Gripes against technology too often take the form of reference to a mythically happy past, with no acknowledgment of those real benefits which technology has brought to society. One wants to avoid this, but there are severe psychic strains imposed by modern technologies that we deny or minimize in importance at our own risk.
Take for instance this notion of "culture" which we are determined perpetually to blather on about; it has become, in the mass-educated and literate societies which technology both permits and requires, a jittery, highly artificial affair, for which we are more indebted to the education "system" than any sort of organic or spontaneous collective way of life. The nexuses of cultural transmission are not the family and the local community but the television set and mass-produced history textbook. Professor Barzun pointed out many decades ago how ludicrously our consciousness -- both social and historical -- has been heightened by mass novel-reading.
This effect has now been greatly multiplied in intensity by the single phenomenon of the motion picture -- now, due to video developments, readily available in the home and accessible everywhere. Our vapid and immensely tedious discussions of "constructions of cultural identity" and the like nonsense are reflections of this situation: our "cultures" are now spoon-fed us by "education professionals" as a sort of pasty and disagreeable gruel, rather than, as it were, suckled at the maternal bosom (all this, by the way, is an excellent argument against the promotion of mass education and literacy, but that is an argument better saved for elsewhere).
The "advances" in transportation and communications technologies also contribute enormously to the dominant sense in the West of extreme relativism and helplessness, of the hopeless inadequacy of every human endeavor. More than this, they make us uncomfortably, almost intolerably aware of our fellow human beings in their solitude and suffering. Disparities in modes of life and standards of living strike us with appalling immediacy, due to the pervasiveness of mass media, yet we are made to feel powerless to rectify them or even to know whether we ought to try. We are made numbingly aware of alternate possibilities for the way we might have led our lives, which redouble the underlying sense of guilt and inadequacy which is everywhere rife (It is worth considering whether this piercing, this almost unbearable self-consciousness is not at the very core of this phenomenon some call post-modernism).
Through mass printed media, through radio and television, we are impressed, more fundamentally, with a strong sense of the sheer crushing mass of the rest of humanity--of people, people everywhere--and without strenuous resistance we must tend to fall prey to an appalling cynicism bordering on misanthropy. Sartre's sentiment that "Hell is other people" is unlikely to have been voiced at any time before the twentieth century, but how many of us at the end of that century have never been brought quietly to agree? Every moment of solitude, of peace and rapturous tranquillity that we can snatch from the technological beast comes to be cherished as a rare and precious gem. How we now envy Bede, nestled in his scriptorium at Jarrow, or even St Symeon Stylites, serene atop his sun-baked column---how we grasp eagerly at any of the diminishing opportunities for Wald Einsaimkeit !
That extremely acute essay by Nietzsche entitled "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" contains the following phrase: "There is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing, whether this living thing be a man or a people or a culture". We can paraphrase this admirable dictum thus: The vitality of a culture varies inversely with the amount of time people spend talking about it. Now, what age can claim a higher degree of this sleeplessness, this excruciating self-analysis than our own? What people has ever been more dogged than present-day Americans in its faith in the capacity of icily impersonal social sciences to somehow increase their happiness? Who have more willingly and eagerly smashed every tradition and idiosyncratic or curious cultural trait on the rocks of rigorous utilitarian calculus? And how, then, can we be surprised at the prevailing malaise?
Must we simply resign ourselves to such a world for the next five billion years or whatever time is still allotted us in this vale of tears? It is probably impossible to look at such a question with anything resembling clear vision; I, for one, have so great an investment in answering the question in the negative that were I proved wrong I would most likely---crack. The state of American society makes clear one key notion: that though the Athenian may have been right that the unexamined life is not worth living, the over-examined life scarcely qualifies as a life at all. For this over-examination, I contend, we have modern technology to thank.
