No matter that the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world not to have universal health care. We Americans are different. We’re independent. We don’t need others — especially our government — telling us what to do. No less a giant than Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay, “Self-Reliance,” gave us a clarion call (“trust thyself”) reminding us that real men make decisions for themselves.
The 19th-century Emersonian idea of self-reliance, slapped on top of 21st-century realities, yields a very odd result. On the one hand, many Americans — especially Republicans — deeply loathe “government nanny-state programs.” They argue that whenever the government interferes in the marketplace, people lose their sense of initiative and their freedoms, costs go up, and whatever was wrong in the first place simply gets worse. They say it’s best to leave as much as possible to the free market and keep the terrible Leviathan of Government confined to a small cage in a zoo of possible oppressions. To them, nothing about health care in particular makes it different from any other consumer matter, or alters the unalterable principle that individuals participating in free markets decide things best and that Government should leave them alone.
On the other hand, while Americans can’t stand their government telling them what to do, they love having machines that boss them around. Our phones, appliances, and automobiles are evolving into machine-creatures that take over and make decisions for us. Who needs to bother to remember phone numbers any more, now that phones remember them for us? And as I recently learned when shopping for a new washing machine (the old one died), the appliance industry has turned into a little nanny state of its own. “I want the simplest thing that also has a high Energy Star rating,” I told the lady at Home Depot. She proceeded to show me machine after machine — popular sellers that were in the medium price range — designed for people who can’t (or won’t) estimate small, medium and large for themselves “No worries! You just dump in the clothes and the machine weighs them for you,” the lady told me.
Or take the ever-increasing number of winking, blinking, talking automobiles. Recently, a colleague who was driving me to an event refused to listen when I said, “Say, I know the way — turn left here.” With the affectionate tone of a father who knew better, he calmly informed me that his GPS navigation system knew better. We drove two miles out of our way.
To my dismay, the toilets and faucets in the bathrooms at Hofstra increasingly seem to be the kind that let sensors do the “work.” Sensor potties don’t trust that we know how to flush them properly. Or perhaps their designers worry that we’ll become anxious about (heaven help us) the germs that live on toilet handles. Perhaps people are forgetting how to wash their hands?
While commuting to work on the Long Island Railroad the other day, I happened to sit next to a test pilot. I asked him if he wasn’t scared doing all that crazy Tom Cruise Top Gun stuff. He laughed and told me that was the easy part. His biggest fear was that he’d get so bored that he’d fall asleep on a long flight. “Everything’s electronic now,” he said wistfully. Even while typing this little post, I’ve been plagued by the rude interference of Word’s gigantic “Help” pop-up window that likes to block my little essay every time my finger happens to slip even the eensiest bit. Can’t I decide on my own when it’s time to correct my mistakes?
Sometimes I wonder how long it’ll be before people say, “Huh? Turn a what? A ‘knob’? What’s that?” How long before people no longer remember how to memorize a phone number? How long before people can’t read a map, or understand directions, or estimate whether a load of dirty clothes is small, medium, or large? The relentless electronification of everything from washing machines to automobiles to toilets, which pleases the American consumer no end, points in one direction only: a populace as incapacitated as the horizontal doughboy humans on the outer-space cruise ship in the animated movie WALL-E.
Here’s a crazy proposal: We embrace universal health care, but ban all washing machines that won’t let people decide for themselves the size of their own load of laundry.
17 Responses to Gadget-Dependent Nation
jffoster - February 25, 2010 at 9:50 pm
I know what the test pilot meant. Letting George (the autopilot) do it on a cross country night solo flight is pretty risky because one might fall asleep. Trouble is that, absent moderate to severe turbulence, George (the autopilot) can fly that plane steadier than you can. We’ve even gotten three generations confused on AM and PM because of the way digital clocks change times on the hour. 12 Midnight is PM, NOT AM. 12 Noon is 12 AM. (I know, the standard Sun is on the Meridian and not “ante” it at noon and on the antimeridian at Midnight.) But legally, if I die at exactly midnight Zone time tonight, the coroner’s certificate will make the date Thursday, 25 Bebuary [I dont pronounce the damned “r” and I aint gonna write it.} — not Friday, 26 Febuary. Look at railroad timetables from the 50s and 60s if you don’t want to believe me. It’s the digital clocks what done it.
maggiesloane - February 26, 2010 at 8:19 am
What month is Bebuary?
lizgibbons - February 26, 2010 at 8:33 am
If a machine can make a “decision” with a simple logarithm, it frees us to do the kind of higher-order thinking (writing books, updating courses) that makes us unique. I’m all for it–if I can get a Roomba to vacuum my house and a washer that makes laundry easier, I have more time to create. What we have to watch out for is that we use this additional time and brainpower wisely–not watching The Bachelor and Lost.
jffoster - February 26, 2010 at 8:33 am
The month whose initial letter in English orthography is hit on a QWERTY keyboard with the same finger as F.
skocpol - February 26, 2010 at 8:42 am
Some machines make decisions with algorithms, few with logarithms. Spell-check doesn’t flag either one unless they are missspelled. [sick] Smart people who rely on dumb machines are…
dank48 - February 26, 2010 at 9:57 am
Well, I agree in principle. Problem is, personally, I won’t own a car with an automatic transmission. My wife has one, and my daughter has one, but . . . well, further explanation might give the impression that sexism has not been extirpated in Naptown. I won’t carry a cell phone or use Power Point or put up with the Office Ass. On the other hand, a lot of these devices and programs have made a considerable difference to people with special needs. Ms. Deaf Indiana might have made the Dean’s List without hand-held, laptop, digital, electronic, pretty damn expensive doodads, but I have my doubts. Seriously, people with handicaps have benefited in any number of ways from the proliferation of these devices. And she’s finally stopped texting while driving. There is progress.
beaugard - February 26, 2010 at 10:53 am
What’s wrong with heroic materialism? What’s your alternative? What’s wrong with improving the material conditions of people’s lives? In general?Why are you sure that the electronification of everything pleases the American consumer? Have you researched this? Why blame these people(consumers) who have little or no control over the political and economic decisions made by elites?And finally, why aren’t you talking about how awful the New York art world is? Have you ever? Apologies, but I don’t follow your blog that closely.
falzf - February 26, 2010 at 11:24 am
To #7 (beaugard):1. “Heroic materialism” (whatever that is) was not the subject of my post.2. Not every method of improving the material conditions of people’s lives is good.3. The post does not blame consumers. Quite the contrary.4. I’ve posted critically many times on contemporary art–in NYC and elsewhere. Unlike you, I approach contemporary art with an open mind. If you’re interested, my posts are archived, and are searchable using key words.
dthornton9 - February 26, 2010 at 1:04 pm
So you like government removing decisions from our hands and imposing control and socialism, i.e. having our truely important decisions made for us by government committees and bureaucrats. I find this hard to believe, especially when they’ve proven themselves so very, very good at it in the past! But you object to the smart, creative, profitable inventions and systems made by the private sector which are making everyone’s lives easier? I suggest you find a wringer washer in someone’s old barn, fix it up, and start doing your laundry that way if you don’t like the options available in your local appliance store. Oh, and get rid of your automatic thermostat, and your air bags and Anti-lock brakes….and on and on….BTW – I’m not sure slamming Republicans from the very beginning of your article adds to your credibility. Did you happen to watch the “Presidential forum” yesterday? It wasn’t the Republicans who acted like arrogant snobs. And question, where do you teach? So that I can make sure my child doesn’t attend there? or take any of your classes?
dank48 - February 26, 2010 at 3:03 pm
Well.Maybe I’m out of it, but one thing that gets me is the commercials for various means and methods of getting television, cable, internet hookup, etc., which are breathless with their own wonderfulness. But, really, how wonderful is it to be able to start watching a program in one room and finish watching it in another? To be able to record and replay eighty-five programs at once and watch them later, no doubt while something even more fabulous is on, which will itself need to be recorded so that later . . . How much TV can one watch? Not more, I suspect, than 168 solid hours a week, max. Why? Two hundred channels, most of them barely distinguishable from each other (why is professional wrestling sometimes on USA and sometimes on the Sci Fi channel?), and there are plenty of times when I’m reduced to–oh, the shame of it!–picking up a book.
philosophy - February 26, 2010 at 3:17 pm
One problem with electronic advisors/assistants is that they are designed by software engineers, and engineers (of all sorts) often don’t think the way the rest of us do. What’s “intuitive” to them isn’t intuitive to others; this is especially true when they substitute icons for words. But maybe that’s because software engineers tend to be illiterate.
goxewu - February 26, 2010 at 3:32 pm
Why dank48, you arrogant ol’ socialist snob, you. So you like government removing decisions about how many hundreds of channels there are on cable, how many TV programs you can replay at once from your GPS-guided car, and whether you’re allowed to watch more than 168 hours of television a week, and having those decisions made for us by government committees and bureacrats? So you object to the smart, creative, profitable inventions and systems made by the private sector which are making everyone’s lives easier by having wrestling on the SyFy channel?Pinko Fendrich’s school is right over there on the right-hand column, and I’m not quite so stupid that I can’t find it, or my keister with both hands. But where do you teach? Or if you don’t teach, what’s the nearest college to you? I don’t want my child–who’s already wait-listed? at Liberty and Bob Jones?–going anywhere near the place? (Somebody told me that throwing in lots of question marks makes me appear smarter. Don’t I?)
dank48 - February 26, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Goxewu, paragraph by paragraph:1. I’m not socialist. I suppose the rest is reasonably accurate.2. This is of course a straw man, as you realize, and has nothing to do with my convictions, beliefs, or crazy ideas. Whether the gummint or the market screws up television or life in general seems to me to make little difference. Most of what I think is wrong with the world has to do with the hardening of my arteries, but not all of it.3. Glad you found Professor (note spelling) Fendrich’s school; congratulations. Glad to know both hands still work for that laudable function. I don’t teach no more; student evaluations convicted me of setting homework and not only giving exams, but grading them as well. The nearest college is an office building a stone’s throw away housing an outpost of University of Phoenix, but I haven’t been there. Good luck with the child, wait-listed wherever he or she may be. By the time your wee bairn is unwee enough to go to college, she or he may be making choices you don’t care for, and by that time, it won’t matter what you care for.I don’t know about question marks making anyone appear smarter. It reminds me of an early part of “Flowers for Algernon,” but that’s probably coincidental. Better than exclamation points, anyway.Have a good weekend.
goxewu - February 26, 2010 at 4:57 pm
Re #13:I was making fun of #9, not #13. Sigh.
dank48 - February 26, 2010 at 5:00 pm
Well, it is a good thing we’re just slinging words, then. “I know you believe you understood what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard was not what I meant.” Or words to that effect. Let’s try to have a good weekend all the same.
goxewu - February 26, 2010 at 5:05 pm
I meant to say that I was making fun of #9, not #10. Probably should have bogusly signed #12 “—dthorton9.” But one wants to leave a few dots for other people to connect.As long as there’s plenty o’ rasslin’ on SyFy, it’ll be a good weekend.
timewaster123 - March 17, 2010 at 9:47 pm
Sigh. I already don’t remember phone numbers. If I happened to have an accident without my cell phone, I could maybe call my parents’ number from 1995…. I know, it’s terrible.