We live increasingly “on the screen,” deeply engaged with the patterns of light and energy upon which so much of modern life depends. At work we turn our backs to our coworkers, immersing ourselves in the flood of information engendered by countless computers. At the end of the workday, computers tag along with us in cellphones and music players. Still others, embedded in video displays, wait at home. They are all parts of an enormous electronic web woven on wires or only air. We marvel at what we can do with this technology. We turn less attention, however, to what the technology may be doing to us.
Recall Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which Socrates tells of prisoners who are rigidly chained in a cave, facing a wall with a fire burning brightly behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners, people carry vessels, statues of animals made of wood and stone, and other things back and forth on a walkway. Held fast, the prisoners see only shadows on the wall and hear only echoes of the voices behind them. Mistaking these for reality, the prisoners vie with one another to name the shadowy shapes, and they judge one another by their facility for quickly recognizing the images.
A sorry scene, we say—a pale imitation of what life should be, a cruel punishment. We do not need philosophers or scientists to tell us that without social interaction, we would not be human. But what has the prisoners’ plight to do with us? We are not in chains. We have many face-to-face engagements with others. And the centuries between that cave and the present have seen monumental developments in human consciousness: the emergence of language and imagination, and the invention of tools of communication that have enabled rhapsodes, scribes, and novelists to thrust us into lives real and invented. Today digital technology extends that reach, making possible ever-beguiling fabrications for entertainment and escape. It has put us at the gate of a magical garden crowded with many others who, from the flickers on a screen, clamor for our attention and concern.
If Socrates could wander the halls of our workplaces or visit our homes, he would be amazed by the advance of our multimedia computers over the primitive technology of his cave with its statues and firelight. Technology, however, never bestows its bounty freely, and Socrates might make us a bit uncomfortable with questions about the role that machines play in modern life: Do they bind us in subtle ways? Are they drawing us into such intimacy that life on the screen will soon replace the face-to-face community as the primary setting for social interaction? If so, at what cost?
I fear that we will pay for our entry into the magical garden of cyberspace with a loss of empathy—that our devotion to ephemeral images will diminish our readiness to care for those around us. We might hope, of course, for an increase in understanding, tolerance, and perhaps even empathy as technology makes more permeable the boundaries that presently divide communities and nations. Such benefits would surely be a boon to our troubled world. But as technology exposes us to the pain and suffering of so many others, it might also numb our emotions, distance us from our fellow humans, and attenuate our empathetic responses to their misfortunes. In our life on the screen, we might know more and more about others and care less and less about them.
What is the source of our feelings for others—the “pity for the sorrowful, anguish for the miserable, joy for the successful” that Adam Smith called fellow feeling? Perhaps it is simply in our nature to respond emotionally to those around us. Indeed, our emotional responses arise swiftly and unbidden, particularly in the presence of those bearing the weight of injury, loss, fear, or despair. We might, therefore, expect our natural sympathy and compassion to be impervious to corrosion by modern life. Yet for every heartwarming account of compassion, aid, and sacrifice, the daily news offers a story of indifference, hatred, or abuse that illuminates a second aspect of our nature: a willingness to advance our individual interests at others’ expense.
Evolutionary theory and neuroscience both seem to confirm the view of those who attribute humans’ compassionate acts to strict social controls —including laws, mores, teachings, and taboos—that alone keep our brutish self-interest in check. If that is so, then changes in the way we interact, and particularly the loss of those social controls, could undermine our caring for one another. Natural selection shaped the brains and behavior of our primate forebears to serve both self and others. By grouping, they could better meet environmental challenges and promote their reproductive success. Individuals still cared most for their own prospects and those of their kin, but increasing social integration demanded care for the interests of the community. Natural selection, therefore, favored primates that could sense the intentions and needs of others of their kind. In time, they became sensitive to the emotions and behavior of others. Our ancestors responded instinctively to body language—not only gross actions, but the twitch of an eye, tremor of a hand, tensing of a leg, and the dilation of a pupil, all subtle indicators of the intent of the brain within the body observed. Thus primates could forge alliances, exchange favors, achieve status, and even deceive. Those who were particularly skilled in “working the crowd” gained added advantages for themselves and their offspring. Because of those advantages, primate sociability became a powerful adjunct to a fierce focus on self.
Genetic adaptations to the demands of that long-ago time still influence our culture, and ancient emotional centers in our brains affect many of our social interactions. But the emergence of imagination set us on the path to what J.K. Rowling characterized as understanding without having experienced, to thinking ourselves into other people’s minds and places. One hundred years ago, Joseph Conrad noted that there is a permanently enduring part of our being “which is not dependent on wisdom … which is a gift and not an acquisition.” The artist speaks to that part of us, for through it, “one may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world.”
For hundreds of years, novels have engaged our empathetic faculties with the lives of imagined others. We learn to read through practice, shaping our brains to accommodate the linearity and fixity of text. Literacy repays that effort by introducing us to a multitude of fictional others whose lives can entertain and edify us. Today, as our brains acclimate to digital technology, a computer screen is increasingly our window to the world. Technology crowds our lives with others’ experiences, each claiming a bit of our attention and concern. Some readers of novels say that by introducing us to fictional others, stories make us more sensitive to the feelings of real people. With its jumble of streaming video, elaborate games, social networks, news reports, fiction, and gossip, cyberspace could coax us to greater regard for the unfortunate and oppressed. The widespread grief that followed the death of Princess Diana is a vivid example of the power of technology’s Muses to extend the reach of another’s mythical life into our own. As digital technology increases its hold on our imaginations, perhaps it will do what novels are said to do: make us a more compassionate, “nicer” species.
Hesiod observed that the Muses have the power to make false things seem true. That, of course, is how they sustain fiction. Today’s technology offers new ways to engage our imaginations. Movies, television advertising, and pictures in magazines depict tantalizing, unreal worlds that offer us, if we will suspend our disbelief, what Sontag called “knowledge at bargain prices—a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom.” Even when we know that what we see cannot be, the falsity of our experience may not reduce our empathetic response, which is more automatic than considered. Our brains, seeking stimulation rather than knowledge, may find more engagement in a montage of simulated joys and agonies than in the lives of real people and events.
In the movie theater, for example, watching the Titanic slowly sink, we suffer with its desperate passengers and fear for their fate. We know the images we see are an amalgamation of the real and artificial. But our brains care little about the way technology weds fact and fiction; we care about the experience, not analysis, and for a few minutes, the sinking is real.
Of course, artists have drawn us into imaginative worlds for thousands of years. But when their performances were finished, their books read, or their movies seen, we returned to our everyday lives—and to our friends and neighbors. Now digital technology is erasing the boundary between the magic and the mundane. Computers give us not only a diversion or a lesson, but a fantastic life in which we can indulge our interests with the click of a link, where we can be any place at any time, where we can be who we want to be.
Technology is replacing the traditional social structures of the face-to-face community with more-fluid electronic arenas for gossip, preening, and posturing. Facebook and MySpace members “strut their stuff” with embellished self-descriptions and accumulations of “friends” from far and wide. Those affectations would mean little if we were not so sensitive to trappings of rank, so irresistibly drawn to judge and categorize others. Repeated encounters with those who present themselves as a blend of the actual and the fantasized alter our expectations of trustworthiness and reciprocity. Absent the accountability of face-to-face interaction, there seems little need to adhere to social conventions of the past. Users are free to invent themselves without regard for the concerns or needs of others.
John Updike said the Internet is chewing up books, casting fragments adrift on an electronic flood. We might say the same of lives; technology is cutting out pieces and offering them isolated from their natural context. Just as a dismembered novel loses accountability and intimacy, so too does a person who appears only in fragments. Other people’s experiences are reduced to grist for the mill of our emotions, where our inclinations, histories, prejudices, and aesthetic preferences grind them to our liking. With technology as a remote control, we can tune in the emotional stimulation we crave and tune out what we find unpleasant or disturbing. As we shuttle from e-mail to hyperlinks to phone calls, we may find little time or inclination to uncover real suffering in the chaotic mix of the actual and the invented.
A century ago, in “The Machine Stops,” E.M. Forster envisioned a time when a powerful Machine would mediate all experience. His Machine had woven an electronic garment that “had seemed heavenly at first.” Over time, however, technology had imprisoned humanity in an electronic cave where the body had become “white pap, the home of ideas as colorless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars.” The sudden failure of the Machine doomed its dependents, who knew no other life but that on the screen.
Many cultures have used art and its technologies to promote social well-being. But now the very fullness of life on the screen may thwart that intent. Multitudinous and multifaceted appeals to our emotions may so absorb us that we have no energy to devote to others. We want the frightened to be comforted, the sick to be healed, and the defenseless to be protected, but in the virtual world, actions that have consequences are few. Feelings without deeds may be the colorless, sloshing stirrings derided by Forster. If natural selection endowed us with a limited capacity to empathize with others, then technology’s parade of fragmented lives may sap us of feeling. Like profligate shoppers who have squandered our money on trinkets that please our fancy, we may have nothing left to spend for anything truly worthy.
Because our biology drives our venture into cyberspace, we can expect a deepening intimacy with our digital machines. They give today’s Muses new ways to meet our brains’ incessant demands for emotional stimulation—to forge fetters that bind us to our electronic environments. If our technology remains robust, we may avoid the catastrophic failure imagined by Forster. But what of empathy?
Socrates argued that poetry, through its power to stir our emotions and appeal to our baser inclinations, undermines understanding. So he proposed to exclude it from the education of the elite in his ideal community. For them, philosophy—an arduous but ultimately more-reliable mode of thinking—would be the path to understanding.
Today our increasingly seductive technologies would alarm him even more; he would surely limit the engagement of his elite with multimedia fabrications. Socrates recognized, however, that art is the vehicle through which society guides the many to good citizenship. He anticipated the arguments of later advocates of novel reading in the promotion of empathy: The right artistic creations—the right fictions—will raise aspirations, enhance fellow feeling, and improve behavior. So despite his reservations, Socrates might see new opportunities for artists and teachers to encourage sympathy and compassion.
Digital technology has fostered a radical egalitarianism that has displaced the authorities that were traditionally empowered to cultivate and guide our feelings for one another. It has made Muses of us all. In turn, we have created the cacophony of the Internet that conveys not a single tradition but a flood of fragments, which can inform us of much but can teach us little.
In this chaos, we may sense an unsettling possibility. Natural selection embedded our dogged pursuit of our own interests in a matrix of sociability. Once we live disembodied lives, in which identity is largely an imaginative construction, will falsehood predominate? Will false identities free us to conceal our intentions, to pursue our own selfish interests more aggressively? It would be deeply distressing if digital technology, which offers so many opportunities for liberation, liberated some of our worst inclinations and behaviors from existing social restraints.
On the other hand, stories of the imagined lives of others have guided empathy for thousands of years. Over time, different modes of communication—songs, poems, and novels—have elevated some ways of understanding over others. Reading pre-empted oral performance, and now multimedia are pushing reading aside. At each transition, masters of the older mode scorned the new and vigorously but fruitlessly resisted it. Those who embraced the new found powerful ways to convey their imaginative conceptions.
Now technology is dramatically changing the path to Conrad’s “permanently enduring” part of our being. If we would foster empathy, we must change as well. We may have to jettison old habits of thought and avoid a debilitating yearning for the past. As McLuhan argued, we cannot drive into the future looking in the rearview mirror. But we can remember the road we have traveled. Our traditions embody much from our past that is important to our society, and we should find them anchors in the digital flood.
