The Blind Giant (24 page)

In the social sciences there is a somewhat circular debate about agency, or, more plainly, how things happen in the human world. Do individuals have the power to change things? Or are we simply at the mercy of forces in the economy and in demographics that are so vast as to be imponderable? Are we capable of changing the course of events, or do events spring from interactions so complex and weighty that no one could hope to understand, let alone alter, the flow? Perhaps one of the most obvious examples is the question of whether revolutions are the product of heroic individuals working to undermine the established order, or whether they come as a consequence of giant structural forces that cannot be provoked, speeded or slowed.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote that ‘revolutions are not made, they come’, but one might argue that he successfully initiated, transformed and perhaps ultimately betrayed one of the most extraordinary uprisings of the twentieth century.

In ordinary life, we tend at the moment to accept that there are structural forces that act upon us and which we cannot influence.
We have been told repeatedly that the banking crisis, for example, was a structural problem, a great institutional madness in which the poor decisions of a few were somehow magnified to create a seismic collapse. But it’s also true – and increasingly obvious – that we are part of these structural forces ourselves. We are bits of the group, and the changes in the group’s structure are those forces we hear so much about.

The idea of the human being as part of a structure makes people profoundly uncomfortable. It plays to images of ant colonies and slavery, notions of the loss of self. That’s cultural, though, and relatively recent. The industrial world’s sense of what we are as humans has moved further and further over the last decades towards the idea of a single person as being complete. It’s a posture that defines our politics – in the form of our freedoms – and our morality. Where previous generations might have responded, in line with the various touchstones by which they identified themselves and located themselves in the matrix of social and cosmological truths as they understood it, that the most significant unit was the family (Margaret Thatcher’s infamous statement on the subject of social organization, which I mentioned earlier, was more properly: ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families’), the state, or the Church, we assume it is the singular human. Some cultures, including subcultures in the industrialized north-west, still feel more collective than not, but in the UK and US as well as elsewhere we generally make our rules and our decisions on the basis of individualism. It’s an ethos that meshes well with the particularly brassy form of free market capitalism presently fashionable, which exalts the risk-taker, the money-maker and the creator of personal wealth over the steward, the good citizen and the bringer of wider prosperity.

The lineage of this combination goes back from the present day by way of Gordon Gekko, the fictional 1980s financial mogul portrayed by
Michael Douglas in
Wall Street –
or through the real life equivalents of Gekko – to the controversial Russian-American writer
Ayn Rand and her disciples in American public life (notably including
Alan Greenspan, chairman of the US Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006) to
Ralph Waldo Emerson (the philosopher of self-reliance who grudged ‘the dollar, the dime, the cent as I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong’) and on into the diffuse origins of our capitalist world and the Protestant work ethic of which it has subsequently been stripped.

It is, however, not the only way of seeing things, or even necessarily the most persuasive. A single human being, after all, cannot reproduce; in fact, it’s hard to determine a minimum viable population for human beings. Estimates range from the fifteen who resettled the island of Tristan da Cunha some time in the 1800s (the population today is somewhat below 300, with a high incidence of asthma derived most probably from three of the original colonists who had the condition) to a more robust 3,000, as proposed in a 2007 article in the journal
Biological Conservation
. Somewhere in that range, presumably, is a number that represents the smallest number of humans necessary to sustain the species and in a way, therefore, the minimum human unit. You could also look at the number of plants required to sustain breatheable air for a single person, the animal and vegetable ecosystem necessary to provide food, and the minimum amount of water and the means to recycle it. A human taken out of context is essentially a corpse.

While that discussion is interesting, and works to prise us away from the knee-jerk response, it doesn’t really answer the question of what the basic building block of human society is. It’s obvious we don’t think of human life as being purely a question of genetic self-propagation. While we hold children in high regard,
we don’t generally feel that an individual, having reproduced, no longer has any point to their existence. Similarly, we would not acknowledge the identical twin (or for that matter the clone) of a given person as the actual individual. We would say that they were genetically identical, but still distinct. We would point to the minds and the experiences of two separate people. At some point in the development of the species, we became in effect two things at once: a physical self, which is replicated by sexual reproduction, and a mental self, an identity of ideas, which cannot directly reproduce in the sense that consciousness cannot be split and recombined, but which is composed of concepts that can absolutely spread by discussion, narrative and sharing. This mental self – however much it is bound to the physical one and emerges from it – is the one that we supplement with our digital devices and which we have extended beyond the body into journals, books, artworks and now digital technologies.

I don’t wish to imply a literal dualism here. Absent some startling scientific evidence to the contrary, my assumption is that the mind is an artefact of the brain, a fizzing system of conscious cognition, unconscious drives and biological imperatives, all overlapping and intermingled to produce us. (I also don’t mean to rule out the terrifying, splendid possibilities of advanced organ cloning and high technology to replace broken parts of a given brain. It’s not that a mind is anchored irrevocably to a particular collection of cells, or that someone with a chip replacing an aspect of the brain would suddenly be non-human; rather, the mind emerges from the brain’s encounter with the world. What happens thereafter is the adventure.)

That said, many scholars trace the development of the modern individual – and to a certain extent also the modern brain – from the arrival of the phonetic alphabet. According to Derrick de Kerckhove in
The Augmented Mind
, the adoption of silent reading, the final stage of the arrival of text, ‘helped to turn speakers into thinkers and critics’. The word was fixed, and could be
examined; and along with it, everything else, as well.
Maryanne Wolf writes that ‘The implications of cognitive automaticity for human intellectual development are potentially staggering. If we can recognise symbols at almost automatic speeds, we can allocate more time to mental processes that are continuously expanding when we read and write. The efficient reading brain,’ Wolf explains, ‘quite literally has more time to think.’

It may also be that the brain has trouble working on concepts for which it has no linguistic template. A 2004 study conducted by
Peter Gordon of Columbia University showed that ‘hunter-gatherers from the Pirahã tribe, whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration,’
³
suggesting that someone without language to describe a given concept may not be able to understand or learn that concept. Attempts to teach the Pirahã to count in Portuguese (they live in territory claimed by Brazil) were unsuccessful.

So does that mean there are two aspects of human life, one biological, which requires a large-ish pool to sustain itself, and one mental, which is the product of the brain’s encounter with the world? It’s not even clear that the modern mind can exist alone. The development of language requires a partner to communicate with and to act as a check; without someone to talk to, our grip on the meaning of words shifts with surprising rapidity. More, the individual is from birth engaged in dialogue, in an exchange of gesture and affection with parent or carer that is so much a thing of interplay and rhythm that some researchers have characterized it as ‘communicative musicality’. This protoconversation, preceding the development of language, is our first experience of life, and we live it as part of a small community rather than as a lone individual.

Without language, in turn, some forms of abstract thought are difficult or impossible. ‘Language’ in this context need not be
spoken; it can be a language of signs or text. A study of a deaf community in Nicaragua
⁴
compared two generations and found that members of the newer generation, whose system of sign language was more complex and expressive, were better able to pass what psychologists call a ‘false belief’ test. (In the test, subjects are shown a sequence of events in which two children are playing. One child puts a toy in a particular place and leaves the room. The other then moves the toy to a new location. The test question is: where will the first child look for the toy upon returning to the room? Children under four will answer with the location the toy is in now; older kids realize that the returning child can have no knowledge of the other’s prank, and will look where the toy was when they left.) The implication of the Nicaragua study is that it is harder to develop a full sense of the existence of other, independent minds without a robust and complex system of language.

The modern thinking self, which understands itself to be separate from others and knows that their perspective differs from its own, is obtained to a great degree through language, and therefore to a great extent through discourse, meaning once more that to be a complete, rational human being in the sense of how we usually understand the words, you need people around you to interact with. Which means, in turn, that while we experience the world as individuals, we come to it as individuals who are part of a group. And increasingly, we can use our digital technologies to monitor that group and assess our position in it and relative to it in real time, taking decisions not based on what has already happened and cannot be undone, but on what is happening and what we actually want.

Feedback is a simple enough notion, and easy to implement, but it has profound consequences. That sense of complexity we experience, of a world out of control, doesn’t come from digital technologies, but from the access they afford us, and the dawning realization that many of our actions have consequences far
beyond the venue where we do them. The difficulty now lies in finding responses that produce the results we want; and there, too, feedback is helpful. Just as you visually check the position of your hand when trying to manipulate something very small, so we can guide our response with real-time feedback, and make sure it’s achieving what we hope for.

One area of the digital realm I’m uncomfortable with is the design of our actual devices and their lack of uniqueness or narrative.
John Ruskin argued in 1853 that machined perfection of form in physical objects was an assault on the human soul. The human was flawed, Ruskin said, and we should accept that and cherish it. For him, the precise lines of industrial processes were unwholesome, speaking of objects rather than people, and diminishing the value of man.