The Schizophrenic Man

If you know anything about history you know that, besides just the drastic change in fashion statements and political structures, our world looks vastly different than the world of the early 1700's. “Lawn” was not a word used frequently, if at all, in the lexicon of middle to lower class families anywhere in Europe, America, or Asia, at least not to refer to their own land. The soil was something that produced edibles, like fruit and vegetables, or grass that was grown as food for the family cow. A cellar dug into the soil also provided a place to protect food for the summer and winter time. Trees provided shade against blistering sunlight when being indoors proved unbearable. Life, although highly imperfect, was an organic whole.

Then industrialization rapidly became the norm. Suddenly, massive numbers of people no longer lived on the land, but in rented apartments in cities in order to be closer to the factories they had found employment in. Families were displaced and separated. The concept of the family farm gradually dwindled, along with the idea that the land provided one's income, stability, and food. The factory, the employer, became the source of stability. Food became a mass-produced, mass packaged, and mass-shipped commodity, and an idea foreign to previous generations came into being: the “food supply.”

So man became divorced from the source of his food. With the invention of air conditioning came the birth of what has been dubbed by some clever advertisers as the “great indoors,” creating a generation of Americans that would mainly prefer to remain indoors during the summer months and have nothing to do with the heat, divorcing them further from the environment. Land became lawns, beautifully manicured properties but with no real fruitful value other than just their beauty. Manufacturing was shipped overseas for one reason or another, separating us from the stench and the sight of what many factories produce as side effects of mass production.

Then, in the United States during the twentieth century, “the pill” was born, mass-produced hormonal birth control for all women that allowed the consequences of sex to be separated from the pleasure of it. A woman could sleep with several men whenever she felt like it, and not be burdened with the physical consequence of childbearing. Suddenly there was a division in the fundamental building block of society, the family, a division between the responsibility of and the pleasure allotted to the procreation of children.

So what do all of these things have in common? What am I trying to get at?

Lately I have noticed a trend (I say lately because I only formally collected my scattered thoughts on this subject a few weeks ago) that people, especially Americans, have been guilty of. We speak of our “lives.” What I mean by that is that we speak of things like our “work lives,” our “social lives,” or one of my personal favorites to pick on, our “sex lives.” We speak of our lives as divided into utterly distinguishable spheres of happenings, each containing its own internal logic and rules. Our “sex lives” never mingle with our “work lives” which never mingle with etc etc.

I remember reading an article recently, and I cannot recall who wrote it or where it was published so whoever did, please forgive my lack of footnote. But this article had an idea presented in it that really woke me up. The author was sifting through the effects of modern technology and he presented the subject of fire. He said that fire provides both warmth and light, and prompted endless ghost stories and bard songs and joyful gatherings. He then went on to present the invention of the lightbulb, then of the invention of the radiator. His point was that technology provided both heat and light, but that these inventions were not an organically bound whole but two separate things. The light of a lightbulb, as the author put it, never really inspired a poet to declaim of its beauty, nor has anyone drawn up their seats around a radiator to tell ghost stories or sing songs. The organic charm of fire was lost in an, albeit useful, separation of functions.

My contention is that technology has inspired much the same response in us human beings. No longer can we live one life as a whole, but we must spend part of it online with our “online” friends, and then spend part of it in the bedroom, then join our colleagues at work in our work life, and so on and so forth. Technology has tempted a separation of function in our lives. How many articles have we seen on all major news outlets that have the headline, “Is Online Cheating Really Cheating?” What enables this online cheating? Technology. We separate ourselves from our family life to browse the web for other women (or men) because the two worlds feel so separate, that the online world couldn't possibly be cheating in the real world.

I think no one is served by this separation, least of all ourselves. I have no problem with computers and smartphones and high technology (I am writing this article on a computer for Pete's sake) or with the ability to produce enormous amounts of food that benefits us and the rest of the world. What I do have a problem with is allowing technology to put an ax to the bonds that naturally hold human beings together, as well as the internal bonds that keeps a man integrated and sane. What we do in one of our “lives” profoundly affects what happens in our other “lives.” Online cheating is really cheating, what we do in the bedroom really does affect who we are at work, and our relationships with our coworkers really do change how we act to our children. If we are selfish in any of these areas, we are bound to be selfish in the others. And the reverse is true: if we are selfless and humble in one world, we are probably going to be selfless and humble in another.

We are creatures bound by the strictures of time and space, a limitation that makes itself felt in the fact that our interactions naturally occur in a sequence of moments, one after the other. However, we are also creatures of memory and habit, and what action we performed in a previous moment is many times repeated in a later moment because of it. Our lives our seamlessly woven together, just as our bodies are. We may call our arm an arm and our shoulder a shoulder, but that does not take away from the fact that our arm is seamlessly integrated into our shoulder and that no separation really exists between arm and shoulder. Such with our internal life.

Why divide ourselves into little pieces when we operate so much more effectively as a whole? Let us live our lives as whole then, and not shoot ourselves in the societal foot by being otherwise.

Be aware.