Lots of caring, thoughtful people are looking at the current state of the world, wringing their hands asking “how in the world we got here?”
Perhaps the more accurate question is “Why, given our mercantile-materialist past, shouldn’t we have gotten here?”
In his 1978 book The Illusion of Technique, public philosopher William Barrett forewarned of the damage being done through our reliance on devices - rather than people - to solve our moral predicaments; and we should have paid more attention.
Today we are stained with the legacy of our civilization falling under the spell of a “machine model for living.” This model emphasized efficiency (or what many called efficiency): speed, instant results, appearance and packaging; and it lured millions to the marketplace–or killing fields.
The result however was anything but “efficient” in the larger sense.
We created ease and convenience, to be sure. But the advances were largely external - relegated to how fast we drove, how quickly we ate, how many gadgets we owned or people we manipulated; but our interior life, our capacity to feel and reflect and communicate was left bereft.
The result is that, today, too many of us have become calculative and consumerist giants but emotional and imaginative dwarfs, steely and impenetrable, but bereft of nuance, attunement, and depth; and this is precisely our dilemma.
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From my standpoint as a psychologist, there are two likely outcomes issuing from this dilemma:
- our citizenry will devolve into drone-like functionaries, programmed for elemental self-interest, or ...
- we will confront the moral crisis of our time - the quick fix/instant results society - and engage our abilities to be more fully present, both to ourselves and those about us.
The type of engagement in the latter will take time–more like what we see consistently in psychotherapeutic settings, but it will help us see each other as complex human beings; persons both unique and yet alike.
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