The Machine Pauses
“Mental health cannot be defined in terms of the &quot;adjustment&quot; of the individual to his society, but, on the other hand, that it must be defined in terms of the society to the needs of man, of its role in furthering or hindering the development of mental health. Whether or not the individual is healthy, is primarily not an individual matter, but depends on the structure of his society.”<p>― Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955)<p>“Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is &quot;no exit&quot;; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology again to find the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years. . . . In our cities there is no more day or night or heat or cold. But there is overpopulation, thralldom to press and television, total absence of purpose. All men are constrained by means external to them to ends equally external. The further the technical mechanism develops that allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities.”<p>― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1954)<p>“What is more, the whole apparatus of life has become so complex and the processes of production, distribution, and consumption have become so specialized and subdivided, that the individual person loses confidence in his own unaided capacities: he is increasingly subject to commands he does not understand, at the mercy of forces over which he exercises no effective control, moving to a destination he has not chosen. Unlike the taboo-ridden savage, who is often childishly over-confident in the powers of his shaman or magician to control formidable natural forces, however inimical, the machine-conditioned individual feels lost and helpless as day by day he metaphorically punches his time-card, takes his place on the assembly line, and at the end draws a pay check that proves worthless for obtaining any of the genuine goods of life.<p>This lack of close personal involvement in the daily routine brings a general loss of contact with reality: instead of continuous interplay between the inner and the outer world, with constant feedback or readjustment and with stimulus to fresh creativity, only the outer world-and mainly the collectively organized outer world of the power system-exercises authority: even private dreams must be channeled through television, film, and disc, in order to become acceptable.<p>With this feeling of alienation goes the typical psychological problem of our time, characterized in classic terms by Erik Erikson as the &#x27;Identity Crisis.&#x27; In a world of transitory family nurture, transitory human contacts, transitory jobs and places of residence, transitory sexual and family relations, the basic conditions for maintaining continuity and establishing personal equilibrium disappear. The individual suddenly awakens, as Tolstoi did in a famous crisis in his own life at Arzamas, to find himself in a strange, dark room, far from home, threatened by obscure hostile forces, unable to discover where he is or who he is, appalled by the prospect of a meaningless death at the end of a meaningless life.”<p>― Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power (1964)<p>&quot;On all sides man was continually made to feel the natural limitations of earthly well-being. The efficient ministering of the technical, hygienic and sanitary appliances with which man has surrounded himself is spoiling him. He is losing the good-humored resignation in the daily imperfections of human well-being which formed the disciple of earlier generations.<p>But at the same time he runs the risk of losing the natural ability to take human happiness as it offers itself, as well. Life is made too easy. Mankind’s moral fiber is giving way under the softening influence of luxury. In earlier civilizations, whether Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or any other, there was always this in contrast: in principle the value of earthly happiness is deprecated relatively to celestial bliss or union with the All. As all these religions, however, do recognize a relative worth of early pleasures, and consider them as God-given, denial of the value of life meant ingratitude. It was the very realization
of the precariousness of every moment of human well-being which caused it to be appreciated at its true value.<p>In the present there is a contrast also, but it is a very different one. The increase of security, of comfort, and of the possibilities of want-gratification, in short the greater ease of living has had two results: On the one hand, it has prepared the soil for all forms of renunciation of life: philosophical denial of its value, purely emotive spleen or aversion from life; on the other, it has installed the belief
in the right to happiness. It has made people expect things from life. Related to this there is another contrast. The ambivalent attitude which wavers between the renunciation and the enjoyment of life is peculiar to the individual alone. The community, however, without hesitation and with more
conviction than ever before, accepts earthly life as the object of all striving and action. It is indeed a true worship of life.<p>Now it is a question for serious consideration whether any advanced culture can survive without a certain measure of orientation to Death. The great civilizations of the past have all had it. There are signs that the philosophical thought of today is also coming to it. It seems only logical, more over, that a philosophy which rates “living” above “knowing” should also include the end of life in its
vision.&quot;<p>― Johan Huizinga, In the Shadow of Tomorrow (1936)