John Wise

Around 195,000 years ago, a transmutation happened when an upright creature, a hominid, took one more pivotal evolutionary step to become homo sapiens. From then on, we learned to create better tools to hunt, farm, make clothing, and machines; we peered into the universe, formed ideas of our existence that would be communicated by stories we could talk about, painted on cave walls, scratched on to rocks, and ultimately published, distributed, projected and broadcast. But today, we may have approached the pinnacle of our mastery of the world around us; we may be entering the dark age of false enlightenment where devolving minds gain reverse acceleration via digital tools that end up hampering human communication and let us as a species slip back a rung on the evolutionary ladder.

Having all the answers and “knowing what’s right” is a form of hate that has infected much of what and who we are and is a vehicle delivering us to ignorance. Hate in the sense that once a part of a thing or idea is known to the individual we can dismiss and isolate the part that remains foreign and peculiar, that whatever we are unfamiliar with should remain irrelevant or even plain wrong. This casting aside is, in a sense, the same reaction we manifest when we hate something or someone. It makes us a small species. A sense of certainty that one’s own knowledge is adequate and succinct enough to make critical decisions without needing to listen to and consider a countervailing opinion is to not see the self-bound to an intolerance formed in part by ignorance to perceive or understand all sides of something. This assumed absolute certainty casts the individual into a mold that finds intellectual domination without inconvenient facts a mark of advancement and celebrates mental conquering through a verbal assault. The naive curiosity that took us out of the cave and beyond our minds to find what lay over the horizon, to float across the seas, to fabricate lenses allowing us to gaze into space is giving way to an ugly introspection caused by fear and an obsession with all things bad. And what we find are bad answers to trivial monkey-mind thoughts. When did the mind’s eye close and stop looking for the grandiose?

It came with our dependence on focusing our eyes on the TV screen. Although a cliché by now and a well-worn epitaph, the conversation was reduced to a one-way street; we listened to a box that could not hear us but lectured us, programmed us, entertained us, and made us afraid of what we could not see, while what we did see left us with the sense that “it” was out to get us. It – was the man lurking in the dark, the army in the jungle, the meteor that would strike the earth, a diabolical communist man with his finger on the nuclear trigger, or the evil bearded man in the cave with an army of martyrs – it was the thing that wasn’t like us, everything around us that wasn’t and isn’t conforming.

Do we try to cross the rubicon of intellectual confidence and the sea of encroaching fear? Far from it, we are enabling the further division of our sense of humanness by isolating this social creature. The internet was to be that bridge back to communication and sharing, which, at a glance, some will argue, has been just that. But I see these blogs, cell phones, chat, email, and online gaming not delivering a new golden age or a renaissance of communication; I see a golden calf hiding in the shadows, working to distance ourselves from ourselves. Our faces are buried in portable devices, hiding what might otherwise be read from our gestures, grimaces, pains, elation, and smiles. We laugh alone and to ourselves, as we are the only witnesses to the miniature window to our new reality. Surely, our eyes will mutate in a generation as peripheral vision becomes superfluous to our newly honed tunnel vision.

Speech is fragmenting into short-form writing styles in which humans of potential great communicative skill reduce their story to a 140 character text message. Brevity and an attention span equal to the length of the digital dialogue are seen as an advancement. Emails of two or three sentences now act as much as an entire letter would have just 20 years ago. A 30-second voicemail tells us all we need to know about where to be next and what to pick up from the store as we speed down the street to save precious moments so we have time to hit the drive-thru for coffee and dinner before dedicating hours in front of TV or computer screens because we are too busy to engage in exploring the narrative of good old storytelling. Not the kind of storytelling where we must sit around the campfire or the reverting to oral history as it had once been our historical form prior to the advancement of the written word. No, what I’m talking of is the idea that we can discuss what life lessons we have learned, what we might like to see happen that improves our station in life, and what our contribution to that end might be. Instead, we complain, cast aspersions, and gripe about how much we dislike the boss, coworker, politician, or neighbor, or we nod in gleeful agreement about how much we like this particular Xbox game, some new TV series, or these great functions on the next generation gadget, cell phone, iPad, or gizmo. Yes, there are places for these modern tools, but are they tools, or are they becoming prosthetic devices?

Our dreams are dead. We can not see that we are not listening to ourselves, each other, or the history we claim is the root of our faith and beliefs. When the lights of the electronic screens brighten, our minds return to darkness. When the best we can muster in a critique of what our minds have just been witness to or stimulated by is along the lines of a one-word rejoinder akin to, “uh,” “yeah,” or “great,” maybe our display of brevity is a symptom of a malaise of mind and spirit that is willingly crawling into the back seat of life.

Maybe we must reacquaint ourselves with an old instinct of survival. A forgotten instinct that time must be set aside to practice that thing that differentiates us from the other animals of the earth? We should ask ourselves, isn’t our real importance to maintain our ability to remember, convey, create, sing, yell, and whisper the story of who we are? Can we be content in allowing cell phones, web services, directors, news reporters, celebrities, and politicians to be the extent of how far a voice can be heard and find influence as it is transmitted silently on its invisible electronic journey to our eyes?

Look and listen to those speaking around you; do you hear the nonsequiturs? People cannot hear themselves repeat the slices of media speak and advertising sound bites that populate their vocabulary, giving a shallow appearance of being abreast of what’s happening, and they are not listening to you. They cannot hear you because the box does not talk back, and you are now but one more plastic box that can be turned down and off. People repeat what they hear because that is precisely how we were all schooled to do so. Didn’t we all begin with a mother asking, cooing, pleading with us to say, “Mama”? Didn’t your teacher ask you to repeat the sounds of the alphabet and work to convince you of the truth that one plus one is two? You have been conditioned to parrot and repeat. Where and when do you awaken to this? When will you turn off the TV, the Wii, and the iPhone and try to reengage your mouth to respond to what your ears are seeing and what your eyes are hearing? Can you ultimately be happy when your vocabulary is reduced to monosyllables and gestures of admiration for how great, fantastic, cool, or awesome something is? Are you yearning to hear and speak of what you know little of but might be willing to open your mind far enough to engage in a dialogue of exploration of your own history, beliefs, awareness, knowledge, verbal skill, and the potential or failure of our shared human future? I am.