Our digital age is one of ANXIETY: Why do we feel so bad?
DIGITAL ANXIETY
“Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.” McLuhan
Our digital age is one of ANXIETY: Why do we feel so bad?
As our DIGITAL AGE transports us back into the unified field experience of oral and auditory modes [even if using a visual technology, its universal nature is analogous to traditional oral communication], we revert to the biosocial norms of traditional societies.
“Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.” McLuhan
“Today’s world is full of threats,” observed Sir Angus Deaton the 2015 Nobel Prize winner in economics. He concluded that the potency with which substantial developed-world populations have responded to extreme and rising inequality threatens the very survival of both the European Union and a well-functioning democracy in the USA.
How can modern society reconcile these apparently diametrically opposed visions of the modern era (‘wars within us’)?
We must acknowledge the medium magnifying our Age of Anxiety, digital media.
According to McLuhan, the Print Culture created uniformity and continuity allowing for the extension of our physical/mechanical abilities. Our Digital Culture, however, “has extended our central nervous system itself into a global embrace.” With the additional development of a “technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing [is]….extended to the whole of human society….” people now seek to declare their beings totally spanning from a moment (Twitter/Snapchat) to a complete life (Facebook/LinkedIn).
The compressional nature of all electronic media (radio, TV, Telephone, digital media) has eliminated TIME & SPACE engendering a sense of wholeness, emotional empathy, and depth (at the cost of the print technology which previously enabled humanity to have an individual POINT OF VIEW). It is as if Plato saw our age when he had Phaedrus say of the dangers of a new technology. That over-reliance on [digital media] “By telling them of many things without teaching them, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part, they know NOTHING and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.” Plato’s Phaedrus
Traditional societies managed such unifying fear with gods and heroes. In our democratic age, society has replaced gods with philosophies and heroes with presidents. We have elected, in succession, a ‘born-again’ compassionate conservative — George W. Bush, a neo-liberal bi-racial progressive professor — Barack H. Obama and now a protectionist billionaire blowhard in Donald J. Trump.
EMOTIONAL V. COGNITIVE EMPATHY
Who has not seen:
The dead Syrian toddler-refugee on that Greek beach?
The iconic footage of the naked Vietnamese girl running from conflict?
- The aftermaths of the Paris or Boston attacks?
The psychological term for our reaction to these images is “identifiable victim” effect. It wrenches us when we see the bald 10-year-old cancer patient or oil-soaked bird. We have all shared the emotional impact of these electronic-enhanced images of death and destruction. This sharing of social consciousness made possible on a global scale by electronic media is the cause of guilt-feelings and compels society to act — often in unpredictable ways.
Literacy conferred the power of detachment, non-involvement. An analogous ability is that of cognitive empathy. This ability to understand what’s going on in the minds of others, allows humans to act within larger communities for the benefit of the whole community. Conversely, emotional empathy originated from tribal oral cultures. Emotional empathy is beyond understanding — it is sharing the suffering/experience of another — you feel what they are feeling. With the compressional nature of our electronic media, emotional empathy has consumed all the oxygen in the room and individuals feel compelled to make decisions without taking the time necessary to form a cognitive empathic response.
Any important decision — criminal justice, diversity policies, immunization programs, gun control, or immigration — will inevitably have winners and losers. Decision-makers should resist the pull of emotional empathy and identifying with either side of the issue. This is counterintuitive. For example, a felon furlough program might lead to an overall drop in crime. However, it only takes one news report of a furloughed prisoner assaulting someone to trigger by the emotional empathic response that drives a society to shut down the program. It’s hard to feel emotional empathy for a statistical shift in crime rates.
Allowing emotional moral mathematics to guide our ethical and political decisions can lead to perverse outcomes. Recent research in neuroscience and psychology shows that emotional empathy makes us biased, tribal and often cruel. For example, empathy shuts down when you believe someone is responsible for his or her own sufferings. Look at the delay in addressing the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s as a recent example.
We are witnessing a clash of cataclysmic proportions between two great technologies. We approach the new (Digital Media) with the psychological conditioning and sensory responses to the old (Print Culture). This same conflict happens in psychology as when our literate society attempts to internalize the unified field of electronic all-at-oneness. The work of Jung and Freud is a laborious translation of non-literate awareness into literary terms [and like any translation distorts and omits] just as McLuhan sought to educate our culture about the emotional existence representing our Digital Age.
MIGRATION
Every society faces challenges. Today we deal with massive migration flows. Our digital medium has magnified the difficulty of dealing with this challenge. While the press focuses on the dramatic events of civil wars or environmental disasters (drought, flood, and famine), migration trends have been on the rise for decades.
In 2018, there were around 250 million international migrants and 70.8 million forcibly displaced by conflict worldwide (i.e., persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations). The USA has been famous for absorbing migrants (‘give me your huddled masses’ averaging over a million a year for decades). As a result, nearly one-in-six American residents are foreign-born compared with one-in-twenty as recently as the 1970s. We are not the only region with a dramatic rise in migration. 76 million immigrants are currently living in the EU (most of which are intra-EU economic migrants) with 4.4 million immigrants during 2017, 2.0 million citizens of non-EU countries, 1.3 million people with citizenship of a different EU Member State from the one to which they immigrated, around 1.0 million people who migrated to an EU Member State of which they had the citizenship (for example, returning nationals or nationals born abroad).
If the EU already had 75 million migrants, why would the addition of 2 million refugees trigger anxiety that threatens to destabilize the whole continent? In the same vein, why has the long-standing residency of over 13 million undocumented migrants in the United States led to a call to “build a wall”? The USA has always been a migrant magnet with roots far richer and stranger that we choose to recall. Society’s shift away for multiculturalism toward its “evil twin,” identity politics, comes from our emersion in electronic media and subsequent reliance upon emotional empathy to make decisions. Migration is the crux of society’s discontent, but not the energizing force behind it.
Technological change manifested as electronic media and its reconfiguration of our social environment is the hidden source of “these wars within us.”
We are numb to this new electronic media as the Amazon tribesman introduced to our literate and mechanical culture. Rather than focus on the ‘content’ of the medium of interaction, to gain insight, we must focus on the sense perception as the key effect of any medium and its impact on the sense ratios of the culture within which it operates. We are inundated with electronic technology and now exist within its “typographic trance… [where] reasoning powers cannot cope with the total inclusive field of resonance [that modern media’s impact]…Everything seem[s] cut off at its root and therefore infected with illusion,” as McLuhan paraphrased A Passage to India and its use of Whitman.
We are enthralled by electronic media and have an unrecognized reliance on emotional morality instead of cognitive morality as the driving force of decision making. Accordingly, we over-weight membership (after all, you are an empathetic member of the group as well); therefore, if you feel the individual DESERVES an OUTCOME you have a biased response (just like a fan supporting the home team).
By deciding with emotional morality that requires group membership, we become unmoored from rationality. Our decisions, therefore, can SWITCH. Dead toddler = let in all migrants (refugees of conflict, environmental disasters, economic). Paris/Boston attack= stop all migrants (even if virtually all of the identified attackers were actually not recent migrants, but second-generation disaffected citizens).
America has over 13 million undocumented immigrants; however, identifying with only a segment of this population obstructs any reasonable compromise. Entranced by emotional empathy, we are compelled to identify them as DREAM ACT members (less than 800,000) or felons like one that killed a San Francisco tourist, Polly Klaas who was a 5-time deported illegal alien (less than 700,000). Anxiety is the natural result of electronic media that demands we identify with 800,000 as 13 million (love) or 700,000 as 13 million (fear). Sadly, having weakened the Print Culture’s ability to generate a rational POINT OF VIEW, fear usually trumps love.
“The electric [digital] technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind, and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology [Print Culture] of and through which the ‘American way of life’ was formed.” McLuhan said.
It is the power of print civilization uses to organize thought and action that de-tribalized humanity. What has modern society so dislocated and grasping for alternatives from fundamentalist religions to authoritarian leaders is our defining of RATIONAL as uniform and continuous and sequential (a product of our print technology). McLuhan concluded, “We have confused reason with literacy and rationalism with a single technology. Thus in the electric age man seems to the conventional [elite] to become irrational.” If we consider BREXIT and Trump’s tweets in this context, these phenomena are reasonable yet not rational (to Print Culture’s conventional elites).
As Print Culture created uniformity and continuity (allowing the formation of our modern nation-state(s), global market, American and French revolutions, empirical science, etc.), the Digital Culture has re-awakened the oral-prewriting cultural values by mixing “cultures of prehistory with the dregs of industrial marketeers, the nonliterate with the semiliterate and the postliterate. As our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother [peer pressure] goes inside. So, unless aware of the dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic/terror exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence” McLuhan observed.
This does not mean the momentum of the Digital Age can’t be a force for rational positive change. Society can mitigate empathy’s perverse mathematics with concern (caring about others) and compassion (valuing their fates). By the recognition that emotional empathy “distorts our moral judgments in pretty much the same way that prejudice does,” Against Empathy by Paul Bloom, we may seek a cognitive empathetic repose, i.e., compassion. The distinction between the two was concisely summarized by Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki in a 2014 article in Current Biology: “In contrast to [emotional] empathy, compassion does not mean sharing the suffering of the other: rather, it is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern, and care for the other, as well as a strong motivation to improve the other’s well-being. Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other [emphasis added].”
Kissinger in World Order notes that information has overwhelmed knowledge and makes wisdom impossible because every question must have a researchable answer. Society’s failure to find ‘the answer’ results in many groups relying upon emotional empathy to make a decision. “The pursuit of transparency and connectivity in all aspects of existence, by destroying privacy, inhibits the development of personalities with the strength to make lonely decisions….only very strong personalities are able to resist the digitally aggregated and magnified unfavorable judgments of their peers.”
Digital interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. Our digital media CONTROL us and we have lost the ability to JUDGE for ourselves.
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