Are we in the handbasket yet?

There has always been a handbasket waiting to take us to hell. Doomsayers of every era prognosticate the imminent social descent down the slippery slope of degraded and decadent culture. Today, it is rap music, ill-mannered youth with their imprecatory speech and ill-fitting pants, and--of course--the tools of our presumed descent, especially video games and computers. In the sixties, we all learned in health class that marijuana was a stepping stone to harder drugs, such as LSD and heroin. These drugs were the drivers of the handbasket. In the fifties, it was communism--real or imagined. It seems any decade of the 20th century conjured up its handbaskets. Television was the great time- and mind-stealing demon of the fifties. Flappers shimmied and foot-slapped down that slope during the twenties. Automobiles belched their demonic fumes into a not always adoring consumer public during the teens.

Before the twentieth century, technological & cultural change happened more slowly than in the previous century; nevertheless, every advance in technology probably felt like "the" handbasket to many people, and with good reason. While industrialization augmented the wealth of some, it darkened the skies and coated buildings with ash and soot. It used the clock to regulate the lives of workers, who no longer relied on mother earth to tell them when to sleep, when to awaken, when to go to work, when to put work aside. Has all the stuff we've produced been worth the cost? And yet--we are still here, enduring and persevering through our impulse to embrace change and all the gadgets it brings.

It always seems to be young people who fasten on to new crazes, new technologies. Whatever that new item is will inevitably bear the blame for the debaucheries of youth. Three hundred years ago, books were blamed for corrupting youth, just as tv was blamed 40 years ago and computers and music are blamed now. We lament the choice kids make to stay inside wrapped up in the lonely embrace of a computer screen or a handheld game instead of inventing stories and adventures with friends in the fresh outdoor air. Kids have been taught to take everything in sound byte doses while they multitask, running snippets of discourse with one or more people simultaneously on cell phone, IM, e-mail, and landline.
Common wisdom tells us none of this can be good. We instinctively value and seek out sunshine and fresh air, knowing they shower vitamins on us and keep muscles toned and fit. We grow alarmed at visions of millions of kids under 12 holed up in their rooms for hours--human moles subsisting solely on candy bars and the canned glow of monitor screens. We doomsayers of the TV generation wring our hands and lament that these current technologies are certainly the breaking point. The evidence is all around us in a test-saturated educational environment that churns out dumber and dumber kids every year, kids who know all the brand name clothing stores from New York to California but have no idea that those are two states three thousand miles apart!

I'll be honest; I'm a luddite. I don't like sorting out the mass of spaghetti that connects TV sets, video game players, VCR's, and DVD's. I wring my hands every time some new cyber-this or nano-that captures the minds and hearts of my kids--and yes, many of my adult peers as well. Why? Partly because I won't understand the new and exciting and will never understand why you would want to take pictures with a phone. But mostly it's because I love books. I am crestfallen when young students facing a research need rush to the computer automatically, even if the query is more aptly and quickly answered by a book--such as basic information about careers, or religions, or recipes. Just as there are adults who will always relax with TV instead of a book, there are kids whose default entertainment will always be video games or web sites. There is no question that books for children have become attenuated over the past 30 years, and the dumbing down of analysis and information is, in my opinion, tragic. How can the intricacies, nuances, ambiguities, and depth of a significant human life--Martin Luther King, for instance--be served in an image- and fact box-laden biography of 32 or 48 pages? The Constitution, the periodic table of the elements, significant human lives--all become diluted and emptied of complexity and richness for the sake of the sound byte generation. If our waning ability to anayze and ask deep questions isn't a handbasket, I don't know what is, for what is it that makes us human if it isn't these very same cognitive abilities? Knowing a human life engenders empathy--if we lack access to the full personhood of a human life, we compromise our ability to empathize. Are we in the handbasket yet? If kids eschew stories, not choosing to read on their own and complaining when they're read to in school because "this is bo-o-o-ring!", how much of our ability to connect to other people--other lives--is lost. Sounds like a slippery descent to me.

I doubt my own perceptions only because history argues against the very existence of the handbasket. We haven't yet plunged down that oblique path of no return, despite the lamentations of generations of doomsayers predicting calamity over this technology or that cultural trend. Here's what I think will happen, and I am making a conscious choice for optimism because I tend toward a more saturnine handwringing stance by nature. I think kids will sooner or later yearn to stretch their muscles in fresh air, and the atavistic longing for the sights, smells and sounds of earth and wind will call out to them. I think we'll become increasingly numb to the ever-growing vastnesses of our TV and computer wastelands and we will hanker for something "different." Suddenly, our kids will grab a ball--or maybe create one out of snow--and "discover" outdoor fun: hopscotch, Kick the Can, Ghost in the Graveyard, Tag. Sooner or later, the primordially soothing rays of natural sunlight have to prevail over the unnatural glow of mole toys in mole caves. It's human nature. It is also human nature to surpass the "evils" of one generation in time for the next generation to invent new "evils." Yesterday--the Charleston. Today--gay marriage. It is equally absurd to be afraid of either, but we still have to learn that the latter is no more ominous than the former; we still have to learn that neither one is a handbasket at all.

Human nature also tends toward change and cycles. Certainly, the unbelted gangsta fashion that disgusts most adults will yield eventually to some other fad, some other "statement." Likewise, how many generations will tolerate the rude, uncivil, "talk to the hand" fashion of discourse that prevails today? As for the dumbing down of education--I have faith that a critical mass of youth that actually knows in what century the Civil War was fought will produce another generation of good students, tenaciously insisting that there be real standards and that these standards be much more rigorous than they are today--rigorous and measured by some means other than standardized testing. I admire and applaud the teacher who makes her students memorize the Gettysburg Address, coupling that mental task with a parsing of the terms and phrases to get at the deeper meaning of one of America's most significant speeches.

The only certainty is that the rate of change is accelerating. I hope we can teach ourselves to be content with what we have now, to not be seduced by the rapid availability of the next nanotechnological marvel on the horizon. Maybe we can train ourselves to stick with the podcast even as more clever ways of communicating and living enter our space, even as rolling generations of smaller and yet more capacious cyber chips render today's computers obsolete in a year or two.

As for me--I'll just keep reading my books.


Copyright 2007 Charlotte Browneyes