Technology and Soul, The Shadow of Technology

I went to a workshop given by Glen Slater, PhD, last weekend on "Technology and Soul, Living at the Turning Point," and was just getting on here to talk about it, when up popped a whole slew of new options I could add to my blog site -- Do I want my readers to be able to flip through my old blogs, or scroll through my old blogs, or eat my old blogs, or what? -- that I had to think about before I could even get onto my blog site. 

And of course, by the time I suffered through that initial interruption, which was full of seemingly pressing questions that apparently needed to be answered immediately before I could even get onto my blog site, I was in great danger of forgetting what I had gotten onto the blog site to say in the first place.


Perfect. And exactly what the workshop was all about. 


We are absolutely inundated with choices. Most of them technological. Most promising to make our lives easier or to make our work go faster or to make us cooler or smarter or more attractive. Most sounding downright irresistible, now that we know so much about how to market things to one another. So we scurry from choice to choice, trying to make the "right" one, trying to keep up, trying to do what everyone else is doing, leaking little bits of our own unique creative individuality all the time. 

Soul making takes some peace and quiet. Some continuity. I had an entire chain of thought going about that workshop which will never quite exist again. Because it was booted out, rooted out -- almost entirely expunged -- by another set of ideas that popped up in front of it. Did you ever read Watership Down? (Great book.) At one point the rabbits are trying to get a big old dog to go in a certain direction, so one rabbit pops up in front of the dog, which it chases, and then another rabbit pops up in front of the dog, which it chases, and then another rabbit pops up in front of the dog, which it chases... 


...that is our minds, folks. In the USA, circa 2000s. We run hard, but we are easily distracted as to direction.

50 years ago children read Treasure Island or Tom Sawyer or Huckeberry Finn. Today, many children have to struggle to read Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. There are so many forms of communication and entertainment available to us we can't bear to limit ourselves or our children to only doing one thing at a time. But we know from brain scan studies that multi-tasking prevents deep understanding in any of the tasks involved. (Or, there seem to be a lot more channels available today than we actually have the bandwidth to handle. See What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr.)

We can't keep technology from effecting our souls. That's where we are. That's what's happening today. But we can, as Slater suggests, try and make its impact on our souls more conscious. We can make more of an effort to choose what will serve us and to reject what will not. We can start to realize that the "hive mind" produced by cyberspace is not unbiased after all, it's actually extremely biased, and not towards wisdom, either -- it's biased towards selling products.

We can start to realize we don't have to chase every new rabbit that pops up.

Also recommended by Slater:
You Are Not A Gadget, Jaron Lanier
Enough, Bill McKibben
Alone Together, Sherry Turkle

Shadow in "The Black Swan"

 Half Jester, Half King mask.

Every few years we're blessed with another great artistic example of what happens to those who deny or bury their shadow. This year, it was The Black Swan.

Nina was a good girl. A good girl in a grindingly difficult profession where harsh judgment was the norm. A good girl trying to placate a fragile, frustrated, controlling mother. A good girl trained since early childhood to ignore the complaints and demands of her own body, the needs of her own soul.

Perhaps not since Robert Louis Stevenson woke up from a dream and began writing down The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have we been presented with such a splendid and graphic vision of what happens next -- internally -- to such good girls or boys.

They die. 

Maybe not right away, in fine dramatic fashion, like Jekyll or Nina. In fact, maybe you won't even notice their deaths, since most people you know will be doing the same thing: that slow, mute, miserable shrinkage that occurs every day while we dutifully trim our dynamic, multi-faceted pegs to fit into the small round holes of Corporate America. But it will still be death.

Like Dylan said, He who is not busy being born is busy dying.

There's a lot of juice in the shadow. A great deal of creativity. 

But ignored, split off, or denied access to consciousness, the shadow turns deadly to its own ego.

 

As Marie-Louise von Franz (friend and student of Carl Jung's, acclaimed analyst and author in her own right) once put it,

The shadow is not necessarily always an opponent. In fact, it is exactly like any human being with whom one has to get along. Sometimes by giving in, sometimes by resisting, sometimes by giving love -- whatever the situation requires. 

The shadow becomes hostile only when it is ignored or misunderstood.

The Shadow In Health Care

This is my grandson Mitchell, with his friend Groucho. Yesterday we spent all day with Mitchell and him family at a local hospital's pediatric oncology unit, learning that this beautiful little guy probably has lymphoma. There is a large unexplained mass of tissue present in his abdomen, as well as smaller masses in his groin and his armpit. So tomorrow we will all go back to the pediatric oncology unit with him, where Mitchell will be biopsied and bone marrow scraped and tested and treated lovingly and professionally again by the excellent staff that work there.

We also learned yesterday that the health insurance which both of his working parents pay into out of every paycheck may not cover oncology treatment. Bumps and scrapes? You got it! Cancer? No way! It's sham insurance. Looks and sounds like health insurance, comes out of your paycheck in the same way, just doesn't cover you when it counts.

Where has this country come to? When two hard working young people have to worry about whether or not they're going to be able to afford the medical treatment which will be necessary to save their son's life? We're not talking tummy tucks or Viagra prescriptions, here. We're talking cancer care: the Big C. For one of the sweetest little boys in the world.


And where is this country going? When those in power would rather keep the "the other party" from moving forward on comprehensive health care than come up with a simple system that would work for all?

We could afford to wage an unfunded war in Iraq for trumped up reasons, killing, bereaving and maiming hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Americans, but we cannot afford for Mitchell to have a bone marrow scrape and chemotherapy? 

We can afford tax cuts for the rich and the powerful, but if Mitchell does get well enough to go back to school, we cannot afford for that school to have art, PE or music teachers?

If you're "Proud to be an American" right now, perhaps you're just not paying attention.