The strangest thing. Julie and I just finished watching the great German film "The Lives of Others," about how the surveillance state in East Germany dehumanized people. Sophisticated domestic spying technology in the hands of a police state turned people into monsters and their prey, and corrupted every human relationship. I saw the film when it came out, and was knocked out by it, and wanted to re-screen it to prepare for a column I'm going to write about the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Checking the NYT website before turning in, I see they've already posted David Brooks' column for tomorrow. It's based on this article in New York magazine discussing how New Yorkers today are using cellphone technology to organize their sex lives, and to set up encounters on the fly. People who do this will sometimes be on their way to one sex date when another offer comes in over the text transom, and they change plans. Just like that. Brooks writes:
Across the centuries the moral systems from medieval chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent, spiritual meanings. Love becomes a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment.But texting and the utilitarian mind-set are naturally corrosive toward poetry and imagination. A coat of ironic detachment is required for anyone who hopes to withstand the brutal feedback of the marketplace. In today's world, the choice of a Prius can be a more sanctified act that the choice of an erotic partner.
This does not mean that young people today are worse or shallower than young people in the past. It does mean they get less help. People once lived within a pattern of being, which educated the emotions, guided the temporary toward the permanent and linked everyday urges to higher things. The accumulated wisdom of the community steered couples as they tried to earn each other's commitment.
Today there are fewer norms that guide in that way. Today's technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust.
In the Stasi state, you could not trust anybody intimately. But those people had an excuse: the government imposed this monstrosity on them. In our case, we're doing it to ourselves. We destroy our own humanity and call it freedom.
UPDATE: I can't sleep for thinking about this. And I am thinking about how, in the film, a turning point for Wiesler, the Stasi agent, is hearing a sonata played by a character mourning the death of another character (see that scene here, if you don't mind spoilers). He has seen the power of love and mercy bring hope and dignity to a relationship soiled by betrayal, and now, artistic beauty reveals to him his own capacity for humanity. And I'm also thinking about these passages from the foreword to "Witness," in which Whittaker Chambers tells his children, in the form of a letter, why he turned from the death-dealing abstractions of Communism. Excerpts:
How did you break with Communism? My answer is: Slowly, reluctantly, in agony. Yet my break began long before I heard those screams. Perhaps it does for everyone. I do not know how far back it began. Avalanches gather force and crash, unheard, in men as in the mountains. But I date my break from a very casual happening. I was sitting in our apartment on St. Paul Street in Baltimore. It was shortly before we moved to Alger Hiss's apartment in Washington. My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I liked to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the Hoor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear-those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: "No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design." The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.
And this, below the jump:
Thus, as children, you experienced two of the most important things men ever know-the wonder of life and the wonder of the universe, the wonder of life within the wonder of the universe. More important, you knew them not from books, not from lectures, but simply from living among them. Most important, you knew them with reverence and awe-that reverence and awe that has died out of the modern world and been replaced by man's monkeylike amazement at the cleverness of his own inventive brain. I have watched greatness touch you in another way. I have seen you sit, uninvited and unforced, listening in complete silence to the third movement of the Ninth Symphony. I thought you understood, as much as children can, when I told you that that music was the moment at which Beethoven finally passed beyond the suffering of his life on earth and reached for the hand of God, as God reaches for the hand of Adam in Michelangelo's vision of the Creation. And once, in place of a bedtime story, I was reading Shakespeare to John-at his own request, for I never forced such things on you. I came to that passage in which Macbeth, having murdered Duncan, realizes what he has done to his own soul, and asks if all the water in the world can ever wash the blood from his hand, or will it not ratherThe multitudinous seas incarnadine?
At that line, John's whole body twitched. I gave great silent thanks to God. For I knew that if, as children, you could thus feel in your souls the reverence and awe for life and the world, which is the ultimate meaning of Beethoven and Shakespeare, as man and woman you could never be satisfied with less. I felt a great faith that sooner or later you would understand what I once told you, not because I expected you to understand it then, but because I hoped that you would remember it later: "True wisdom comes from the overcoming of suffering and sin. All true wisdom is therefore touched with sadness."
In the first passage, it was an epiphany that overtook him while gazing at his baby daughter's ear that awakened Chambers to the reality of God, and the transcendent realm denied by his ideology. In the second passage, Chambers marvels over the "reverence and awe for life and the world" revealed to his children by art. Both insights point us to the dignity of man, and perhaps give us a way into Dostoevsky's curious prophecy: "Beauty will save the world."
UPDATE.2: I took down a bit of this post, because in the light of day, I don't want to give the impression that I think there's a moral equivalence between a Stalinist dictatorship and idiots in New York who undertake la vie du skank via text message. Still, I think there are some significant similarities worth considering.
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BobN, it is the 'mostly' part that is the problem, unfortunately.
Just playing devil's advocate: Is it possible that when people are ready to form a lasting relationship they will also use iphones to connect with like-minded people?
I admit it does drive me crazy when I attend an industry event for networking purposes and it appears that everyone is looking at a lighted screen and ignoring the person seated next to them.
Many thanks, Cecelia and Major Wotton, much appreciated.
Thank you again, Rod, for writing about The Lives of Others. I don’t know how many people have seen it but it is well worth seeing. I got out my DVD and watched it once again this evening.
The Brooks part of your essay got the most attention. No interesting musings from readers about the type of people who deserve to have “eine Sonate Vom Guten Menschen” (A Sonata About a Good Man) written about them.
There are so few models for moral courage these days, especially in the political world which provides a setting for demonstrating human fragility more frequently than strength. And seems to grow more coarse and weak in some areas by the year. Too many people equate courage with standing up for people who fit in comfortably with their own group and not for others. Rarely can I pick out an author or a poster on a blog which deals with politics who I think might have done what Wiesler did. Indeed, I look at the things that U.S. political leaders of both parties and all ideologies sometimes say and find myself thinking of that line from Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons, “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales? I think there are a lot of people out there (some religious, some secular) who want something better than what we have. We can’t control what others do, we can control our own actions and choices.
Geoff,
A generation ago these guys (most of them presumably good-looking or well-provided for financially) would have been prowling singles' bars looking for a hot, loose woman to get drunk and take home. Long Island Iced Teas and shots of tequila are not exactly what I'd call ingredients of a romantic courtship. So we've gone from lounge lizards to texting trolls. Technology marches on I suppose, but I can't see that the old way of such guys was any better than the new way, unless you're a bar owner who misses the business.
That a new German film would teach Americans about human faith at a time when acclaimed movies like Borat lack faith. A multi-layered and surprisingly touching dramatic thriller.
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