Tune In, Turn On, Evolve

Sitting in the DFW airport, waiting for my next flight, in a completely typical airport lounge. A flat screen TV – a must-have feature of any modern space where people congregate – is mounted on the wall, CNN playing, and 100 waiting passengers sit mesmerized. Wherever they are sitting, they are angled toward the screen, their eyes transfixed, their bodies sagging. (I am sitting in a single row of seats along the wall where the TV is mounted, facing into the room, into the rapt, unseeing eyes of the rest of the passengers, while all the other seats in the lounge face the TV).

Sometimes a particularly boring commercial comes on, and as if released from a spell, awakening from a collective coma, a few of them shake their heads, adjust themselves in their chairs, glance toward whomever is seated near them, and perhaps even speak a few words of primitive conversation. No discussion, of course, no intelligence or wit or flair, simply the meat and potatoes of brief social acknowledgement, squeezed into the brief interlude before the show comes back on.

Other times, the story is compelling – something about the kidnapping of US soldiers in Iraq, particularly poignant here as little knots of soldiers in fatigues walk through the airport, smiling, young, on their way to and from the war – and the only sound in the room is the chatter of the CNN announcer and the inappropriately cheery lilt of whatever background music they’ve chosen.

I am struck by how this behavior seems so natural, so normal, and yet would never have been seen in a similarly sized group of people anywhere on earth before 50 years ago. The roughly corresponding experiences which were possible throughout almost all of human history – watching a play or a speech or a sermon, listening to a storyteller under the stars, or even tuned into a radio broadcast – were vastly different. One would not have seen the kind of slack-jawed, vacant look in the eyes – there would have been an active look; an attentive, participating, thoughtful look. Or at least regular old boredom and squirming, as the uninterested watcher looked for something else to do.

It is frightening, really. One has the real sense that these people are hooked up to a life support tube, that they are passively absorbing vital nutrients into their collective social brain. At the same time, because I live on the inside of that experience, I know that it doesn’t feel that way to the subjects… it feels as if they are hearing and watching and participating in something interesting. That baseball game, those pictures of the soldiers, that sage commentator, that funny commercial – they are the content of our lives; they are the topics of our interest; they absorb our attention, and motivate our trends and our desires. They are the fuel and the food of our experiences, the source of meaning for our time here as living people. And yet they are so obviously meaningless.

I cannot help but think that anyone who arrived in this world via a time machine from the past would be puzzled and upset by this behavior. “Why isn’t anyone talking to each other?” they would ask, perhaps getting a little angry, certainly uncomfortable. “What could possibly be so captivating on that tiny little box? It’s not as if there aren’t other things to look at – why it only takes up the size of my thumb when I hold it up in the air at arm’s length! What is going on? Are these people under a spell? Have they lost their minds?”

Well, have they?

Now I believe that I have some interesting answers to this question, but I’d rather ask the question first, and let it sit. But I’ll provide a couple of hints to my point of view.

First, I think that systems work. Systems get to be the way they are in our Darwinian universe because they are locally optimal (they work better than the alternatives), and self-reinforcing (within the system, you go along to get along). And societies are systems, and the individual decision-makers within them make rational choices that result in the way things are. Yet the results can be bad from a human standpoint: Nazism and Palestinian terrorism and Stalinism all evolved in a perfectly ordinary way, and “worked”.

And second, I think that the universe doesn’t care in the slightest about human beings, and that evolutionary forces are at work that have nothing to do with the good of the human race, or the stability of our lives, or what we think has meaning. People live in a weird, delusional bubble, acting and feeling as if what they care about is actually important in some objective sense – but truthfully, we are nothing but a moment’s flickering of sunshine on the dust. All that we hold so dear, which we think of as the Alpha and Omega of existence, is just a momentary flash, a shadow, half-seen from a chance angle and then gone forever.