I’m reading “Encounters with Reality“, Regina Munch’s review essay of Christine Rosen’s book “The Extinction of Experience“. Rosen’s book argues that direct experience is superior to mediated experience; Munch is arguing that while Rosen may be correct, her case is not substantiated enough to hold up. The question of why we engage in mediated activities, and why we feel dissatisfied with them, offers the key which will unlock the deeper question of what constitutes real experience, and why that sort of experience is not just important but essential.
The blame does not lie with those who engage in such “mediated” activities, as Rosen takes it, but rather those who are motivated to profit from people’s exhaustion and dulled curiosity. I know well the unnerving feeling she describes: that our technology has made reality too digestible—that feeling of being lied to. That food you just ordered on DoorDash, Uber Eats or, indeed, Seamless doesn’t emerge from the ether. All of the scaffolding of the app, your linked credit card and your delivery person’s anonymity trick you into thinking that the food that sustains you really was just that easy to grow, harvest, prepare and transport. We know it wasn’t, but the “experience” of ordering food insulates us from engaging with those realities.
This I can agree with. Rosen goes on to argue:
There are many technological innovations Rosen has no quarrel with—cars, the printing press—that profoundly mediate our experience of the world, making our lives faster, easier and less onerous than they would otherwise be. “Experiences” surely existed long before the emergence of the technologies Rosen decries. Before there was Seamless, we picked up the phone to order food—a convenience that certainly obscured some of the reality of what food preparation entails. (As does, for that matter, ordering it in a restaurant!) Rosen talks as though there was a fundamentally stable “real world” of true experience before pesky technology came along and made everything depersonalized and detrimentally efficient. There wasn’t.
In this I recognise something of my belief that friction is what provides meaning in our lives. Rosen outlines three different types of experience which we might call app-based, voice-based, and person-based, and an order of sorts emerges even as I type those words. What distinguishes these from each other is the level of interaction with another person they require, and therefore the level of friction they involve. We feel instinctively that each one is progressively more “real” than the other not because there is some platonic ideal of ordering food which we are drawn to like moths, but because we recognise that friction is what allows us to to makes ourselves real. Real to ourselves, and real to others.
As far as I can tell Rosen and Munch agree with this general thesis, but they struggle to account for why. According to Munch, “Rosen takes for granted that it is good to encounter reality as it is—to have experiences of it—and assumes the reader will agree with her.” Munch herself asserts that “there are lots of reasons for thinking that reality is fundamentally good” and outlines a position. Reality is the grounds for “what we fundamentally need to be humans well”, and that “being a person well is an activity” which requires a type of freedom which is undermined by mediation. I agree with this but find it insufficient – what is the nature of this activity?
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In the back of my mind is the tick-tock post-Covid countdown, the sense that something has been damaged which in time will bring us down, both individually and collectively. Individually many of us labour under a burden of ill-health which we do not recall from our previous lives, little reminders of that earlier assault; collectively many of us have become untethered from the shore and are caught in treacherous currents which we come to call home. That home is now heavily mediated, many if not most of our experiences delivered through a screen which seems to offer the whole world – but a world which does not feel as if it opens us up, only closes us in.
It’s best not to think of this as either normal or abnormal. One of my theses is that modernity was rupture, and that Europeans have been living in a post-apocalyptic present gussied up by great wealth. I’m no fan, then, of the idea of normal, or the new normal, or anything of the sort; pace Lucas, I tend to believe that civilisation is not just the slow process of learning to be kind, but the constant struggle to actually be kind. The struggle continues whether we believe we are in normal or abnormal times. The question is what kinds of kindness we commit to, for another one of my theses is that kindness comes in many colours.
I am committed to kindness as part of a broader project of virtue ethics, in which kindness-as-virtue is the cornerstone of civilisation-as-kindness. There are other virtues which may be important at an individual level, but kindness seems to be the cardinal virtue required for living together. Kindness is not valued so highly these days, I think because we’ve been taught that kindness is a cousin to meekness, but kindness is in fact more kin to courage. It takes strength of character to open your heart before the other person opens theirs.
Virtues need to be learned (and preferably taught); in order to be learned, they need to be continually practiced, and in order to be practiced they need to take place in public. So we need to live public lives in order to become the people we want to become, and that means continual interaction with other people in varying situations in which our different interests can both compete and cohere. There is no reality to this interaction except in the interaction itself; it exists only because we bring it into existence, and it ceases to exist as soon as we walk away. Yet on this ephemerality the entirety of civilisation is founded.