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| W.H. “Ping” Ferry |
The words in my
essay on technology addiction were brought to the page via a grant from W.H.
“Ping” Ferry, a New York intellectual and philanthropist who had spent his long
life engaged with the most innovative thinkers of his generation, focused on
some of the most pressing social problems.
In his 80’s, he still ambled out to his garage in Scarsdale every day,
where he banged out letters to hundreds of colleagues on an old black
typewriter and gave out $1000 grants demanding from recipients neither proposal
nor follow-up report.
One day
in 1991 Ping sent me a letter. He wanted
me to understand that the problem facing humanity was not just specific
machines like nuclear weapons or Dalkon Shields; rather it sprung from an
entire technological system. Finding like minds was, even then, a
rarity. Ping and I began a
correspondence -- and one day I mailed him a cassette tape of a lecture I was
particularly proud to share, demonstrating that I had indeed digested his
feedback. He punched out a quick note on
his typewriter informing me he didn’t own a cassette player, never had, never
would. When I proposed that he walk next
door and borrow a tape recorder, he refused and returned the tape, unopened, in
the envelope!
I felt
I’d had another lesson from the inimitable W. H. Ping Ferry.
The
essay he commissioned for inclusion in Technology
for the Common Good continues, hopefully incorporating his wisdom.
The twelve-step
recovery movement says that, to heal, the addict must make "a searching and fearless moral inventory.”[i] On
the personal level this undertaking includes claiming responsibility for
instances in which we have violated another
person's integrity. On the collective level we might claim responsibility for technological society's uncounted
violations against humanity, animals, the plant world, and the Earth.
But, as Kellogg tells us, addictive
behavior is not natural to the human species. It occurs because some untenable
violation has "happened to
us."[ii]
And
indeed, we have undergone an untenable violation: a collective trauma that
explains the insidious reality of addiction and abuse infusing our lives. The Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders
defines trauma as "an event that is outside the range of human experience
and that would be markedly distressing to almost anyone."[iii]
Psychiatrist Abraham Kardiner describes it as "an external influence necessitating an abrupt change in
adaptation which the organism fails
to meet."[iv]
The trauma endured by technological peoples is the systemic and systematic removal of our
lives from the natural world: from the tendrils of earthy textures, from
the rhythms of sun and moon, from the
spirits of the bears and trees, from the life force itself. This is also
the systemic and systematic removal of our lives from the kinds of social and cultural experiences our ancestors assumed
when they lived in rhythm with the natural world.
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| Photo by Edward Curtis |
Deloria
infers that technological people "have no idea" about much of
anything that resides outside "the artificial technological universe with
which [we] are familiar." Human beings evolved over the course of some 3 million years and 100,000
generations in synchronistic evolution with the natural world. We are
creatures who are physically and psychologically built to thrive in intimacy with the Earth. A mere 300 generations ago, or
.003 percent of our time on Earth, humans in the Western world began the
process of controlling the natural world through agriculture and animal
domestication. Just five or six generations have passed since industrial
societies emerged out of this domestication
process. Our experience is indeed "outside the range of human
experience," and by the evidence of psychological distress, ecological
destruction, and technological control, this way of life has necessitated
"an abrupt change in adaptation."
Though
largely ignored, evidence jumps from the pages of anthropological texts
suggesting that the very psychological qualities so earnestly sought in today's
recovery, psychological, and spiritual
movements, the very social equalities for
which today's social justice movements struggle so valiantly, and the
very ecological gains sought after by today's environmental movements --
these comprise the same qualities and conditions in which our species lived for over
99 percent of its existence.
For
nature-based people, addiction was not a normal occurrence. Rather
people lived every day of their lives in
the wilderness. We are only beginning
to grasp how such a life served the inherent expectations of the human
psyche for development to maturation and health. In nature-based people who today maintain some vestiges of
their Earth-based cultures, we can discern a decided sense of ease with
daily life, a marked sense of self and dignity, a wisdom which most of us can admire only from afar.
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| Photo by Edward Curtis |
Anthropologists
report that in small, face-to-face communities most nature-based people practice an easy form of democracy. Every
member has a say and members of the community listen to each other.[v]
Workaholism does not exist.[vi] The
population tends to remain stable, held in check by natural (rather than
technological) fertility controls arising out of diet and lifestyle.[vii] And
ecological sustainability reigns: all tools are made of natural
substances, and movement from one place to another allows for remaining waste
to biodegrade into the Earth.
As
psycho-historian Paul Shepard notes:
White,
European-American, Western peoples are separated
by many generations from decisions of councils of the whole, life with few
possessions, highly developed initiation
ceremonies, natural history as everyman's vocation, a total surround of
non-man-made otherness with spiritual
significance, and the 'natural' way of mother and infant.[viii]
The loss of such experiences in the face of an increasingly
human-constructed, technology-determined reality,
and the loss of living in fluid participation with the wild, constitutes
the trauma we have inherited.
The
hallmark of the traumatic response is dissociation. This is also the
psychological result of the kinds of social changes that took place via domestication. Shepard describes this process as
the initiation of a heretofore unheard of tame/wild dichotomy in which
things considered tame (domesticated seedlings, captured animals; the mechanical,
controlling mentality required to keep them alive) are prized and protected, while things considered wild
("weeds," wild animals; the fluid, participator way of being
human) are threatening.[ix]
This split
between wild and tame lays the foundation for both the addictive personality
and technological society. Ultimately
such a split imprisons us in our human-constructed reality and causes all the
unnecessary and troublesome dichotomies with which we grapple today -- from
male/female and mind/body, to secular/sacred and technological/Earth-based.
Shepard writes:
In the ideology of farming, wild things are enemies
of the tame; the wild Other is not the context but the opponent of 'my' domain. Impulses, fears and dreams -- the
realm of the unconscious -- no longer are represented by a community of
wild things with which I can work out a meaningful
relationship. The unconscious is driven deeper and away with the
wilderness.[x]
In his work on the post-traumatic stress of
individuals, psychiatrist Ivor Browne describes dissociation in terms
remarkably similar to Shepard's. He sees it as "unexperienced
experience,"[xi] experience that has not been properly
processed by the psyche and integrated into memory. Just as animals often meet
threats of disaster by "playing dead," so traumatized people split their consciousness,
"freezing" the experience of loss and pain from awareness and
playing dead in mind and body. This mechanism is a brilliant way to protect the
psyche from threats that our nervous systems
simply were not built to handle, and changes that we were never meant to
integrate.
The
purpose of dissociation, then, is self-preservation. As Ivor Browne describes
it: "Whenever we are faced with an overwhelming experience that we sense
as potentially disintegrating, we have the ability to suspend it and 'freeze' it in an unassimilated, inchoate form and
maintain it in that state indefinitely."[xii]
Technological people's dislocation from the
only home we have ever known is a traumatic event that has occurred over generations, and that occurs again in each
of our childhoods and in our daily lives. In the face of such a breach, symptoms of traumatic stress are no longer the
rare event caused by a freak accident or battering weather, but the
everyday stuff of life experience.
Kellogg describes trauma as "the freeway to addiction,"[xiii] and his technological
metaphor is not lost. As human life comes to be structured increasingly by mechanistic means, the psyche
restructures itself to survive. The technological construct erodes
primary sources of satisfaction once found routinely in life in the wilds, such
as physical nourishment, vital community, fresh food, continuity between work
and meaning, unhindered participation in
life experiences, and spiritual connection with the natural world.
Bereft and in shock, the psyche finds some
temporary satisfaction in pursuing secondary sources like drugs, violence,
sex, material possessions, and machines. While these stimulants may
satisfy in the moment, they can never truly fulfill primary needs. And so the
addictive process is born. We become obsessed with secondary sources as
if our lives depended on them.
Today the
world is awash in a sea of both personal and collective addictions: alcoholism,
drug abuse, sex addiction, consumerism, eating disorders, codependence,
war-making, and global drama. Psychotherapist and
author Anne Wilson Schaef points out that beneath these behaviors lies
an identifiable disease process "whose assumptions, feelings, behaviors,
and lack of spirit lead to a process of nonliving that is progressively
death-oriented."[xiv] While her words describe the addictive
process of individuals, they also characterize the addictive process of a
civilization.
Techno-addiction finds its momentary satisfaction through machines and
power, but it is also an addiction to a way of perceiving, experiencing, and thinking. As the world has become less
organic and more dependent on techno-fixes, humans have substituted a
new worldview for one once filled with clean rushing waters, coyotes,
constellations of stars, tales of the ancestors, and people working together in
sacred purpose. But the ancestors from the western world took on the crucial
task of redefining their worldview in a state of psychic dislocation, and so
ended up projecting a worldview that reflects the rage, terror, and
dissociation of the traumatized state. They dreamed a world not of which humans
are fully part, but one that we can wholly
define, compartmentalize, and control. They created linear perspective, the scientific-technological paradigm, and
the mechanistic worldview.
Life on
Earth encased in the product of such a construction is, to quote the Hopi,
hopelessly koyanaskatsi, or out of
balance. As a psychotherapist, I believe that to address this imbalance at its
roots will require more than public policy, regulation, or legislation. It will
require a collective psychological process to heal us technological peoples
who, through a mechanized culture, have lost touch with our essential humanity.
Because I am
insufferably adamant about the need to throw off the chains (freeways,
electromagnetic technologies, nuclear weapons) of mass technological society and become as wild as the Earth intended, I
am dedicated to healing. This is recovery not just of the
"unexperienced experience" brought
on by the trauma, violation, and abuse people now sustain -- but it
encompasses recovery of the joy, laughter, and compassion we so sorely
miss. It is, as Morris Berman proposes,
"the recovery of our bodies, our archaic traditions, our unconscious mind,
our rootedness in the land, our sense of community, and connectedness with one
another."[xv]
Such a
choice involves recovery of a respectful intimacy with the natural world. Those
who have made a transition in this
relationship -- from one of speeding over the land at 75 miles per hour
and manufacturing genocidal weapons to one of wonderment, curiosity, and
loyalty -- will attest to the discovery of long-forgotten strengths and convictions.
But because of the breach of intimacy technological peoples have endured, there also is pain in
opening ourselves to a world being
wantonly destroyed before our eyes. Radioactive fallout rings the globe. The trees of the Black Forest
are withering. The seals in the North
Sea are dying of immune-deficiency disease.
And the poisons keep leaking out.
Then, there are our feelings about how the natural world for most of us is nonexistent in our lives today. We cannot see
the moon overhead because of the
smog. Our feet do not touch the Earth when we walk. We rarely walk. We spend our time fixated before electromagnetic
screens. We do not know how to speak to or learn from the natural world.
Finally,
we have feelings about how as children we were rarely encouraged, taught, or
given the context within which to establish an authentic relationship with the
natural world. Such an intimacy is essential to our growth into mature human beings,
and was built into our lives throughout our evolution. Yet technological society denies us this
intimacy from the start. As children, we barely learn how the moon changes
shape, why snow is cold, or how the earth spirits can help us live. The excavation of feelings about this lost past,
and about our present losses, provides the psychic crucible for a
non-mechanistic way of being; as we feel, we come alive.
And
"What will come of such conversations?" ask you who worry that
heart-felt experience supplants political action. One overlooked outcome of any authentic
recovery process is that it refutes personal powerlessness. My experience as a psychotherapist and an activist tells me
that because the clear-sightedness and love
for life that stream forth can be so mighty, the passion to become involved can be held back by neither bulldozer nor virtual
reality. The words that spring to mind when I am faced with yet another
violation of life are these: "Over my dead body . . ." And when I see
an opportunity to create something new: "To Life!" (1991)[xvi]
This blog is a book. Please feel free to read the next chapter now. Go to the Table of Contents under the introduction on the right side of the page and click on the next chapter.
[i] Anne
Wilson Schaef, Co-Dependence. San Francisco
[ii] Kellogg,
“Broken Toys, Broken Dreams.”
[iii] Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, 3rd ed. Washington
DC
[iv] Abraham
Kardiner, “The Traumatic Neurosis of War,” Psychomatic
Monograph II-III. New York
[v] Peter
Wilson, The Domestication of the Human
Species. New Haven CT Yale University
Press, 1988, pp. 42-43; Stanley New Brunswick NJ :
Transaction Books, 1974, Chapter 8; and Colin Turnbull, The Forest People: A Study of the Pygmies of the Congo New York
[vi] Marshall
Sahlins, Stone Age Economics. New York : Aldine De Gruyter, 1972, pp. 14-32; Frederick
McCarthy and Margaret McArthur, “The Food Quest and the Time Factor in
Aboriginal Economic Life,” in C.P. Mantford, ed., Records of the Australian-American Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land , Vol. 2, Anthropology and Nutrition. Melbourne , Australia :
Melbourne University Garden City NJ
[vii] Margaret
Ehrenberg, Women in Prehistory. Norman OK: University
of Oklahoma New York New
Haven CT Yale University
[viii] Paul
Shepard, Nature and Madness. San Francisco
[ix] Shepard,
p. 120.
[x] Shepard,
p. 120.
[xi] Ivor
Browne, “Psychological Trauma, or Unexperienced Experience,” Revision, Vol. 12 No. 4, Spring 1990, p.
26.
[xii] Browne,
p. 27.
[xiii] Kellogg,
“Broken Toys, Broken Dreams.”
[xiv] Schaef, Co-Dependence, p. 21.
[xv] Berman, Re-Enchantment, p. 282.
[xvi] Adapted
from Chellis Glendinning, “The Conversation We Haven’t Had: Technology, Trauma,
and the Wild.” Chapter 4.
