When I walk down the corridor to my office, I pass a vending machine whose read-out panel flashes "Have a nice day." It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy just to know that this machine is concerned about my well being.
In the name of efficiency, machines have evolved to replace a broad range of human interaction. Of course they have also replaced a lot of boring and arduous tasks, "freeing people to engage in more creative and fulfilling pursuits," as the machine's manufacturers like to point out. But there are limits.
When someone talks about how we will be so much better off after the next technological breakthrough, my mind wanders back 20 years to the sunlit town of Charlotte Amalie in the Virgin Islands. While walking the town's main street, I noticed a tiny shop whose sign advertised camera bags made to suit the customer's specifications. I stepped inside, described to the young woman at the sewing machine the custom camera bag I wanted and watched as she immediately began making a bag just for me. While she worked I asked her how someone with a New Jersey accent came to live in Charlotte Amalie. As pieces of canvas rotated beneath the plunging sewing machine needle, she told me about her former job as a long-distance telephone operator in New Jersey. What she especially loved about her old job, she said, was the adventure of connecting with heavily accented voices in distant places with mysterious sounding names. For her, the most fun came when she helped someone make contact with someone else, somewhere out there in the dark, far away. The greater the difficulty of finding the right party, the more people she would have to talk to in the process, the more she enjoyed the task.
Then on a pre-arranged date in the heart of winter, the phone company switched to automatic equipment — and she switched from talking to people to monitoring the new equipment. As she sat monitoring the equipment one night, she began to think about the adventures her job once held. She recalled the night she had helped someone in New Jersey find a long-lost friend in the Virgin Islands. It took several calls to several towns on several different islands before she finally located the right party in Charlotte Amalie. She imagined the settings she had called: palm trees and beaches, villages near the sea, people lightly dressed in colorful clothing. She though about the voices she heard that night, the mix of musical Caribbean accents, the excitement of the caller when he finally heard his friend's voice on the other end.
That moment of recollection became one of those defining flashes of realization we hear about — a moment after which her life would never be the same. She quit her job at the end of her shift that very night, went straight home to her apartment, got out a map and began to look for a place named for a Danish queen called Charlotte Amalie. The next morning she was at a travel agency; a couple of weeks later she was walking the sunny streets of Charlotte Amalie looking for a job. She made friends, including a newspaper photographer who suggested she could go to work for herself, doing what I found her doing that afternoon in her little shop. As she handed me my crisp new bag, she told me she wasn't certain how things would work out, but she knew that she was happier than she had been in a long while. If an automatic "custom" bag maker machine replaced her, she mused, she would know that it was time to strike out on her own once again.
Some might say that the telephone operator's story is an example of how new technology urged her on, to "follow her bliss," as the historican of religion Joseph Campbell used to say. But what they won't point out is that someone else had to take her place at the automatic telephone equipment. The New Jersey telephone operator escaped, but how many people's lives are relegated to tasks they cannot escape? How many people have had to forfeit the richness of working directly with a community of fellow workers, customers, clients or patients because they had to switch to making a living by communicating with labor-saving devices instead of people?
Yes, the automatic telephone equipment that replaced so many human operators does make for cheaper phone calls. I tell myself that whenever a recorded voice on the other end of the phone tells me to "press one" for administration, "press two" for sales. When the line is busy for the department whose number I pressed, I am gratified to hear that I am nonetheless a valued customer and the computerized machinery will play recorded music for me until someone can talk with me directly. When whoever I was trying to reach becomes available, the recorded voice returns to thank me for my patience. "Have a nice day," the disembodied voice says, and then finally, finally I get a real person. Simple rituals of human politeness have been reduced to convenient and efficient cardboard cutouts of the real thing.
Last August I was working with an international group of architects and architecture students in the ancient maritime city of Sidon, in war-torn Lebanon. After our analytical study of the city as it was, we formulated a proposal for replacing, restoring and expanding the old city center, a center that had become crowded by the addition of refugees and damaged by unplanned modern development following the destruction of an earthquake and a war. As we were nearing the end of the project, the part of the city where we were working came under artillery fire. The building given us to work from was a beautiful 16th century caravansari, a two-story affair overlooking the harbor, with generous arcaded courtyard at the center and heavy stone vaults spanning rooms at each level. We decided that a direct hit would only penetrate the upper level at best, exploding a floor above us. So we continued working for the three or so hours during the shelling, stopping momentarily to glance at one another when an impact sounded close by. Once the shelling had stopped for long enough for us to conclude it was over, we spilled out into the streets. It was sundown by then and much of the city had been abandoned, people having fled north out of range of the artillery battery that was located somewhere in the mountains to the southeast.
Ironically, it was the most peaceful moment we had experienced since we arrived. Gone were the big trucks and noisy horn-honking cars and the smell of exhaust fumes. The streets were so quiet we could hear the gentle surf at the edge of the harbor for the first time since having arrived in the city nearly a month before. Suddenly, loudspeakers high on a minaret nearby began to blare the evening call to prayer. Years before, the muezzins had abandoned their minarets to automated loudspeakers with recorded calls, because only loudspeakers could be heard above the noise of the traffic. On that particular night, the voice could not have know the faithful had fled, so it blared into the silence after their hurried departure: "There no god but God and Mohammed is his prophet . . ." We wondered aloud if the calls to prayer would continue if every one stayed away, perhaps even if the human population of the earth disappeared completely. Would the muezzin's recorded voice continue through the silence, repeatedly reminding no one of the presence of God?
I see the world through the concerns an architect has. Basic changes in the form of buildings and cities, especially since the end of the World War II, have progressively insulated people from casually interacting with one another in ways we once took for granted — the simple, casual things that reminded us that we are part of a community. We used to walk to our houses through a neighborhood of people we recognized and who recognized us. Now we have reconfigured our houses and our neighborhoods so that it is the driveway, not a front walk, that connects our house with the public way. In many cases the sidewalk is gone altogether and the house is moved far back from the public street. Today we drive our car into an attached garage, and in effect enter the house while still in our car. The bank teller once cashed our check or took our deposit and we exchanged a few words of greeting on each such occasion. The milkman and vegetable vender came through the neighborhood and no one hesitated to open the door to either of them. I find my bank's ATM machine terribly convenient, but now I regard the institution that owns it and serves me in this way as an abstraction; I don't know anybody there any more. The average American worker drives more than 10 miles to work, usually alone except for a radio, and upon arrival spends the day in a windowless room, often communicating electronically with the rest of the world, even with his or her fellow workers in the same building. Because of the effectiveness of air conditioning, ventilating equipment and electric lights, architects now routinely design buildings with mostly interior offices, so that the people who work within never experience natural light during their work days. An office building designed this way is much more efficient than one where everyone is able to experience what is going on outside, but how can it not desensitize us to any relationship with the natural world around us?
Recent studies of children who communicate with others regularly by e-mail have revealed that it is not unusual to find otherwise scrupulously honest kids assuming false names and misrepresenting themselves in electronic communications with people they know they will never meet. There is evidence that the more distant or obscure certain kinds of environmental damage are in relation to their source — such as acid rain that falls hundreds of miles from the place it is generated or the damage to unseen undersea coral from the effluents of industrial concentrations — the less likely we are to be concerned enough to do something about it.
Could it be that as we move more completely into a world of electronic and mechanical communication, and as we separate ourselves more completely from experiencing nature directly, we become callous both to the human condition and to the condition of our natural environment? Neil Eldredge, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, recently observed, "humans are the first species to live outside a specific ecosystem." While hunter-gatherers were consciously a part of a local ecosystem, today we are part of a worldwide economy where decisions made one place may have profound effects in places that lie far beyond the concrete comprehension of each decision maker. And decision makers are not just real estate developers, CEOs, and politicians, either. You and I make a decision when we purchase a product made of materials from a rain forest or manufactured by an ever more exploited cheap labor force in some sad place with a strange sounding name. Then, when we finally come to realize the problem, we expect the solution to be found in a new "techno-fix," to use Eldredge's term for it — another technological innovation that will solve the problems created by the last technological innovation.
Observations like these are beginning to sound like a proverbial broken record. We have all heard them so many times-that they appear to have less and less effect on us. The miraculous worldwide techno-economic system has become our new nature. We approach it as we once did nature itself — as a fait accompli, something that nurtures us. We assume we can only modify it a bit here and there where it becomes dangerous, much as we once protected ourselves from nature's storms or the winter cold. The automated speaker system solved the muezzin's problem of calling the faithful to prayer over the din of traffic, and the Internet is being touted by some as a solution to problems of the dissolution of communities, but what are we losing in the process? Is what we gained always more important than what we lost? Can we choose?
European architect Leon Krier made a little drawing recently that showed two kinds of towns. One was a jumble of everything imaginable, an environment that no doubt held every modern convenience, every new technological breakthrough, every extravagant building design and type of high-speed highway circulation system that modern technology could produce. The other was a rather traditional community, with tranquil neighborhoods, convenient shops and places of employment scattered about yet integrated in the matrix with all else. A choice between these options was a real choice, Krier noted, while the choice between conflicting options all jumbled together and working at cross purposes was only an elaborate illusion of choice, revealing itself in the end to be no choice at all.
If I am right about our coming to accept the worldwide techno-economic system as a fait accompli, if we are treating it as though it were nature itself, then we are doomed to wherever it will take us. An old Chinese joke based on Confucian homilies runs as follows: "If you do not change your direction you will end up where you are going." Even though the intention is humor, there is wisdom in it. We must make choices if we are to change a bad direction to a better one, but the more powerful the conditions affecting such choices and the longer we delay the more difficult it becomes. The New Jersey telephone operator's personal decision about the direction of her life was easy for her. She realized what was going on and in a moment of inspiration saw a way out of it. She knew she was taking a chance — but it undoubtedly seemed the best option at the time and she took it before she lost heart. Hers was an individual choice; choices to be made by a community are much more troublesome. And if that community is worldwide, it seems all the more overwhelming. But delay doesn't make it easier, and the consequences might well be staggering.
I have often cited these lines by Loren Eisley, from his book The Invisible Pyramid, penned in his faculty office at the University of Pennsylvania in downtown Philadelphia: "In the heart of the city I have heard the wild geese crying on the pathways that lie over a vanished forest. Nature has not changed the force that drives them. Man, too, is a different expression of that force. He has fought his way from the sea's depths to Palomar Mountain. He has mastered the plague. Now, in some final Armageddon, he confronts himself."