Back to my blog after some professional and personal interruptions. I thought I’d begin again by talking about the way many people so readily embrace the new technologies that stream out of software and hardware  companies and into their lives. Most dismiss objections about the changes in our lives, in our relationships—indeed in our brains— that those new technologies may trigger.  For better or worse, it’s inevitable, people say. Stopping the changes, or even the rate of change, is impossible now. Many pundits and members of the digerati enjoy not just defining the current trends but also predicting the future, whether it be the next new thing or a broad vision of social change over the upcoming twenty years or more.

But is it all inevitable? I recently came across another take on the issue of inevitability and the impossibility of stopping the relentless march of change over time. In Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the narrator reflects on the consensus in his intellectual circle in Munich that as the 1930s unfolded, Germany was in for “hard and dark times
that would scoff at humanity, for an age of great wars and sweeping revolution, presumably leading far back beyond the Christian civilization of the Middle Ages and restoring instead the Dark Ages that preceded its birth and had followed the collapse of antiquity.”

Yet Mann’s narrator observes that no one objected to those conclusions. No one said this dark version of the future must be changed, must be avoided. No one said: ”We must somehow intervene and stop this from happening.” Instead they reveled in the cleverness of their insights, in their recognition of the facts and their inevitable results. They said: “’It’s coming. It’s coming, and once it’s here we will find ourselves at the crest of the moment. It is interesting, it is even good—simply because it is what is coming, and to recognize that fact is both achievement and enjoyment enough. It is not up to us to take measures against it as well.’”

It is a predicament well worth remembering, I believe, as we listen to our own technology enthusiasts. Our dark age ahead my not have death camps and atomic bombs but it has the possibility of being just as pernicious and inhumane. It could well be a time where in celebrating the wonders of technology we ignore what is the best essence of what it means to be human. We would do well to consider our choices while we still can.

Take your pick: Do you like the continual sounds from your smartphone announcing yet-another text message or phone call, or would you rather opt for an hour or so of listening to Mahler or watching whirling dervishes from Istanbul? 

There appears to be a wave of spirituality gaining force in the classical music world. And it is in part in reaction to our heavily technologized modern lifestyle. As Lincoln Center’s Artistic Director Jane Moss sees it,  the ubiquitous cacophony of cellphones, smartphones, and other digital gadgets is not only enormously seductive, but it is also  a
barrier to having a full interior life: “People are looking for larger experiences in a cyberworld” that has become more and more “like eating candy.” She has organized an annual White Light Festival in New York as a way to give
audiences a chance to experience “transcendence.” Moss stressed that the  festival is not about sacred music but about transcendence.  This year’s festival offers seventeen offerings from various international individual  performers and groups from a French Baroque ensemble to Indian Sufi mystics to contemporary American composers, along with many classics from the Western tradition. 

Other organizations are joining in: The annual Salzburg Festival, now the summer home of the Vienna Philharmonic, this year added a 10-day Spiritual Overture to its program while the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland has created a summer festival simply called “Faith.” A “Credo”series in that program  explores religions of seven different spiritual visions from the perspective that every religion is legitimate and each is only an approximation of what ultimately remains unexpressed. And the Pittsburgh Symphony is expanding its offering of a program it calls Music of the Spirit, an annual set of performances that is designed to show the symphony’s “deep commitment to
promoting and spreading a spiritual and universal message.”

Joseph Campbell, writing from the 1950s through the 1980s in the field of comparative mythology, could not possibly have foreseen how technology would permeate our lives as it does today, yet he did observe even
then that people had generally lost the ability to think and feel in metaphorical terms: “Our thinking is largely discursive, verbal, linear,” he told Bill Moyers in the conversations that were eventually aired on PBS and
published as  The Power of Myth. “One of the problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We’re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour.” Were Campbell alive today, he might in addition have observed that we are so tethered to our digital machines and gadgets that we have no time for an inner life at all and may well be losing the capacity to ever develop one.

Campbell did not believe that contemporary society had a living functioning mythology.  And it is myths, as he points out, that provide “clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life.” The deep vitality of a culture’s mythology comes from the power of “its symbols as metaphors, delivering not simply the idea, but a sense of the actual participation in such a realization of transcendence,” he wrote late in his life in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space. If we were to have a new mythology in the future, he believed it would be up to the artists to create it, and he also believed that it would have to be a global mythology, taking into account and trying to express the rapture and the wonder of what it is like to be alive as human beings on this planet Earth within our solar system and “the cluster of twenty galaxies of which our galaxy is a member, which local cluster, in turn, is represented as but one of thousands of such local clusters of galaxies, themselves gathered in superclusters in a universe whose limits are not yet known.” Although Campbell focused primarily on the art of literature and story-telling, I think he would see good signs in how various musical organizations in the US and Europe are starting to offer programs that combine
Western and Eastern spiritual traditions, offering transcendence and the richness of a strong inner spiritual life through art in their own medium.

“I am a multitasker,” my ten-year-old niece declared with a triumphant grin at a recent family get-together. I was horrified, frankly. After all the neuroscientists have been telling us lately about the limitations of our working memory—most people can only hold about seven items in  their working memory at any given moment—and about how switching back and forth between tasks actually makes people more inefficient, I was appalled to see a  member of our younger generation expressing multitasking as a positive achievement and a model for how to negotiate life.

If recent surveys and current trends are any indication, by the time my niece is 15, she will be checking her Facebook account, watching TV, texting several friends, and doing her homework in a rapid cycle of sequences for seven or eight or more hours per day. She will have acquired 365 friends on Facebook and sleep with her cell phone under her pillow. She will spend a great deal of her time tethered to her machines, alone, “communicating” with others through a truncated set of texting words, abbreviations, and acronyms. The closest she might come on some days to deep emotion will be expressed in a string of emoticons. Her time alone will resemble not solitude, where some contemplation of oneself and one’s life might occur. Rather it will be more of a muffled isolation within an electronic cocoon.

What draws people to the spell of multitasking? Why is this goal so valued as a continuous activity today? I think it began with a  set of metaphors that started making their way into our language, probably in the 1970s, possibly even earlier. I was first personally struck when I was having a conversation with a businessman  conversant with computer programming as he described how he “interfaced” with his client. When I asked him what he meant by “interface,” he told me he meant how people connected, just like the 8- or 12-pronged plugs that connected a
  computer terminal to a mainframe. By the 70s, we began to speak and think of some mechanical aspects of human thinking. By the eighties, the use of computer terminology to describe human thought became commonplace. We “processed” information. We “transferred” knowledge. We “crunched” the numbers. In short, we began to think of ourselves more as calculators than as people. Multiprocessing seemed a natural after that.

With the ubiquity of digital devices today, people have begun to emulate the microprocessors with which they share their lives. They have adopted the rhythm of the multitasking, breaking down large tasks into smaller steps and
processing multiple activities in a nearly simultaneous way. There are many problems with these analogies and the changes in our behavior they foster, but I’ll just mention two. One, we humans are not made to be multitaskers. We
basically can do only one relatively involved task at a time (most of us can walk and chew gum at the same time, but that’s different from activities that require real focus). The second problem involves the whole idea of equating
human activity with computers. It leaves out very large parts of what makes us human in the first place: creativity, self-awareness, morality, and our abilities to love, trust, empathize, grieve, and experience a whole range of
emotions that machines can never understand. All these experiences color our thoughts, one would hope, and make them more deeply human along the way.

“The world without spirit  is a wasteland. . . . What is the nature of a wasteland? It is a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you’re told, with no courage for your own life. “ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Reality is broken, and video gaming may well provide a way for fixing it, according to Jane McGonigal, a game designer and author of Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. The subtitle actually sums up the argument for the book. McGonigal argues that playing video games can help people find their core strengths. Essentially she believes that one can use video gaming as positive psychology therapy to learn how to become more optimistic, proactive, engaged, and creative in solving real-world problems. Not surprisingly the heroes in her book are the video game designers. She believes they can inspire people to give their lives more meaning and lead them to believe they are participating in epic actions, epic lives. She also suggests that people are likely to be more optimistic if they create alternate reality games in real life based on their favorite superhero mythology.

However, it is the subject of the main title, this  so-called“brokenness” of reality that provides a real clue to the mythology of  our time.  Reality (that is, real life) is disappointing, and in a series of bold statements, McGonigal tells us just how reality is failing us and why games are better. Here’s a sample:

 “Compared with games, reality is too easy. Games challenge us with the voluntary obstacles and help us put our personal strengths to better use.” Behind this statement is the sad and abiding idea that our real lives are boring, our real work an involuntary burden of unwanted tasks done at someone else’s bidding. “We are wasting our lives,” McGonigal explains.

And again:

“Compared with games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, hands-on work.” Reality it seems  is  unstructured and offers few if any opportunities for satisfying work. Again, the work of our everyday lives is inherently tedious and the goals often ill-defined and hard to figure out.

One last sample:

“Compared with games, reality is disconnected. Games build strong social bonds and lead to more active social networks.” Real life is isolating, the author says. She cites the demise of extended communities in our everyday lives and refers to Robert Putnam’s landmark work Bowling Alone (2000) about the collapse of organizations and civic participation in the latter part of the twentieth century.

McGonigal argues that video gaming and alternate reality games can be powerful paths to help boost happiness, improve problem-solving and perseverance, and even provide sparks of a sense of community, all of which can
be applied to real-world experiences. To be sure, games of all sorts can be fun and give players a change of pace and respite from the responsibilities of life. But McGonigal goes way beyond the fun part. She is right in saying that we need to take games more seriously, that they are not just an evil force in society offering opportunities for people to waste their time or play incessantly and additively. But it is questionable whether she is also right in claiming that
video games are truly transformational and provide positive experiences that can influence the way people act and think in their real lives away from the video game screen. Her evidence is anecdotal and largely unconvincing.

In the end, it is McGonigal’s perspective is truly askew. Reality isn’t broken. It’s the relationship between people’s inner lives and their external reality that is out of whack. Life is complex, messy, full of demands, disappointments, inconveniences, and responsibilities. Virtual worlds and  gmes, on the other hand, offer more structure, clearer goals, and hence new ways to feel successful and to communicate. But this does not by any means lead to authentic living. In the mid-1980s, the renowned mythology expert Joseph Campbell observed that many people were leading inauthentic lives. He said that they weren’t connected to their own inner spirit. Nor did they have a sense of the fundamental mystery of life in general. Without a sense of who they really were and their place in the universe, it was not possible to be genuinely engaged with others. And all this basis for leading an authentic life, Campbell
wrote repeatedly, is what a living myth can provide.

Reality may seem broken for video gamers because the life on the screen is so vivid, so complete in its opportunity for vicarious heroism. It is  the land of superheros and super tasks, mythological in the sense that  characters and events are larger than life. But these things are not representative of a living mythology, which would inspire inward illumination and outer wonder through its symbols and narratives about modern life. “Myths inspire the realization of the possibility of your perfection, the fullness of your strength, and the bringing of solar light into the world. Slaying monsters [and here Joseph Campbell meant slaying the monsters within the individual] is slaying the dark things.” Campbell told Bill Moyers. “Myths grab you somewhere down inside.” Video games may excite, may amuse, may well elevate one’s mood, but they do not hit you down deep within your spirit. They do not change your life as Campbell defined it when he spoke of living myths.

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I  don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an  experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we  actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about,  and that’s what these clues in myths help us to find within ourselves. . . .   Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.   . . . We need myths [today] that will identify the individual not with is  local group but with the planet.” Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

For many today, the Internet seems to be a powerful presence. Why does it have such a deep resonance within our imaginations? How has it become so central to our contemporary life? And what does that say about the lives we live and our values? People find the phenomenon of the Web full of possibilities. Many believe that there’s something magical in its very existence and that it offers access to knowledge and powerful modes of communication that are fundamentally different from what we have had in the past. There is also the pervading sense that the Internet is changing us, both individually and communally, in very important ways. 

One way of understanding the role of the Internet in our culture is to consider it as a metaphor and potentially part of a mythology that expresses some essence of what it means to be alive today. Many envision the Internet as an ever-expanding, boundless entity with near-infinite connections both to other people and to sources of knowledge. And this powerful pull of the Internet seems to me to come from its similarities both to our sense of our
outer world—that ever-expanding universe of which we are such a minute part—and to our inner world—the endless depth of our own psyche, imagination, and unconscious with its potential links to communal metaphors and myths. Both these worlds, the outer and the inner, are ineffable, boundless, and to a certain
extent mysterious, unknowable. 

The Internet shares these characteristics and hence seems to offer a similar potential for knowledge, insight, even adventure. It’s cyberspace, after all, a place for journeys. One clicks on an icon (our computers do have their own “iconographies,” just as mythologies do). Microsoft Windows offers users an “Explorer” program to cross the threshold into the vast and unknown space called the Internet. The potential seen in the boundless, gargantuan phenomenon of the Web leads many people to make large claims: Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired,
calls the Internet a “planetary computer,” a “global computer,” and even a “large-scale sentience” with a distributed and vast intelligence that grows “smarter” by the second as millions of users provide evermore information merely
by clicking on a specific website because, in so doing, they indicate their preferences, their interests.

Is there transcendence here, one might ask, the kind of move beyond our ordinary life toward the ultimate mystery of the universe and the source of life itself? Kevin Kelly and others seem to think this is possible, that there is the promise of ultimate knowledge, the unknowable, in the Internet: “Currently,” he writes in What Technology Wants, “we are prejudiced against machines, because all the machines we have met so far have  been uninteresting. As they gain in sentience, that won’t be true,” Kelly writes. “What technology wants is increasing sentience. This does not mean evolution will move us only toward one universal supermind. Rather in the course of time the technium tends to self-organize into as many varieties of mind as is possible. . . The universe is so huge, so vast in its available mysteries, that it will require every possible type of mind to comprehend it. The technium’s job  is to invent a million or a billion varieties of  comprehension.”

Much hinges on what Kelly means by technium, a word he coined because he found that “culture” was too “small” and does not for him convey a sense of “self-propelling momentum.” (I would point out that the word "culture" is also associated with organic growth.) Kelly reaches towards a new kind of mystical sense in defining his technium: it is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us.” And this is not just
hardware and software, but all “culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations” along with this impulse (and here he quite anthropomorphizes technology) of essentially “what technology wants,” which is to generate more technology, more inventions, more connections. For Kelly, as for many enthusiasts of the Internet, the “technium” seems to be alive. But is it? And is it truly self-organizing, or is it just some version of Larry Paige
 standing behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz?

But the real question at the end of the day about what this technology “wants” is: does it have any place left for humanity and the spiritual potential that Joseph Campbell alludes to when he talks about the myths human beings create out of their own dreams, their own imaginations, their own psyches. Or is this new myth a myth of the machine as an all-knowing  and all-powerful deity—in short, a god? Or maybe it’s just all that smoke and mirrors, concocting something rather more illusory than elusive.

I recently had a chance to revisit a wonderful series  of conversations Bill Moyers had with Joseph Campbell, a renowned and innovative  scholar of comparative mythology, a long-time teacher at Sarah Lawrence, and  the author of many books, beginning with The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1948). The Moyers conversations, called The Power of Myth, originally aired on PBS in the late eighties. But now, even twenty-five years later, there is much
rich, relevant material in those programs and in a companion book that includes all twenty-four hours of those talks, which were whittled down to a mere six hours for the PBS series itself. 

Campbell and Moyers spoke over a period of two years at George Lukas’s Skywalker Ranch and later at the Museum of Natural History in New York. In the course of their talks, Joseph Campbell repeated several times in
different contexts that our contemporary life had no relevant myths. Things were changing too fast, he believed, for a mythology to form. He defined myths as metaphors, stories that harmonize our lives with reality. They express the experience of living in terms that are appropriate for a specific time. But our lives have essentially been demythologized in the latter part of the twentieth century (and perhaps even earlier). Yet the old myths are still useful as guides, Campbell always maintained; they provide messages and hints about what  it means to be alive. 

Various journalists, scholars, and innovative thinkers today are writing about the nature of our life today and how we can accommodate the prevailing technology and flood of information and live successfully amid all of it. In effect, they are attempting to articulate various parts of the dominant symbols, metaphors, and stories—a mythology of sorts for today. And so  I thought it would be interesting to use this blog to explore some these  writings within the context of mythology as Campbell defined it and to bring some of his wisdom to bear on the problem of how we live in this world of the early twenty-first century.

One of the most powerful symbols of our time is of  course the Internet, also known as the World Wide Web or just the Web, and it is having a profound influence on the way we think about things. Daniel Weinberger, whose book Too Big to Know I reviewed on January 24th of this year the shape and nature of knowledge: Human knowledge, Weinberger argues, is assuming the shape of—and the scale of—the Internet. One solution to the resulting information overload, then, is to build not hierarchies but networks. Weinberger claims this is a serious shift in knowledge itself (although I believe it may be more of a shift in our approach to perceiving and manage information). Weinberger writes: “The Internet’s abundant capacity has removed the old artificial constraints on publishing—including getting our content checked and verified.”In case you don’t think this is necessarily a good thing, he expands on this vision: “The new strategy of publishing everything we find thus results in an immense cloud of data, free of theory, published before verified, and available to anyone with an Internet connection.”

This may sound a bit like the Wikipedia version of knowledge, but with less rigorous rules. In fact, it closely  resembles a free-for-all of  knowledge. Weinberger sees the structure of the Internet changing our  understanding of scientific facts. He claims that authority no longer reigns, even in scientific research, because truth is always being debated and revised. But that has been the nature of science for centuries, as science learns more and more about the world around us. Weinberger claims we can best learn to use the Net by understanding that authority, or the truth, is “the last page in the linked chain you visit” does not follow. But this seems to be to be more whimsy
than anything else. In fact, given the uneven level of the quality of information one can find on the Internet, it simply doesn’t make sense to say that the last page is the final word on a given topic. The last page could be
completely specious, contradicting many highly informative pages that preceded  it. 

The idea that only now is knowledge networked is also very questionable. As C.W. Anderson points out in his review in The Atlantic of Too Big To Know, knowledge has always been networked, just not electronically. Using the example of finding the population of Pittsburg in 1983 in an almanac, Anderson writes: “What do
almanacs, census bureaus, government funding streams, volunteers, the notebooks volunteers carry, and libraries amount to, if not a network?” So too I would point out that learning has never been a linear process. As one researches a topic, one might move from a chapter in one book to a journal article to three books on the topic and on and on until one is satisfied of the grasp of the knowledge available. It wasn’t as easy as clicking on links but it was always a process of exploration with some serendipity and surprise always bound to be part of the experience. 

Nevertheless, Weinberger’s whole thesis is representative of a growing body of literature that derives its energy, its
vision, and its sense of mystery (often verging on mysticism) from the image of the Internet, and this phenomenon in itself bears more close examination. Is this the beginning of a new mythology, a new set of symbols and stories that help us explain to ourselves and each other what it means to experience life today?  Or is it just an overreaction to a powerful but essentially mechanistic intrusion of new electronic capabilities into our environment? Moyers writes that the last time he saw Joseph Campbell, he asked him if he still believed “that we are at this moment participating in one of the very greatest leaps of the human spirit to a knowledge not only of outside nature but also of our own deep inward mystery.” Campbell thought about that for a moment and then replied, “The greatest ever.”
Perhaps the next phase is always the greatest ever, when it comes to science.  I’m not sure our grounding in our own human spirits though is making a comparable leap forward however. 
See also:  Joseph Campbell Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving his memory and  works, including making available a large collection on work unpublished during his lifetime.
  .

Yesterday I attended a conference on social networking at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and was once again struck with how absolutely overwhelmed and engulfed our modern lives are with digital machines and  technology. They are omnipresent. We carry them with us wherever we go. We  transact business through them. We communicate with friends and family and even  with that larger amorphous network of acquaintances and distant mutual friends  and their mutual acquaintances. And if we are honest, most of us will admit that  we even take those devices into our bedrooms with us when we retire for the  night. It is now so easy for our lives, our minute-to-minute experience of life,  to become permeated and mediated by our technologies. 

The conference, “Are Social Networks Really Social? was sponsored jointly by the museum and the Boston Institute for Psychotherapy so I would guess therapists of various sorts were in the overwhelming majority. But  there were more ordinary folk like myself who came out of curiosity to hear  three speakers on the topic of social media: (1) a psychologist and author who specializes in technology, Sherry Turkle, (2)  a  novelist, Helen Schulman, who has written about the nature and consequences of all things digital on the lives of ordinary families, and (3) an artist, Rachel Perry Welty, who has explored media like Facebook and Twitter as performance spaces. Over a long and rich afternoon those speakers and the audience pondered how social media—everything from email to smartphones to  Facebook—affects both our relationships with others and our own psyches. There  was a general consternation, even fear, and some sadness too, about how distracted, unfocused, and isolated individuals are becoming in our society. 

Many ramifications of such behavior came up: People are less productive, and they’re less capable of sustained and complex thinking. Some observed that there’s an intolerance, perhaps even an inability to actually cultivate
solitude. Not unrelated is a strong tendency to avoid, even again to fear, having direct conversations with others. And this of course leads to a lack of intimacy as well as empathy. Sherry Turkle worries that many people are actually substituting “connections” for “conversations.”

I’m thinking it may even be worse than that because when people post some thoughts on Facebook, send out a Tweet, or text someone, they are often not “connecting” so much as they are “performing.” My own experience with
Facebook and its current invitation to participate: “What on your mind?”is that it is a site for self-promotion, or as Norman Mailer once humbly (or maybe wryly) called a collection of his short works: “Advertisements for Myself.”
(Mailer was very good at the self-promotion thing, well before 2.0.)

The Yale computer scientist David Gelernter recently wrote a diatribe in The Wall Street Journal primarily against the careless disposable nature of “digital words,” and how sloppy and lazy (and idiotic) texting and smiley faces
really are. Yes, I agree that it’s all regrettable and one can only hope that everyone will come to their senses eventually. But what is even more interesting is Gelernter’s observation that “Generation-i is stuck in then“now,” neither pondering the past nor planning for the future. It’s the permeation and flow of the continuously new. “Merely glance at any digital gadget and you learn immediately what all your friends are doing, seeing, hearing, 
.  .  .  and (if you care) what’s going on now any place on earth. The whole world is screaming at you. Under the circumstances, young people abandon themselves to the present. Group narcissism takes over, as Generation–i falls in love with its own image reflected on the surface of the
cybersphere.”

Group narcissism. It seems we have far more of this phenomenon than we do of wise crowds and smart mobs. But it’s not clinical narcissism, which is a serious personality disorder characterized by dramatic emotional
behavior, a deep need for admiration, an inflated sense of self-importance, and an underlying fragile esteem for oneself. No this narcissism refers to the simpler classical myth of the beautiful Narcissus, who fell deeply in love with his own image in a pool of water as he drank from it. But he could never embrace or possess the image so rather than relinquish it he lay down by the side of the pool and was gradually consumed by the flame of his own
self-passion.