E-Etiquette and Political Engineering: Edge and Wedge

I devoted my Spring Break to writing for my quarterly journal and (especially) correcting student essays, a stack of about fifty. My wife and son drove to Georgia for a change of scenery: I stayed in the house alone, laboring away like a Trappist monk. Actually, I would have made a pretty good monk. I don’t enjoy being alone particularly, but I am probably more susceptible to its charms and profits than most. Nevertheless, the second half of my very modest break was utterly corrupted by an intrusion from the outside—in the form of e-mail. In business related to my son’s school, I received a very aggressively worded, sometimes quite sarcastic attack from a teacher who thought that I was undercutting his authority with the boy. I found the long rant fairly incoherent (e.g., its very length, since the writer claimed that he didn’t have time to respond to all the pesky e-mails I was sending about my son’s progress—e-mails which uniformly aimed [at a rate of about one every two weeks] at my ascertaining or confirming the teacher’s will rather than undermining it). Yet I could understand why this person would be upset, because a third party—the parent of another student—and shared with him an e-mail wherein I mentioned the teacher as someone whose intentions I had struggled to make out. We are to assume with e-mail, apparently, that every message we send is ripe for distribution to the whole world. There seems to be no such etiquette involved with it as used to bind gentlemen entrusted with a private letter under a stamp.

As for the teacher’s fury, e-mail also seems to have rendered that a little hyperbolic. When I wrote back to inform him that the message he had been shown was not, after all, uncomplimentary, and that I would not be writing anyone connected to this school another e-mail ever again, I received a very pleasant phone call within the hour—the tone of voice, as I told my wife later, for all the world that of the boy next door selling magazines for Boy Scouts. Writing has always allowed me to drift out and down, qualifying and sounding expressions to my heart’s content… but apparently, for this post-literate generation, electronic writing merely hones the spear’s point. It lures the sender to launch missiles and spit venom of a ferocity and velocity that he would never dream of doing face to face.

Just one more witness in a long, long line on behalf of the case that the e-world is “desocializing” us…. We seem readily to fling aside whatever manners we’ve learned as soon as we go online. Restraint takes a holiday, and long pent-up passive aggression is no longer passive.

I read a piece by Robert Kurzweil last week—the highly successful techno-prognosticator whose visions famously spurred Bill Joy to warn us in Wired that robots would inherit the earth. Kurzweil is fair-minded: in the piece, he weighs both pros and cons of the Brave New World where humans actually fuse with robots by dint of the billions of nanobots tweaking their neurons and supplementing their intelligence. What disturbs me most about him is that he lists the following prophecy in the “pro” column: “If we want to enter virtual reality, they [the nanobots] suppress all of the inputs coming from the real senses and replace them with the signals that would be appropriate for the virtual environment.” And again: “We will be able to ‘go’ to these virtual environments by ourselves, or we will meet other people there, both real people and simulated people. Of course, ultimately there won’t be a clear distinction between the two.” I suppose we will be able to throttle or rape these people if the whimsy overtakes us—and exactly which people is anybody’s guess, since we will not know virtual from real. (A full-service pornography site is indeed among one of Kurzweil’s examples of how our future will happily fuse reality and fantasy.) The lessons of an overreaching ego chastened by contact with other beings of freedom will no longer truly be learned, but rather crunched into programming: instead of the warnings of conscience and shame, we shall have the hard-wired code of Political Correctness (for one cannot suppose—unless one is the rosy-spectacled Kurzweil—that Botman will really be allowed to entertain homicidal fantasies: the code will simply quarantine anything of the sort). The very notion of individuality will evaporate… for how can you discover your own borders when you fade in and out—on a whim—of various personalities in various localities? Again, anyone but Kurzweil would foresee that Big Brother will dictate the “individuality paradigm”: that the borders we are allowed to explore, in other words, will be rigidly determined by what is deemed “socially productive”.

The Obama Administration is already skillfully manipulating people by its use of television. (By radio… not so much: but the “Fairness Doctrine” will soon dispose of that unruly medium.) People are being promised cradle-to-grave housing, transportation, schooling, health care, and spending change by the government. New initiatives are afoot to begin government programming of mere toddlers—this in the guise of “universal pre-K”—and to trim away excess drones from the hive—this in a House initiative to revisit and re-legitimize partial birth abortion. Look for a push very soon to grant citizenship to millions who cannot even speak English or read any language; and, shortly thereafter, look for a severe abrogation or cancellation of the right to pass along one’s wealth to one’s children. Little ones must be made to look to the Government for their maintenance: their being entrusted to parents will soon be only provisional, dependent upon said parents’ competence at child-rearing (which will eventually include voting the right way). Do not be too surprised, in fact, if a major war “forces” our President and Fearless Leader to rescind elections indefinitely. I expected Bush to try this… but Bush was truly a Bush Leaguer compared to our present Manipulator-in-Chief.

And in this atmosphere, we are REALLY supposed to believe that electronic communication will set us free? On the contrary, never has technology fused with social meltdown to create such a threat to our freedom and vibrancy as a species, or to our soul as spiritual beings.