How Civilization Fell

 

Postage stamp from the late-stage era when people still wrote letters to each other. 

As the years pass, more and more I am convinced that civilization is not about to fall but rather it has already fallen. Somehow we have managed preserve the material trappings of civilization--the working economy and its comforts and convenience, at least for most people. Yet it feels as if we live in a time of barbarism.  When one looks for certain hallmarks of civilization beyond the economic, one sees that certain aspects of our culture that were continuations of phenomena from the earliest days of human civilization have disappeared.

One of these things that has disappeared is the written word. The hand-writing of ordinary language is happening less and less by the day. We press buttons on a keyboard and pixels on the screen in front of us change their luminosity and hue. Pixels on monitors elsewhere in the world may change as well. This is not writing. This is pixel manipulation.

Hand writing has all but disappeared except for white boards in corporate offices, where the scrawl is often barely legible. Is there anything more pathetic that a white board with someone's brainstorm ideas from two months ago? Likely no one really understood it at the time, not even the person doing it.

What no longer exists at all is letter writing, the kind that friends, family, and lovers wrote to each other since the invention of the postal service.  Email destroyed it but without replacing it. It has been a barbaric conquest, suitable only for business communication. Among intimates, it only serves to highlight the separation. It would drive lovers mad with frenzy, this false sense of connection.

I am one of the last letter writers, holding out while others fell by the wayside.  One day I got sad thinking that my nieces, born in 2005, will never get a love letter, nor any of the young women of their cohort. 

None of them will know the joy of true correspondence, which as opposed to email, happens at a human pace. We build up thoughts in our head, one's we want to put into the consciousness of people who we know and love (or hate, etc.). At some point they build up enough that we feel compelled to write these thoughts  down, and they never come as we intend, but as some shadow of what we meant to say. Yet we know the joy the other person will have, to receive a letter, and with all the groundedness of material existence, we fold up the paper, words inked out, written over, with arrows and inserts, and we put it in an envelope, perhaps one of fine material befitting our esteem for the other person. Perhaps we add festive extras. We lick the envelope and seal it, knowing they will open it.

We place it in a mailbox and we wait. Days go by. We know the letter is en route, but it has not arrived. It will be found by the addressee at some time unknown to you. They will read it, and be guided through the thoughts and emotions that were manifest in in by you, the writer, but days or weeks before.  It is like a boat going through the locks of canal, taking its time on each stage.

Perhaps the addressee holds the contents of your words in mind, for days and even weeks, returning to consider them, and building up an itinerary of reflections and responses to your words, one they wish to share to you. Or perhaps they let them go, leaving only the intention to write back to you at some point.

Perhaps they do write back, at some frequency of time that is appropriate to your friendship, family relationship, or otherwise. One need not leap to action in most cases. One savors the build up to writing a response. 

As such one experiences, a mental and spiritual overlap of brain states with another person, asyncronously and at a distance, over time. Such a thing can be very healthy for one's mental health. My great-uncle Dick wrote to his surviving sister, ping pong back and forth almost daily from Nevada to Nebraska and back,  until around 2018, when his last sister died. 

With good friends, the time lag need not be constant, frequent, nor even all that regular. Six months or a year may go by. Yet the friendship can be retried at any moment. We could not only follow, but participate in, each other's lives over time. Become small or large characters in chapters of each other's lives.

None of this is possible anymore. Email destroyed all this. It gave us an illusion of connection. And yet that was only the start. If we still had only email, and not text and social media, we might have stumbled our way through the darkness. Now email seems retrograde.

Email friendship and love affairs exist only in the movies. They cannot happen in real life. They can only say hello to each in passing. They "drop in" and move on, until next year, or several years later, when digitially "drop in' again.  In contrast, by text and private message, people hook up.  Text is superb for clandestine love affairs with sexual contact. Imagine the insanity of a long-distance text relationship.

The functions of a working society, a civilized one, that were once supplied by letter writing, continuously so for hundreds of years, even back to Antiquity, have been abolished. 

The seduction of technology is strong. Some have begun revolting from it, including apparently youth. A couple weeks ago I read about a historical society where school kids can use typewriters.  Typewriters are fascinating technology worthy substitute for hand writing for intimate correspondence, I think. Some folks have terrible hand-writing, after all, and typewriters tend to bring out the poet in all of us.