Culture Thursday: The world is too much with us

The above quote is from noted American novelist Chuck Palahniuk. And it speaks to the moment in which we find ourselves.

Day in and day out we are bombarded by information, by trivialities, by "entertainment". We are connected to the world more than any human beings have ever been, and yet also disconnected from it, floating in our own bubbles. We are so inundated with data that we seek some way to make sense of it, and often turn to simplistic answers. We see this on social media. We see this in our culture. We see this in our politics. We are in a propaganda moment we haven't witnessed since the fall of Berlin in 1945. Malicious actors use our openness against us, seeding fake news to cause dissension and chaos. Corporations flood us with more and more infotainment, chasing the holy click, the sacred attention of our eyeballs. Most of what we consume is pabulum. It's pap. It's dross. It contributes nothing to our wellbeing. It keeps us soporific, as if we are taking greater and greater quantities of soma from Brave New World. 

We are fed with empty calories. We binge on a diet of intellectual and moral Big Macs, clogging our arteries until we eventually die from heart disease of the soul. We consume vapid "reality TV". We mindlessly follow celebrities, as if they had anything of note to say which would speak to our inner needs. We revel in crassness, in braggadocio. We inure ourselves to the world's problems, because they are not our problems, and hey, look, here's a great TikTok video. Turn off, tune in, drop out. Nothing matters. The world is going to end anyway, so if that's all there is, then lets go dancing.

Of course, this moment isn't quite new. William Wordsworth, the great poet of English Romanticism, had this to say:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

We are living in times just as eventful as those through which Wordsworth lived. In his day England was launching on the Industrial Revolution. Napoleon stalked the Continent. The world was transitioning from pre-modern to Modern. The European Enlightenment had called into question all the sureties which had fueled Western civilization for a millennium. If God wasn't dead, he was on life support. The educated classes had more information than any civilization in human history. Sound familiar?

Although Wordsworth would marvel in stupefaction at our technology, the problems are the same. In our rush to ever greater modernity, we forget that which makes us human. We forget to be still. We forget to pause and listen to those quiet voices inside us, the voices which tell us to slow down, to savor this one, precious life. We disregard that human life was not meant to be lived completely in public. We deny the private sphere, the space for our own thoughts and feelings, which we are under no obligation to share with the world on Instagram.

We are atomized, disconnected, unable to forge real connections in the real world. I love you all on this blog; but if all I had were all of you, and no one here, next to me, no friends in real life, I would be all the poorer, as would you. The tools which technology has given us are just that: tools. Tools are free of morality. Tools are our servants. How we use them is what turns them into agents of liberation or instruments of oppression. We, by our actions, imbue those tools with moral characteristics. We turn neutral things into things which can dominate our lives.

It's too late to go back. Nor would I want to. I derive so much intellectual nourishment from this Connected Age. In the aggregate, our access to the sum knowledge of humanity is a boon. I'm no Luddite. I don't want to return to the times when I grew up. But as a world society we need to realize that our machines, if not handled with care, will destroy us. Or, rather, we will destroy ourselves if we don't master our implements rather than being mastered by them. We are at that inflection point where we can go one way or the other. May we have the wisdom to see beyond the thickets in which we find ourselves and strike out for that winding, wonderful road, and on to the blue horizon.

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