By Bill McKibben. 1992.
Daybreak
We believe that we live in the “age of information,” that there has been an information “explosion,” an information “revolution.” While in a certain narrow sense this is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of missing information.
It’s a comfortable notion that as we progress we simply add to our store of understanding about the world–that we know more about the world than our grandparents knew when they died, and that our grandchildren will in turn be infinitely wiser than we are. In truth, though, we usually learn a new way of doing things at the expense of the old way. In this case we’ve traded away most of our physical sense of the world, and with it a whole category of information, of understanding.
Midmorning
The most obvious drain is in our ecological understanding. Each piece of land the world over is different–the climate and the topography and the vegetation all combine to mean that the field over there is particularly vulnerable to erosion or that the deer need that bit of stream or that the groundwater’s shallow here and easily depleted. These kinds of lessons–and the affection needed to implement them–can only be learned by long observation.
One idea–one phrase, really–casts a long shadow over this discussion. the notion that we live in a “global village” was first put forward by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s. “Today after more than a century of electric technology we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned,” he wrote. “The new electric interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.”
In the decades since the resonant phrase “global village” has become a mighty cliche, repeated so often that we believe it to be true without really thinking about it. And what an attractive idea–it seems to solve the problem I’ve posed here. On the one hand we can follow the modern, commercial, political impulse toward globalization, toward standardization–and in the process create the intimacy of a village, the kind of close and connected personal and cultural life we’ve been vaguely missing. It sounds awfully good for other reasons too. It sounds like the way we’re going to solve our worst political problems, so many of which (the environment, nuclear weapons), are global in scale. And in this image, quite explicitly, the TV is a sort of campfire, and also a set of jungle drums bearing the news.
What aspects of a village can be usefully translated to an almost infinitely larger scale? What is a village? What is a tribe?
When people in villages traditionally got together to talk, they talked about what they had in common. What the weather was like and what it meant for the crops; what the people in the next village were up to and if they meant harm; who in town was causing trouble and who needed help. The talk had real content, and the smaller the village the deeper that content was because everyone could agree on what was important–the talk was rooted in the particular facts of its local existence. By contrast, it obviously makes little sense for the global village to talk about the weather, since while some are harvesting others are planting; we could and should talk about the greenhouse effect or nuclear war, since they’re a form of international weather, but we do so only occasionally.
Since we must restrict our conversation to what we have in common, our global-village campfires are not as productive as the old tribal ones. We can find subjects of interest to all only by erasing content, paring away information–the things that interest me may not interest, or even be comprehensible, to you.
The mountain says you live in a particular place. Though it’s a small area, just a square mile or two, it took me many trips to even start to learn its secrets. Here there are blueberries, and here there are bigger blueberries. The swamp is impenetrable here, but easy to skirt on the other side. You pass a hundred different plants along the trail–I know maybe twenty of them. One could spend a lifetime learning a small range of mountains, and once upon a time people did. But to what end now? A day of television reminds you that except for whatever speciality you earn your living with, you live in a vastly simpler place. A place where your physical location hardly matters.
10:00 AM
In the end, this staggering absorption with TV culture comes at a price. History is weirdly foreshortened–for instance, all anniversaries from the TV period are marked with great care and attention, at least if whatever happened was captured on film.
Which is fine–but nothing that comes before television is covered in any detail at all. The brightness surrounding the last forty years blinds us to all that preceded it–and forty years is a very short time, even to an individual.
The past fills our mind, but only the past of the last four decades. As a result, those four decades seem utterly normative to us, the only conceivable pattern for human life.
But the last forty years have actually been an exceptional period in human history. All the trends I discuss in this book–the retreat from nature, the rapid globalization, the loss of the skills needed for self-sufficiency, and so on–all came to full blossom in this period. It is the most discontinuous, jarring, strange, out-of-the-ordinary stretch of time since we climbed down from the trees–a short bender in the more sober course of history. By some estimates, for example, human beings have used more natural resources since the end of World War II than in all the rest of human civilization. This needs to be seen for the binge it is, and it probably needs to end, sooner rather than later, we need sustainable, steady-state societies that live off the planet’s interest and not its capital. But if you marinate in the images of the last forty years for hour upon hour and day after day, this binge seems utterly standard, and it’s exceedingly hard to imagine other models, societies, ideas.
4:13 PM
If there is any one subject on which everyone seems to agree, any one point of doctrine to which every political sect subscribes, it’s that “economic growth” is the highest goal, our ultimate goal as a country.
The question is, does it make sense for us any longer–is it automatically cheerful news that the American economy is busily expanding? … Such questions remain heretical, but there heresy gains new adherents constantly, and not just among Thoreauvian cranks. Their numbers are not yet large enough that they make any dent in the momentum of society or raise a wrinkle on the smooth-browed anchorman. Still, our society’s shiny faith in endless material progress has begun to tarnish. Many of the most subversive challenges have come from environmentalists, who question one of the givens of growth–that it will always be physically possible on a finite earth. At first, two decades ago, environmentalists predicted we would run out of certain raw materials. While over the long run this remains likely (it’s awfully hard to believe that there’s enough stuff for everyone on the planet to live the way Americans live), it seems unlikely it will happen very fast.
But there’s another challenge to this idea of material progress, of endless economic growth, that occurred to me as I reclined in front of the TV watching the history of the last forty years. And that challenge is a simple one–things aren’t progressing. I don’t mean that we’re not getting richer (though we’re not–between 1969 and 1989, median family income in constant dollars rose only $562, from $28,344 to $28,906.). I mean that even if, as the society urges, we all made twice as much money, our cash could buy us very little additional ease or even luxury. Daily life has scarcely changed between 1960, when I was born, and the present.
The current emptiness is not television’s fault, but television has made it visible–when you live in the age of videos there’s not even a chance of ambiguity. The pictures are as much a part of the song as the tune–you’re told what the music’s about.
5:00 PM
If you heard Billy Idol singing “Cradle of Love” on the radio, it might trigger many associations. But on video it is a leering “Cat in the Hat”–a girl in a miniskirt visits her neighbor, a lonely yuppie. She puts on the tape and turns into Thing 1 and Thing 2, breaking the furniture, ripping off most of her clothes, writhing on the bed to the beat of the music, kissing the confused neighbor, then flouncing off leaving him–and the viewer–hot and bothered.
Lita Ford is straightforward–“I’m hungry for your sex”–and so is MTV: the “word of the week” on the channel is “callipygous,” which means “having shapely buttocks,” which every woman on MTV does. (They’re encased, invariably, in tight black skirts.) I didn’t, I suppose, spend as much time as I should have thinking how offensive this was. You can feel a little grubby watching it, but you watch–it knows what buttons to push.
Late Afternoon
Viewed linearly, the rat race makes perfect sense–if there is a destination, you might as well get there first. But if, instead, you’ve internalized the seasons to the point where you realize you’re on a wheel, you might slow down a little–might decide you’re going nowhere impressively fast. If you’re on a wheel, as mystics have long observed, speed is an illusion.
We complain incessantly about the “fast pace of modern life,” and say we have “no time.” But of course most of us have lots of time, or else every study wouldn’t show that we watch three or four or five hours of television a day. It’s that time the way it really works has come to bore us. Or at least makes us nervous, the way that silence does, and so we need to shut it out. We fill time, instead of letting it fill us.
8:00 PM
And what exactly does all this information leave you with? Not, at least in my case, the feeling that I understood how the world had changed that day, much less how the world worked.
Perhaps the greatest distortion of TV news, though, comes from the very fact of its seeming comprehensiveness. Each day it fills its allotted hours no matter what, and each day it fills them with crackling urgency. A newspaper comes out every day too, but a newspaper has a variety of ways of letting you know whether an event is important or not.
TV congratulates itself endlessly on its commitment to urgency. The promos and opening titles for nearly every local newscast showed their square-jawed personnel out battling the clock to bring back film, which was edited by rushing technicians while the heroic correspondents batted out copy on flashing screen–finally the anchor settled into the anchor throne, took a second to gather her breath, and then launched into her report.
But the worst disasters move much more slowly, and thereby sneak past the cameras. Consider two of the grinding glaciers that are slowly, methodically changing the topography of the world around us–the decay of the global environment and the wicked, miserable poverty that traps so much of the country and the planet.
Growing up in America involves a dozen troubles–parents too busy and grandparents living in Arizona, the passage through adolescence in an atmosphere of commercialized and omnipresent sexuality, the pressure of keeping up appearances in a society obsessed with consumption, and so on.
The relentless flood of information we receive, then, does not necessarily equal an understanding of our situation. The principal boast of electronic communication is speed, and speed doesn’t help much in grasping these situations–it doesn’t matter if you learn about the greenhouse effect this week or next week or next month. What matters is that when you do hear about it you understand it so deeply and thoroughly that you begin to question the way you live. It doesn’t matter if you hear constantly, night after night, about poor children or abused elders. It matters that you hear about them in some way both deep enough and complicated enough that you’ll go out and do something useful.
Here’s one way of asking the question–if instead of watching the news each night on television, or devouring the newspaper each morning, say you heard only one newscast a week, or read every third or fourth issue of Newsweek. If you reflected carefully on what you did read, I think in some ways you’d understand more about the planet.
Even on a mountain you can’t escape the news. Escaping the news is an ignoble goal–in a nuclear, damaged, suffering world what happens elsewhere is all of our business and all of our shame.
And it’s not as if we need to know every jot and tittle in order to act–cranky old Thoreau is a useful witness to this matter. He scorned those who kept fanatically up-to-date (“Hardly a man takes his half hour’s nap after dinner but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks ‘What’s the news?'”). He ridiculed attempts to speed communication between continents (“Perchance the first news that will leak into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough”). and yet he knew enough about the world to act. He knew that the Mexican war was wrong, and on reflection knew it was wrong enough to require that he go to jail. His protest was not based on extensive reporting from Mexico–“Civil Disobedience” includes no list of atrocities from the front. His protest was based on small amounts of information fed, in long hours of wilderness reflection, through the mill of principle. True, he went to jail only for a night. And his calm stand went unreported, save in his essay. And yet it has come down to us through the generations, a model for much that has followed. We say “information” reverently, as if it meant “understanding” or “wisdom,” but it doesn’t. Sometimes it even gets in the way.
Twilight
“For most of human history,” writes psychologist Paul Wachtel in his book The Poverty of Affluence, “people lived in tightly knit communities in which each individual had a specified place and in which there was a strong sense of shared fate. The sense of belonging, of being part of something larger than oneself, was an important source of comfort. In the face of the dangers and the terrifying mysteries that the lonely individual encountered, this sense of connectedness–along with one’s religious faith, which often could hardly be separated from one’s membership in the community–was for most people the main way of achieving some sense of security and the courage to go on.”
“For most of human history.” I have used this phrase before in this book, to try to make it clear just how different our moment is, just how much information we may be missing. In this case, the information is about “community.” Many of us are used to living without strong community ties–we have friends, of course, and perhaps we’re involved in the community, but we’re essentially autonomous. (A 1990 survey found 72 percent of Americans didn’t know their next-door neighbors). We do our own work. We’re able to pick up and move and start again. and this feels natural. It is, after all, how most modern Americans grew up. On occasion, though, we get small reminders of what a tighter community must have felt like. Camp, maybe, or senior year in high school.
Deeper Twilight Still
The difference between comfort and pleasure is enormous, though hard to set down in words. Albert Borgmann says “comfort is the feeling of well-being that derives from an optimally high and steady level of arousal of positive stimulation, whereas pleasure arises from an upward change of the arousal level. Since there is a best or highest level of pleasure that constitutes comfort, one cannot indefinitely obtain pleasure by rising from comfort to more comfort. … Hence pleasure can only be had at the price of discomfort.” What he means, I think, is, if you walk out of the bitter cold into a 70-degree room, it will feel marvelous, toasty, cheerful, a haven, a nest. But if you spend all your time in a room where the temperature is 70 degrees it will simply feel neutral.
A pair of academics, Robert Kubey and Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi, recently published a massive and novel study of why people watch TV. …Their data showed quite convincingly that people watch television when they felt depressed–that the strongest variable predicting that people would watch TV in the evening was that in the afternoon they felt the day was going badly.
We use TV as we use tranquilizers–to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness. The reason that television can be counted on to work this way–the way that television most nearly resembles a drug–is its predictability.
This tranquilization has its advantages–anyone who ever checked into a hotel room knows that TV masks the loneliness. And if it really made us happy, who could argue? Loneliness, stress, fear–these aren’t to be desired, exactly. But television doesn’t leave us happy; it only presses our boredom and alienation a little to the back.
“Obviously,” wrote Kubey and Cziksentmihalyi, “if they possibly could, TV producers would regularly broadcast programs that would make people feel significantly happier than they do normally. They would do so because of the obvious commercial gains that would accrue. That television viewing helps us feel more relaxed than usual but generally does not help us feel substantially happier says something about human nature and what makes for happiness. Happiness is a more complex state than relaxation. It requires a more elusive set of conditions, and is therefore more difficult to obtain. Others can successfully attract and hold our attention and help us relax, but perhaps only we can provide for ourselves the psychological rewards and meaning that make for happiness.”
An author, in a sentence or even half a sentence, can conjure up any locale from Paris to Pluto, can flip backward and forward in time, can take you inside the minds of of her characters. She’s in no measure bound by what she can take a picture of.
The problem is not that the individual segments are too short–you can say a lot in a few minutes. It’s that each line of thought is instantly replaced by another.
Still, as McLuhan realized, there’s a lot of the tribal villager left in us. We respond to repetition and TV offers it. It shows a million different programs, but they’re not that different.
Human beings–any one of us, and our species as a whole–are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.
That may be our real importance–as the only creatures who can fully comprehend how correct and harmonious the world is. Scientists have a stronger sense of this than most of us, and that is because they spend more time with wildness–not in the woods, necessarily, but through a microscope or a telescope. They know, many of them, that mere appreciation, the attempt to understand marvels for their own sake, is worth a life’s work.
I’ve tried, in the preceding pages, to describe some of the information that the modern world–the TV world–is missing. Information about the physical limits of a finite world. About sufficiency and need, about proper scale and real time, about the sensual pleasure of exertion and exposure to the elements, about the human need for community and for solid, real skills. About the good life as it appears on TV, and about other, perhaps better, lives. As I said at the outset, human desires count. I think the signals the natural world sends us–the seven warmest years on record all occurring in the last decade, for instance–are signals that our desires need to change.
Take MTV as an example. The people who run the network face a potentially serious problem–their target audience is at the age when they might be attracted to “subversive” and uncontained ideas. And rock’n’roll, defanged as it now is, still, by sheer volume if nothing else, raises the possibility of mild rebellion against the model consumer life-style.
Watch David Letterman for a night to see what I mean. You can hardly deconstruct it–it’s deconstructing itself.
Television, writes Miller, “has us automatically deplore or ridicule all anger, fear, political commitment, deep belief, keen pleasure, exalted self-esteem, tremendous love; and yet while making all these passions seem unnatural, the medium persistently dwells on their darkest consequences, teasing the housebound spectator with hints of that intensity it has helped to kill.”
That reduction to absurdity–that mocking, knowing snicker–is so sad, because it shuts people’s ears to the promise of this particular moment. Which is, simply this: having immense amounts of technology available to us, this society could pick and choose those things that would create a life both sustainable and rich.