A
COUPLE of weeks ago, I replaced my three-year-old BlackBerry Pearl with
a much more powerful BlackBerry Bold. Needless to say, I was impressed
with how far the technology had advanced in three years. Even when I
didn’t have anybody to call or text or e-mail, I wanted to keep fondling
my new Bold and experiencing the marvelous clarity of its screen, the
silky action of its track pad, the shocking speed of its responses, the
beguiling elegance of its graphics.
I
was, in short, infatuated with my new device. I’d been similarly
infatuated with my old device, of course; but over the years the bloom
had faded from our relationship. I’d developed trust issues with my
Pearl, accountability issues, compatibility issues and even, toward the
end, some doubts about my Pearl’s very sanity, until I’d finally had to
admit to myself that I’d outgrown the relationship.
Do
I need to point out that — absent some wild, anthropomorphizing
projection in which my old BlackBerry felt sad about the waning of my
love for it — our relationship was entirely one-sided? Let me point it
out anyway.
Let
me further point out how ubiquitously the word “sexy” is used to
describe late-model gadgets; and how the extremely cool things that we
can do now with these gadgets — like impelling them to action with voice
commands, or doing that spreading-the-fingers iPhone thing that makes
images get bigger — would have looked, to people a hundred years ago,
like a magician’s incantations, a magician’s hand gestures; and how,
when we want to describe an erotic relationship that’s working
perfectly, we speak, indeed, of magic.
Let
me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what
consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at
creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic
relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives
everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw
terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is
consigned to a drawer.
To
speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of
techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes —
a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of
resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be,
effectively, a mere extension of the self.
Let
me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore
troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in
turn.
Its
first line of defense is to commodify its enemy. You can all supply
your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of
love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young
children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the
particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting
devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you
should buy stuff.
A
related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the
verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with
your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice.
And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving.
The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than
electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be
immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer
product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose
makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet
engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)
But
if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined
by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without
integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a
narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her
self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either
withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing
lengths to be likable.
If
you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt
whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that
you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you
succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard
not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve
fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or
alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then
quitting).
Consumer
technology products would never do anything this unattractive, because
they aren’t people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of
narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in
eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting
when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in
our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse
and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.
And,
since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t
have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with
actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the
mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in
our private hall of flattering mirrors.
I
may be overstating the case, a little bit. Very probably, you’re sick
to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My
aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic
tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice
Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving
somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on
the mirror of our self-regard.
The
simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is
incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example,
you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll
hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at
all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool,
attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than
likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual
life.
Suddenly
there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a
BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And,
for the other person, does this person love me?
There
is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle
of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such
a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And
this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist
order: it exposes the lie.
This
is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about
bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another
person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I
understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be
a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self,
on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a
specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as
if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
The
big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being
disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of
potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable
surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The
prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is
what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of
liking.
And
yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative —
an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain
emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a
resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived.
Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff
later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely
taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being
(and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer.
When
I was in college, and for many years after, I liked the natural world.
Didn’t love it, but definitely liked it. It can be very pretty, nature.
And since I was looking for things to find wrong with the world, I
naturally gravitated to environmentalism, because there were certainly
plenty of things wrong with the environment. And the more I looked at
what was wrong — an exploding world population, exploding levels of
resource consumption, rising global temperatures, the trashing of the
oceans, the logging of our last old-growth forests — the angrier I
became.
Finally,
in the mid-1990s, I made a conscious decision to stop worrying about
the environment. There was nothing meaningful that I personally could do
to save the planet, and I wanted to get on with devoting myself to the
things I loved. I still tried to keep my carbon footprint small, but
that was as far as I could go without falling back into rage and
despair.
BUT
then a funny thing happened to me. It’s a long story, but basically I
fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance,
because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that
betrays real passion is by definition uncool. But little by little, in
spite of myself, I developed this passion, and although one-half of a
passion is obsession, the other half is love.
And
so, yes, I kept a meticulous list of the birds I’d seen, and, yes, I
went to inordinate lengths to see new species. But, no less important,
whenever I looked at a bird, any bird, even a pigeon or a robin, I could
feel my heart overflow with love. And love, as I’ve been trying to say
today, is where our troubles begin.
Because
now, not merely liking nature but loving a specific and vital part of
it, I had no choice but to start worrying about the environment again.
The news on that front was no better than when I’d decided to quit
worrying about it — was considerably worse, in fact — but now those
threatened forests and wetlands and oceans weren’t just pretty scenes
for me to enjoy. They were the home of animals I loved.
And
here’s where a curious paradox emerged. My anger and pain and despair
about the planet were only increased by my concern for wild birds, and
yet, as I began to get involved in bird conservation and learned more
about the many threats that birds face, it became easier, not harder, to
live with my anger and despair and pain.
How
does this happen? I think, for one thing, that my love of birds became a
portal to an important, less self-centered part of myself that I’d
never even known existed. Instead of continuing to drift forward through
my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my
commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I
had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.
Which
is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about
all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This
fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And
you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace
it.
When
you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I
did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting.
But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or
even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love
some of them.
And who knows what might happen to you then?
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