Beliefs, Behaviors, and Belonging
My meditation this week will be brief, since class has begun and Iâve found myself thrown into the maelstrom involved in setting up schedules, orienting myself to classroom âtools,â and so on. But itâs those very tools, or rather, the expectations about their use and prevalence, that are nagging me.
Very basically, Iâve begun to wonder whether this and future generations will consider me a version of the creationist my own generation sneered at as laughably stuck in an outdated conception of reality. I remember in high school one girl being allowed to sit out a day of chemistry, since we were talking about the Big Bang, and her metaphysical convictions refused to acknowledge such a thing had ever happened.
That sort of insistence on the nature of reality seems a different thing altogether from my resistance to being force-fed all manner of digital platforms, programs, and the privacy-invading protocols that come with them. But Iâm beginning to suspect that digital natives not brought up within a world in which it was illegal and downright damnable for anyone to open up your mail, much less look at what was inside, canât remotely relate to my unease. They seem puzzled that that was the sort of thing that occurred in totalitarian regimes, not the so-called Free World. If I mention my concerns, when faced with class requirements to use GoogleDocs or even Facebook, about data usage, privacy, AI training, and moreânot to mention the assumption that everyone even has a Google or Facebook accountâIâm met with at best a shrug (thereâs nothing we can do about it anymore but give in), and usually a semi-disguised snicker. Just another old person whoâll be dead soon enough, and we wonât have to deal with her, anyway, since sheâs not on our platforms to bother us.
Dropping by the schoolâs library a while ago, I asked the person at the desk if she could tell me where a certain office was. She shoved a laminated piece of paper my way with nothing but a QR code on it, and said I could link to a map there. I declined her invitation; among other things, if youâre going to take the time to copy and print out and laminate a QR code, why not just do the same with a campus map? I went to the next office down the hall, and received the spoken information I needed from that receptionist.
It might not be so much the tools per se that bother me, but rather, what their pervasive use leads to. Iâm not saying anything new by fearing all our gadgetry will get us so unused to thinking on our own that we finally wonât be able to do it, period; in addition to all the commentary about TV rotting your brain that started before I was born, I remember way, way back an intellectualist uproar about fast food companies replacing numbers on their cash registers with the items a person was ordering, so that no mathematical thought was required at all, save the amount of change the cashier was told by the computer to count out and return to the customer. Of course, touch screen ordering has pretty much eliminated the entirety of that problem, change included, since the whole transaction is cash free.
Itâs not worth railing against most of what fast food chains do; if they could eliminate employees altogether, theyâd do it in the name of increased profits; if those profits are earned by injecting even more fat and salt into burgers and fries than is currently the case, theyâll do it. But that desire to operate on unthinking drone mode fits in with the unquestioning approach weâre apparently all supposed to accept when it comes to (digital) technologies and their supposed benefits. Shove a QR code at me, and thereâs no connection or exchange between one human and another; thereâs no likelihood that the receptionist who made that move will learn where the office is that I asked about.
Fine; human connection is lost, familiarity with oneâs immediate surroundings is lost; weâre already so far gone in our respective niches, and customer service already at such a low, that nothingâs really changed in this situation. But is there still something to the suspicion that acceptance and constant employment of these tools pushes users to a different sense of how Things Really Are? In other words, has a cloud-dependent life constructed an intellectual realm in which those who stay on the ground are thought to be operating outside a sense of real reality, something even more extreme than the smash-up antics of Luddites just trying to save their jobs based in manual labor?
The âtoolsâ that drove my high school classmateâs objection to accepted science were a Protestant Bible and her church communityâs interpretation of it: human constructions, unreliant on ostensibly objective technologies to make a case for prevailing conditions and how best (most efficiently!) to move through them. In excusing herself from the class that day, she was both making her own decision and not, shutting down (exposure to) one conversation in favor of adhering to another. And in some real sense, she had a choice to make: stay or leave, going about her life either way. The last I heard, she was still, thirty years down the line, attending a super-conservative church that continues to spit on the idea of evolutionâand also continues to thrive in a consumerist society. And that church makes use of all the technologies and social media tools that celebrate that same society, to which, by the way, they say they so strenuously object. My classmate and her community, in other words, make their metaphysical choices while still fully functioning in the world around them. Exempt from chemistry for one day, she was still able to receive an education, and take advantage of all the social and other opportunities school offered.
The increasing adoptionâuniversalizationâof things like QR codes and life on a smartphone, though: will my own choice not to participate in such things mean that existence in contemporary society will be more difficult even than it would be for someone who doesnât buy into an accepted picture of the physical nature and history of the universe? All my classmateâs practices, after all, merely required a statement of conviction and a refusal to engage in one particular discussion, a refusal that, again, didnât exile her from the rest of class, school, or the paths a high school diploma would open. Whether or not she believes in the sciences that delivered her car or her air conditioning or her phone or LinkedIn account, she uses those products of said sciences. She can believe whatever she wants; as long as her practical activities are in line with the norm, all will be well. The trouble is, in spite of my acceptance of the sciencesâbiological and others that often produce all sorts of gadgetryâmy outdated convictions influence my current practicesâoddly enough, maybe more in line with the way a few religious communities (Amish or Mennonite or Hasidic, perhaps) arenât just going to go along with the average contemporary Joeâs habits and customs.
I havenât arrived at any conclusion, though Iâve long believed I wouldâve run for the reservation in Brave New World rather than settle for that settingâs reigning realities. Maybe itâs too soon to tell who will ultimately be included or excluded from Reality, or whether we can or will have to draw clear lines and separate ourselves off into different isolated communities, or whether a crisis of resources will finally just shut down all our energy-intensive servers and the machines that depend on them, mooting the bigger conundrum. But I think my larger question is this: do (or should) we define reality via the metaphysical convictions and/or beliefs that we hold (in which case, for example, believing Jesus is my one true lord and savior is all that matters, and I can then proceed to be as shitty a human as possible, with no adverse consequence for my eternal soul), or is reality defined by (some agreement about) how we engage practically with the world around us (so that I donât buy into the religious conviction stated above, but do my damnedest to treat all beings and surroundings with respect and care, because we share a reality)? And/or some combination of the above or more? Again, itâs hardly a new demand, and one that wonât be solved any time soon, if ever. But sucks to the QR code until then.