‘S he can multiply complicated figures in her head like lightning,” says Miss Honey, the schoolteacher in Roald Dahl’s Matilda, speaking of the title character. But the little girl’s father, Mr. Wormwood, is unmoved: “What’s the point of that when you can buy a calculator?”
The world has changed a lot since Matilda was first published in 1988. Now, the calculator is one of the more basic functions of another similarly shaped contraption, which is at once a telephone, a voice recorder, a camera, a virtual piano . . . and the list of its capabilities goes on.
Today, we are all in danger of becoming a bit like Mr. Wormwood — overvaluing technological tools at the expense of human gifts.
The ways in which real-life human connections are being undermined by technology are well documented. In romance, spontaneous meetings — requiring the high-risk/high-reward action of asking someone out — have been replaced by apps, with people swiping through options as though ordering a pizza. For some, pornography has become a substitute for a fulfilling relationship. But perhaps most troubling are the ways in which the “virtual world” interferes with childhood development.
As Jonathan Haidt outlines in his book The Anxious Generation, the virtual world involves disembodied, asynchronous interactions happening in online forums whose participants have a “low bar for entry and exit.” The virtual world is a difficult place to learn life’s hardest lessons, to put it mildly. Take humiliation, for instance. When this negative social experience occurs in the real world and in real time, in one-on-one or one-among-several interactions, children can, depending on the circumstances, potentially acquire resilience and not suffer lasting harm.
But the virtual world raises the stakes. Consider something that happened at a high school recently. Instead of the ordinary humiliation of being told “You can’t sit with us,” an adolescent endured having her face superimposed on hardcore pornography by AI and shared by classmates on social media.
It’s not unusual for technology to have unintended consequences. For instance, in the 1980s, suburbanization and the ubiquity of car-dependent infrastructure, which seemed to threaten community life, inspired the New Urbanism movement. The New Urbanists believed, correctly, that walkable neighborhoods make family life easier, in part by allowing children to embark on unsupervised play. As Tim Carney suggests in Family Unfriendly, simplifying the logistics of family life might encourage people to have more children, something America needs to stave off demographic decline.
Yet despite the New Urbanists’ best efforts, car-dependent living remains the norm. Those who opt for a different way of life are doing something almost radical. In some cases, they are merely making use of older and preexisting urban planning. They look for walkable, family-friendly towns and cities — Hyattsville, Md., comes to mind — and move to them, inviting other like-minded families to do the same.
Yet, even where car-dependency results in atomization, the concern is still related to real-world, physical communities. With the advent of the virtual world, even the word “community” has evolved from connoting your friendly neighborhood to clumsily categorized identity groups such as “the LGBT community.” These geographically disparate groups are inadequate substitutes for real, in-person human contact.
Human beings are conformist. This is true whether we have primitive or advanced technology. The question, always, is what are we conforming to?
In The Lonely Crowd (1950), David Riesman noted that Americans had moved from being “inner-directed” — that is, taking their social norms from generations of family wisdom — to “other-directed” — taking cues from mass media, corporations, and bureaucracies, a consumerist society in which people are constantly looking to see what others are doing. (A third possibility, Riesman notes, is to be “tradition-directed,” as happens in a religious age.) Being “other-directed,” Riesman observed, contributed to a contagion of anxiety and loneliness.
Focusing on children, psychologists such as Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté, co-authors of Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers, frame this trend in similar terms. They argue that children are increasingly looking to their peers instead of their parents for validation, unconditional love, and acceptance. “Throughout human evolution and until about the Second World War, adult orientation was the norm in human development,” they write. “We, the adults who should be in charge — parents and teachers — have only recently lost our influence without even being aware that we have done so.” Hence, “instead of culture being passed down vertically, it is being transmitted horizontally within the younger generation.”
This, too, raises the stakes, since peers are incapable of providing the unconditional love and support that children need.
What can be done? Certainly, we can’t stop advances in technology, nor would such a project be desirable. To resist the erosion of human connection requires great effort, determination, and an embrace of the countercultural. None of which, of course, can be done alone.