Someone writing around 1930 that civilization might be in ruins in about fifteen years, is worth paying attention to even nearly a century later. One such person was Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), whose biography by Maisie Ward I have been reading lately.
Chesterton was unquestionably a genius, but of a type that we are unfamiliar with today. In our science-besotted age, we cannot conceive of geniuses other than the Albert Einstein type: the scientific or technological wizard whose superiority is manifested by the fact that nobody except perhaps a few other geniuses can understand what he or she is doing.
Chesterton wasn't that kind of genius. He was a genius for the masses. His gift was to take everyday things that everyone knew about—sunrises, beer, family affection, work—and look at them in a paradoxical way that made people sit up and see them in a new light. He called himself a journalist, and if writing enough published material to fill a bookshelf several feet long with one's collected works qualifies you to be a journalist, he was not wrong to do so.
But he was so much more than that: philosopher, theologian, controversialist, debater, radio personality, and apologist for Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. Believe it or not, he wrote many things that reflect on current issues in engineering ethics, and I'd like to focus on one quote in particular.
Toward the end of his life, he looked around the England that he loved, and saw how people were being drawn toward what we would now call electronic media (back then, mainly radio and especially sound movies) as a distraction from everyday life. The very word "boredom" dates only from the early 1800s, and seems to be a peculiarly modern malady. By the 1930s, Chesterton saw a danger in the fact that ordinary life, without spicing it up with a distraction that called for the observer to do nothing more than sit back and watch, was seen as increasingly boring. This insight led him to pen the following words, which are quoted from the extensive biography of Chesterton by his friend Maisie Ward:
"Unless we can bring men back to enjoying the daily life which moderns call a dull life, our whole civilization will be in ruins in about fifteen years. Whenever anybody proposes anything really practical, to solve the economic evil today, the answer always is that the solution would not work, because the modern town populations would think life dull. That is because they are entirely unacquainted with life. They know nothing but distractions from life; dreams which may be found in the cinema; that is, brief oblivions of life . . . . Unless we can make daybreak and daily bread and the creative secrets of labour interesting in themselves, there will fall on all our civilisations a fatigue which is the one disease from which civilisations do not recover. So died the great Pagan civilisation; of bread and circuses and forgetfulness of the household gods."
The "economic evil" of which he spoke meant the Great Depression of the 1930s, which was arguably harsher in England than in the United States. What he called for in this passage was not any innovations in technology. While he was in favor of the good which advances in science and technology can produce, he saw that when people are provided with distractions that let them forget about the daily task at hand, they all too often choose the distraction over the task.
This is an ethical issue, and cannot be evaded with the old saw that "technology is neutral—the good and bad lies in how you use it." Moving to today, vast fortunes and huge industries rely on the power of smartphone-enabled technology to divert the attention of billions into channels that profit corporations while delivering distractions that waste time at best. And one of the harms it causes is the tidal wave of depression sweeping over the children and youth of the world—a tidal wave that Australia is attempting to sweep back with their recently-enacted ban on social media for anyone under 16, which took effect on Dec. 10.
I'm pretty sure that Chesterton, once he understood what social media is about, would be in favor of that ban. He might even go so far as to recommend that every smartphone on earth be subjected to the treatment that a Houston private school gives every phone that is confiscated from students who violate their school-day ban on them: slicing in two with a diamond saw.
But the problem isn't just the phones: it's what we have allowed the phones to do to our psyches. When was the last time you sat outside for more than five minutes and did not look at your phone, but instead looked at the world around you? Perhaps it's a busy cityscape. Perhaps it's a field of wheat in the countryside. Perhaps it's a forest. But unless you live in Antarctica or on a desert island, there is life and there are other people around to observe and wonder at.
That was the kind of thing that Chesterton himself could do regardless of where he was, whether in the dullest, dingiest part of London or in the beauty of his countryside home in Beaconsfield. And appreciation for the ordinary aspects of real life is what he saw lacking in the lives of his fellow citizens of England in the 1930s, just fifteen short years before the devastation at the end of World War II.
I'm no prophet, and recycling old prophecies usually doesn't work. But if mass distraction is a sign of civilizational breakdown, and Chesterton called it right in the 1930s, we should at least pause to consider whether radical-seeming steps such as the one Australia is taking may save us from a breakup that will not be World War III, exactly, but might be just as devastating. Already, the political systems of many countries have suffered tremendous damage from the pernicious influence of social media. And worse effects may come.
If the tide is to be turned, it will happen as one person at a time learns how to use technology as a tool, and not allow it to be a master. Put down the phone and spend time with the real world this Christmas—and with people you love.
Sources: The quote above is from Chapter 21 of Maisie Ward's Gilbert Keith Chesterton, originally published in 1942. The Kindle edition I'm reading lacks page numbers or references to the source in Chesterton's voluminous writings.
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