I’ve been thinking about personal space and how our culture manages it.
We desire to be the undisputed emperors of 9ft². It’s an indictment of our prevailing norms that walking up to someone in the street and extending a greeting can now be seen as a disruptive act. For aeons in our evolution our very survival was bound to our transformative ability to converse, engage and empathise. Those unable to connect, or those showing disrespect at a critical moment, would be frozen out of the social matrix. This is how our gregarious nature bloomed, a positive feedback loop that rewarded cooperation and integrity.
It is commonplace now to see people in public engrossed in digitally-mediated dissociation. In smaller-scale communities such indulgence would surely be anti-social, but we seem to have moved beyond that. In fact, the reverse is true; the person offering greeting or seeking conversation is now regarded as trespassing in the sanctified inner sphere of the Self, an intrusion for which they better have a warrant. Feel free to leave a message though.
Perhaps it is better to rephrase ‘personal space’ as ‘personal attention’. Our attention is constantly pulled in multiple directions, flitting from our phone to a passing face, back to the phone, across to the advertising screen bursting with red that is just the right shade to pique the interest of our visual cortex, and back to the phone. Always back to the phone, the new home of humanity. We are so rarely at peace with our thoughts. In fact, in writing that last sentence I have shown how deeply ingrained this dualism of self and thought runs. I should say ‘we are so rarely at peace’. To actually sit somewhere and do what this culture calls ‘nothing’; to be. This is the ultimate subversive act of our time.
It’s easy to be beguiled by the conveniences of modernity into surrendering your natural conviviality and kindness, but in the end it is ourselves we are defrauding. There is no short-cut to authentic meaning. I see this surrender as an abdication of responsibility, an alluring concession of defeat to the pressing tide.
Technology can transform our world at a speed and scale that is hard to fathom. Certain technologies, designed in line with the human body, can offer constructive benefits to our society. Examples of what Charles Eisenstein calls ‘technologies of reunion’ include biodynamic agriculture, local economy loops and the remediation of toxic waste. These are activities with a holistic nature that serve to enhance connection with communities and the earth. In stark contrast though, the technologies so ubiquitous in modern life tend to remove or lessen our agency. Consider the patronising prodding of Google Search: ‘did you mean…?’, or GoogleMaps guiding us from one highly-reviewed location to another. Simply do what the pleasant, neutral voice tells you. This may well be efficient and effective, but in order to harness it you must first relinquish any claim to autonomy of movement.
Delegating our navigation to our phone is an exemplary instance of the blind logic that comes pre-loaded into our modern operating system. Locating ourselves in an environment is such a primal activity. It quite literally places us within a semiotic landscape. Memory and myth are vectors in our consciousness, orientating us, but how can we have true agency if our senses and our minds are ‘constantly polluted’, in the words of Ai Wei Wei? We are complicit in this maceration of meaning, if only by permitting death by a thousand cuts. Each iteration of these technologies takes us further down the tunnel, away from self-determination. On a neural level, we are leaving derelict whole sectors of our brain which should be engaged in riotous, sensual interaction with the world. Have we not all felt this void under the surface of daily life? When I am in a natural woodland, or by the sea, or playing with my kids I can feel this void fill until brimming. By choosing to tend these vital reservoirs within us we can resist the disempowering effects of modernity.
Paul Kingsnorth refers to the manifestations of this current culture as ‘The Machine’. He accurately describes it as fetishising technological progress and the future, which leads to the deification of ourselves and the abandoning of any notion of limits. This is offered alongside a nostalgia for a vintage past; anything to displace the ennui away from a critical platform in the present. Kingsnorth suggests a way out of the quagmire is to establish ourselves resolutely in the present, where we must perceive and act in accordance with what we know to be true, moving towards connection.
The reflections offered here do not advocate a return to the innocence of the Palaeolithic. That is the seductive glow of nostalgia again. Our task is to meld the immanence and agency of that forgotten time with our modern mind, to deploy the existing scaffolding as a support for an emergent beauty. A daunting task, to be sure, but one that can be realised through small reclamations every day.
We cannot return to the past, but we can return to the present.
Thanks James. It can feel like the inertia of ‘progress’ is against us but by articulating these ideas and forging relationship I agree we can remain ourselves.
Appreciate your thoughts here Ryan, I share many of these speculations, reflections, concerns and questions! Glad you're sorted out the story of "The Machine" too. I believe it's possible for us to find and maintain our autonomy within all these technologies plaguing us. It begins with discussions like you're sharing here!