The Village

My wife and I were recently wandering around the shops in Whitefish, MT where we had decamped for the weekend to celebrate our anniversary. Many of the shops sold various knickknacks (coffee mugs, tea towels, greeting cards) with funny, often irreverent little sayings on them, which I sniggered and guffawed at, dutifully capturing the greatest hits on my iPhone and sending them to my friends back home while my wife perused slightly more highbrow fare. If you think that sounds like a rather juvenile and unimpressive way to spend part of an afternoon, well, you’re not wrong. In my defence… ah, who am I kidding, I have none.

Among the clever little ornamental slogans that I encountered on that afternoon was this one.

Anyone who has negotiated or is presently negotiating the terrain of parenthood will almost certainly chuckle on a first read. Why? Well, it expresses something of the helplessness and exasperation that we all feel at times, perhaps especially in the digital age. It communicates the desire (rarely voiced out loud) that we’d sometimes love to just abscond, take our hands off the wheel, run for the hills. We don’t really know what we’re doing, after all. Perhaps the village could intervene? Maybe give us a call when they’ve got the kids sorted out?

At its worst the phrase expresses a desire to escape, to shuck the burdens of caring for others and live primarily for ourselves. Parenting is such a drag, right? It puts a real crimp in our social lives and it is grossly expensive. At its best, the phrase may just be gesturing toward something like ancient wisdom. “The village” is shorthand for the process of acculturation, a recognition that every human being for all human history has been shaped by a received set of practices, traditions, beliefs, and ways of being in the world that preceded them. It speaks to the vital truth that becoming human is a group effort.

But what if the village no longer exists? What if “the village” has, like everything else in our world, been degraded or destroyed by the internet? What if “the village” has devolved into a collection of individuals in their own individual worlds who have outsourced their attention to the overlords of the attention economy? What if there is no longer a village to call to raise the kids? These are among the sobering questions asked by Talbot Brewer in a long article called “The Great Malformation” over at “The Hedgehog Review.”

Here are a few of the passages that grabbed my (ever-fleeting) attention:

But today, I fear, the village has been all but shouldered out of its socializing role. The villagers are too often found behind closed doors, watching television or surfing the Internet. When they do appear in public, they are increasingly prone to do so with portable electronic devices in hand, phoning or surfing or tweeting their way through virtual realms, leaving the village streets full of moving bodies but emptied of human presence.

This same retreat from shared physical spaces is observable even—or, rather, especially—in the inner sanctum of the home, where brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, parents and children, are increasingly found alongside each other yet absent to each other, cocooned in mesmerizing solipsism, ghosting even themselves and their own lives.

The human race is on its way to becoming seven or eight billion perfect societies of one, each bound in what Stephen Colbert once called “solitarity” with other human beings, somewhere or another—who knows where—who themselves are busy absenting themselves from their families and homes. Where are the children being raised in such a world heading? What are they being urged to care about, cultivated to do and to be? What conception of the human good, if any, is implicit in, supported by, or coincident with this sort of upbringing?

And this:

We have almost everywhere and always strived to pass along a way of life that will be good not merely for our generation, which will soon be gone, but for our children, so that they, and hence in the largest sense we (the polity, human beings), might have a worthy future.

What we are living through is the unplanned and mostly unnoticed obsolescence of this very basic element of the human form of life. The work of cultural transmission is increasingly being conducted in such a way as to maximize the earnings of those who oversee it. Their instruments of acculturation now find their way into the family sanctum, diverting our attention from our kin and toward a variety of screen-based fascinations that are well known to make us more lonely, less capable of intimacy, more prone to depression, less capable of concerted and undistracted attention, more riven by consumer desires, less empathetic, and less capable of calm and well-reasoned political debate—that is, entirely unlike how any sane society would wish its progeny to be.

It’s hard to overstate the terrifying significance of that last paragraph, in my view. We have largely turned over the task of socializing our kids to massive corporations who have a huge financial interest in destroying the village, driving us ever further into ourselves, and nurturing the worst aspects of our humanity. The author of the article opines that “this engulfing of culture by the market will appear in retrospect as one of history’s more thorough and far-reaching revolutions in value—comparable in depth and eventual ripple effects to the Christianization of the late Roman world.” I’d love to disagree — this revolution in value seems truly horrifying to consider ­— but I’m struggling to do so.

It’s easy to read an article like this and feel hopeless. The odds are stacked against us, so resourceful are our technological overlords, and so attuned to our weaknesses. But if we don’t start to resist, even in small ways, there may not be a village to call to raise the kids. This Christmas season I’ve been struck by how odd and counter-cultural (and life-giving!) little things can be. Things like going carolling with people in church. Or playing board games instead of watching TV. Or sharing meals. Or going for walks (and leaving your phone at home). Or, well, pretty much anything that doesn’t involve a screen and communicates, however subtly, a vision of human being that extends beyond the self.

I am no model citizen here, God knows! This post did begin with a story of me tethered to my phone, taking pictures of clever little sayings instead of enjoying walking around an idyllic little mountain town with my wife on our anniversary. But I think we can probably all do something. And we must. If nothing else, for the children’s sake. The great malformation is already well underway.