Them belly full (but we hungry)

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I hadn't noticed till downloading Volume 89 the other night that I hadn't copied Volume 88 (Nov/Dec) onto my iPod. So I've got a lot of catching up to do. This morning I listened to Ken Myers interview Steve Talbott, who wrote a book about how technology is divorcing us from an experience of reality. The Mars Hill interview focuses on the role of technology in educating, and mis-educating, modern children.

Talbott tells a story about a father who went out with his son on a nature trail. They encountered a rattlesnake along the way, and spent a while observing the creature before finally making their way around it. At the end of the day, the boy told his father that this was the "best day of his life." Talbott asks if any child would ever say that to a dad who had sat down with him to watch a nature video about rattlesnakes.

The answer, obviously, is no. But why not? If education is simply a matter of accumulating facts, there is no difference between learning about rattlesnakes from a nature video, versus encountering a rattlesnake in the wild. Right? But obviously there is. Talbott's point is that there is something more to real education, and it has to do with direct experience, and the context in which we acquire this information. Myers remarked that this is the modern approach to knowledge: isolating facts from context, and mistakenly thinking we can truly understand a thing by grasping factual information alone. In fact, we starve ourselves of real knowledge, and understanding, by using technology (e.g., computers, television) to abstract ourselves from reality.

This discussion reminded me of a passage I from "The Omnivore's Dilemma," in which Michael Pollan addressed new discoveries science is making about the nutritive value of plants grown in different ways. We used to think that if you isolated the macronutrients in food, you could understand what made one food more nutritious than another. But it turns out there are deep subtleties in food that affect nutritive value. Polyphenols, for example, look like they might have a previous unrealized importance to human health -- and they are present in much higher numbers in organically grown produce than in conventionally grown produce. This, Pollan says, "might explain why diets heavy in processed food fortified with vitamins still aren't as nutritious as fresh foods. You wonder what else is going on in these plants, what other undiscovered qualities in them we've evolved to depend on."

I do wonder what ways we are undernourishing ourselves, literally and figuratively, by relying so heavily on technology to mediate our experience of the natural world. It's like a great philospher said, "Them belly full but we hungry."