending with another coherent organic self, as is the case with brainets.  And once a person’s sense of self is temporarily blended as a part of a brainet with another person’s sense of self, does either person’s sense of self ever fully recover its organic coherence and its strong personal boundaries?  Again, a serf or a slave is forced to give up a lot of his personal dignity, particularly in some societies, in doing the ongoing drudge work he frequently has to do.  But he still somehow maintains his personal mental boundaries.  Perhaps a better analogy to the situation of brainets is a person who has been brainwashed by a totalitarian society, fundamentalist religion, or a cult.  In these cases, a person’s thoughts are to some extent retrained to be in synchrony with those of the people in the community that surrounds him.  In all of these cases, there is definitely a deep penetration of a person’s psychological boundaries, but because these communities still do not have the impelling force of electronic signals going directly from one brain to another, they are not quite as invasive.

Once the boundaries of a person’s sense of self are penetrated as a result of participating in a brainet, that penetration will remain a part of the person’s memories and will remain a part of a person’s projected development into the future.  The temporary loss of a person’s self- boundaries will blur into his ongoing sense of self and will prevent a total reintegration of his self-boundaries.  The person will never be as whole again.

We must keep in mind that the researchers developing these brainet experiments are hoping to ultimately be able to develop “organic computers” where animal brains would be connected by the use of wires for different purposes.  And if this can happen with animals, why not with humans.  What a wonderful tool organic computers would be for dictatorships, for totalitarian governments, even for large multi-national companies, where people from different continents could be wired together for the supposed purposes of inventing new products or creating new marketing strategies.  What if workers in these companies could be coerced into participating in organic computers, if they wanted to keep their jobs?

This represents a different way for a person to become machine-like that is distinct from becoming a cyborg.  Instead of a person fusing directly with functional machine parts, the machine parts being used – namely the wires – act as conduits for a person merging with other person or persons for functional machine purposes.

            But the brainet may be more emblematic of what has already been happening in a symbolic way in modern technological society.  We have been moving toward the idea of large organic computers for a long time.  Again, the large symbolic organic computers I am talking about are based on social organization and not microscopic wires and therefore do not use the same intensity of brain penetration as the brainets.  But they have been moving in the same direction that leads to the loss of individual mental integrity.  Communist societies and modern capitalist societies haven’t needed brainets to accomplish many similar goals.  In communist societies, the state has acted as one large organic computer, where people are brainwashed into giving up their individuality and devoting themselves to promoting the economic power of the state through large work projects that demand working in synchrony.  In some modern capitalist societies, companies have expected absolute loyalty, as people work to promote the collective imprint of the company.  Nowadays, a new attitude has developed where people are supposed to temporarily give themselves up to a company, working in synchrony long hours often without overtime pay, and then are vulnerable to dismissal when a particular project is finished.  In both communist societies and modern capitalist societies, people are symbolically wired together, synchronizing their tasks, partaking of larger strategies, temporarily or permanently giving up a large part of their sense of self to become a part of one enormous ball of mental energy, one enormous merger of consciousness.  It is just that the metaphorical wiring together that we experience in today’s work place doesn’t require implanted wires.  It doesn’t have to.  Symbolic organic computers are already here.

 

(c) 2015 Laurence Mesirow

 

Why Some Men Today Commit Mass Murder

                                   In today’s world, it is increasingly difficult for the average citizen to obtain a sense of prestige, a sense even of recognition from a coherent social grouping.  Such social groupings, such organic communities have more difficulty surviving within an anonymous vacuumized urban setting, than they do within a preliterate tribe or a rural village.  And when such groupings do survive, they don’t exert the same kind of influence, because they have to compete with each other for the attentions of members of the larger community within modern technological societies.  Without strong cohesive organic groupings, there is a loss of a meaningful audience for many of the kinds of achievement that warrant prestige or recognition.

            Here I am not necessarily talking about the kind of prestige that comes from unusual achievements, a kind of prestige that is still available to the select few.  Modern digital media are good for promoting such achievements.  Rather, I am talking about the kind of positive appreciation for the more modest achievements that can nevertheless stand out in smaller social groupings.  Examples in more traditional social groupings include a good hunter in a hunting and gathering society or a good artisan in a rural village.  Even just a good family leader in a strong-bonded extended family.

             But not only has there been a loss of audience in our more anonymous modern society for prestige-creating achievements for the average person, there is also a loss of opportunity for such achievements.  In a modern technological living environment, there are few organic surfaces on which to make and preserve strong organic imprints, and there is little organic friction available to generate the processes involved in making organic imprints.  The frictionlessness of modern technology makes more and more modern life activities seem trivial. 

At any rate, without strong meaningful organic imprints, there is less opportunity for meaningful prestige from a coherent audience.  Prestige reinforces self-esteem.  Without meaningful opportunities for organic imprints, there is less opportunity for a person to obtain self-esteem.

            This is particularly a problem today for men as opposed to women.  A woman has one important natural opportunity to create a preserved organic imprint that a man does not have.  That of course is giving birth to a baby.  A fertile woman of age without reproductive problems can often have a baby when she wants, and many women today have babies to increase their self-esteem from a meaningful imprint whether or not they are married.  There is much less of an onus to having a child out of wedlock today, and single mothers often find encouraging support groups both from their family as well as from their friends.  Family and friends can form ad hoc social groups around the single mother to give her positive reinforcement.

            So when a fertile young woman wants to leave her imprint on an anonymous urban environment, she can do it, in spite of a lack of available recognition or prestige from conventional social groupings and in spite of a lack of opportunity to leave an imprint through some kind of meaningful accomplishment in the public external world.  A man has no such equivalent opportunity.  He is much more reliant on the experiential surfaces of the public external world for making and preserving meaningful organic imprints.  Yes, a man makes a crucial contribution to making a baby, but he is not directly involved in gestating the baby or delivering the baby to the external world.  A lot was written by Freudians about the notion of penis envy among girls, but also important in the history of humanity has been the envy by men of a woman’s ability to have babies.  In many preliterate societies, there exists a cultural institution called the couvade, in which a man goes into confinement before, during and/or after his wife’s birth of a child and is required to observe certain dietary restrictions and other taboos.  It is as if a man becomes pregnant and gives birth himself.

            But, of course, the man does not actually become pregnant.  Nevertheless, this institution shows the importance of creating meaningful opportunities for a man to make and preserve organic imprints, and not only, as has been discussed before, to create a bundle of preserved organic imprints to function as a surrogate immortality in preparation for death.  A person needs to make and preserve organic imprints to validate his life, to give meaning to his life, while he is still living.  And a man, in spite of the couvade, has to really do this in the public sphere of life, because he can’t do it in the personal or family sphere through giving birth to babies.

            But today, the public sphere – the modern technological living environment – offers relatively few opportunities for most people to leave meaningful imprints.  People experience the sensory distortion in their living environment – the understimulation from the vacuum aspects such as the frictionless technological processes, the monotonous housing projects and the decorationless modern architecture on the one hand, and the overstimulation from the tension-pocket aspects like the overpopulated city centers, the construction sites for modern buildings and the traffic jams on the other – and people become numbed and hardened.  But men, in particular, still have this unsatisfied need to make and preserve organic imprints to validate their lives, to gain recognition and prestige.  And if a man can’t validate his life by making and preserving organic imprints, then often he will find a way to pull himself out of his numbness and his jadedness and to validate his life by destroying other people’s organic imprints, including destroying other people’s capacity to create organic imprints, by destroying their lives.  Instead of prestige and positive validation, the man gains notoriety and negative validation.  Such destruction can start with graffiti, which combine aspects of making and preserving organic imprints by making artistic images and aspects of destroying other people’s organic imprints as a result of defacing property.  Arson is an unadulterated form of destroying other people’s organic imprints. To the extent that the accumulation of personal property can constitute a kind of organic imprint as a result of demonstrating a person’s taste, then robbery or burglary of property represents a destruction of an organic imprint.  Robbing another person’s money is robbing a symbol of the imprint created by work or astute investment.  But by far the most heinous of all destructive imprints is taking another person’s life.  This, of course, is magnified when a killer goes on a rampage and tries to kill as many people as possible.

            These killing rampages represent the quintessential nihilistic attempt by a man to leave an organic imprint when there are few experiential surfaces on which to leave positive organic imprints, and when the killer finds no other meaningful way to pull himself out of his numbness and restore his full sense of feeling alive.  The killer, of course, gets notoriety, because his horrendous actions make him stand out in the public’s awareness.  And he gets an incredible kick out of it to pull himself out of his numbness.  Even if he is going to get caught, even if he is going to get killed, for a certain period of time, the adrenalin is flowing, and he has succeeded in pulling himself out of his experiential vacuum.  At least for a short while, he has validated his life.

            If lacking the opportunity to make and preserve positive organic imprints is a major component in the growth of the killing rampages in modern technological society, then a possible solution is to find a way to meaningfully reconfigure society and meaningfully reconfigure living environments such that men, in particular, have a greater opportunity to make and preserve positive organic imprints and to do so in such a way that they can win validation from some appreciative social groupings.  But this requires a sense of collective responsibility that is hard to muster in modern democratic societies where people are becoming increasingly individualistic and unwilling to submit to the requirements that are part of being a member of traditional coherent groupings.

            Without some sort of fundamental change in our social structure and in our social attitudes and expectations, we may just as well resign ourselves to more random violent actions.  Discussions about improving early childhood care and education, about more available job training both in and out of prison, while important for human wellbeing, don’t deal with the problem under discussion here.  Even with the best childhood care, the best education and the best job training, a man particularly has to feel that he is doing something that allows him to leave meaningful organic imprints in such a way that he receives some kind of validation, approval, prestige from some receptive audience, some coherent social grouping.  And the more that we try to make our fields of experience frictionless through modern technology, the more difficult it will be to find the organic surfaces in our fields of experience that are necessary for a man to have the opportunity to leave imprints and to obtain positive validation, so that he doesn’t have to resort to the range of destructive activities, the destruction of organic imprints that include the mass murders about which we are all more and more concerned.

 

(c) 2015 Laurence Mesirow

 

Trying To Find Out Who We Are In Modern Technological Society

            Two of the basic ways that people can identify themselves are by who they are and by what they do.  Who they are assumes that a person is not so fragmented, so pulled in different directions that he lacks an essence, a coherent sense of self.  It deals with what a person is when he is still and temporarily free from activity.  It includes his lasting relationships with other people.  Such a state of being is hard to come by in a modern technological society where the tempo of activity and the shifting of relationships seems to continually accelerate.  Perhaps this is why people today increasingly identify themselves and others by what they do, by what they are like when they are in motion, in activities.  People feel a need to keep doing things in order to block out all the activity that surrounds them, activity over which they feel no control, and replace it with the stimulation of their own activity over which they do feel control.  People today frequently adopt a posture of what has been called in this column conative acceleration – a speeding up of the will – in order to keep moving forward in spite of the stimulation generated from all the activity around them.

            But there are consequences from all this preoccupation that people have today with what they do rather than who they are.  Not focusing on who they are means leaving out of both their self-assessment and their assessment of others a very important aspect of identity.

            People move around quickly today in the vacuum and tension-pocket environment that has been created by all the complex technology in modern living environments.  These modern machines exist in order to facilitate the flow of modern life activities.  These modern machines, particularly the consumer technology with which people intimately interact on an ongoing basis, and the robots that are projected as examples for the performance of an increasing number of work activities, all become both mirrors and models for how humans behave.  These machines and robots subtly influence people to shift their bonds with other people to more instrumental connections.  The focus on the connection is in terms of how a person functions. Does he do what he is supposed to do in different situations?  Can he be relied on to fulfill his obligations? 

And, of course, there develops a similar focus on one’s connection to oneself.  Rather than focusing on who we are when thinking about ourselves, we focus on what we do.  We increasingly look at ourselves as a series of defined functions and activities rather than as a coherent sense of self.  As a result of this, the value by which we judge ourselves is instrumental value.  We approve of ourselves if we are reliable in what we are supposed to do.  And we love ourselves primarily in a conditional way, based on our success in our actions.

            One problem with this approach is that it does not provide a consistent flow of self-love and self-grounding.  Success in performing functions and activities leads to temporary spurts of self-love and self-grounding that then dissipate and leave a person in a vacuum in terms of love and grounding.  These periods of relatively pure vacuum are periods when a person is vulnerable to a range of feelings from self-criticism to self-doubt to self-hatred, as the person tries to pump up his will to be successful at more tasks, so he can give himself more love and more grounding.  Or if a person despairs at his capacity to be successful when he performs, he can fall into a lifeless numbness.  All of these vacuum emotional states are causes for concern and can create enormous destructive stress.  A person needs to balance out his self conditional love and his appreciation for his instrumental value with self unconditional love and his appreciation for his intrinsic value, in order to give himself the strong emotional grounding that he needs.

Another problem is that once a person defines himself too much by his functions and activities, he fragments his sense of self.  He loses his core.  He becomes subject to being pulled apart psychologically by the forces of entropy that exist in an experiential vacuum.  He no longer has the quiet comfort that comes from having a coherent sense of self.

A similar problem occurs in the creation of connections based exclusively on conditional love and instrumental value with respect to other people.  There are spurts of both love and grounding in these connections, but they don’t last.  And during the spaces between the spurts, a person feels alone in a social vacuum, and he experiences the destructive entropic effects of this intermittent isolation.  There is no sustained emotional connection, no sustained emotional grounding when relationships are based entirely on contingent conditional love.  If a relationship is to have deep meaningful roots, there has to exist some sustained emotional continuity.  And this means it can’t be built exclusively on a valuation of a person’s efficacy in the execution of particular functions and activities.

So both intrinsic values and unconditional love need to be an important part of the equation of how people identify themselves and others.  Who a person is is as important as what he does.  There has to be balance between these two orientations.  Too much focus on who a person is can be just as harmful to a person and to the people around him as excessive focusing on what he does.

A person who bases his assessment of himself and others exclusively on intrinsic value and unconditional love, is a person who has no motivation to actively engage the external world and form a meaningful life narrative.  It is like the person lives in a womb-like world with no sense of his mortality and no need to make and preserve organic imprints and prepare for death with a surrogate immortality.  More fundamentally with too strong a sense of intrinsic value and unconditional love, a person feels no impelling need to define himself properly in relation to others as a separate defined discrete figure.

Most people up until recently have lived in situations where there was a reasonable balance between unconditional love and conditional love, between intrinsic value and instrumental value, both in attitudes towards oneself as well as attitudes towards others.  In more traditional preliterate societies where a person is very strongly identified according to a series of community classifications like tribe, moiety, phratry, clan, extended family and immediate family, he has a lot of grounding in his social world, a lot of confidence that he has a very specific place in the wider social arena, a strong sense of his intrinsic value as a result of his specific place, and a strong sense of the unconditional love that both he feels towards himself and that others in the community feel towards him.  The same is true for his attitudes towards the other people that surround him in the community.

Now this unconditional love and intrinsic value are balanced by the presence of conditional love and instrumental value based on a person’s skills in the social role he is supposed to perform in society.  These skills can be in areas as diverse as practical work skills, skills in the arts, skills as a lover, and skills in the area of magic (although sorcery and witchcraft would be frowned upon).  And the moment that measurable skills are present, at that moment there is going to be some competition usually among people of the same sex and the same age with regard to the demonstration of those skills.  It is within the competition among persons displaying skills that some of the more meaningful personal organic imprints are made and preserved within the memories of groups ranging from different social organizations to whole communities.  The key is the collective memory, because preliterate groups by definition do not have the means to write down outstanding records or other outstanding events.

            Among most of these groups, warfare also has provided a meaningful method to obtain conditional admiration and a strong instrumental value.  And among some of these groups, there have been grotesque tangible souvenirs that reinforce group memories such as scalps, heads, and captured slaves.  All of these combat prizes are totally repulsive to us members of modern civilized societies, but they have played a meaningful role in determining prestige in some preliterate societies.  At any rate, these members of preliterate tribes are definitely people who have identified themselves by both who they are and what they do, with probably a greater emphasis over all on who they are, because of all the memberships in different sub-groups in their tribes.

A different balance between unconditional love and conditional love, between intrinsic value and instrumental value was created in urbanized civilization.  As people left their folk societies to seek out opportunities in city centers, they left behind them the different layers of support they had in their home group.  No longer did they have easy access to the tribes, the clans, the villages, the communities that had helped to identify their place in the world, to give them secure emotional attachments and secure opportunities for work.  In the new living environment, people were relatively anonymous, free from many of the obligations that were present in the larger traditional cohesive social groupings, but also free from the support, from the grounding that came from those groups.  Nevertheless, group life in the form of family units was still present in these cities.  Often it was both extended and immediate family, and people definitely still played a more important role as mirrors and models for other people, particularly children, than did complex machines.  But work moved more and more away from the base of family and family contacts.  And people had to prove themselves and demonstrate their worth to strangers who were hiring people for specific jobs.  If a worker didn’t do his job right, he was fired and wouldn’t have the money needed so that he and his family could eat.  Yes there were still families and other social groups built around the church, the synagogue and the local community.  But by necessity, conditional love and instrumental value began to play a more dominant role in the way people identified both themselves and others.

The discussions of preliterate traditional societies and urbanized civilizations here presented were brought in to show two different configurations of intrinsic value and instrumental value, of unconditional love and conditional love, both of which configurations represented balances of these different qualities that allowed people to maintain their humanity.  In both kinds of human groupings, people could give reasonably good answers to both who they were and what they did.  Today, that is no longer the case.  As people focus more and more on their instrumentality and on giving and receiving conditional love, both in regard to others as well as to themselves, they become more and more like machines.  As they focus on what they do to the exclusion of who they are, they increasingly lose their core organic selves and become like robots.  People have to find a way to get in touch with who they are again, if they don’t want to lose their humanity.

 

(c) 2015 Laurence Mesirow