Stop Communicating So Much
Sermon by Stephen D. Edington
November 19, 1999
Readings
[This sermon was preceeded by a reading of Mending Wall, by Robert Frost.]
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or waliing out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Sermon
What I could not figure out was why I was getting so annoyed. It was a warm night at Fenway Park, the Sox were winning, and I had a great seat from which to watch it all. It was the guy behind me with the cell phone that set off a slow but steady boil somewhere inside me. About every inning or so either his phone would ring or he would make a call, and each conversation would be an update of the game and/or a description of the same scene he'd just described some 20 minutes earlier. I don't know if he was talking to the same person on each call or not, but it did sound that way. After a few innings of this I was very close to turning in my seat and saying, "For heaven's sake doesn't the person you're talking to own a television set or a radio? If they really want to know what's going on here there are other ways to find out other than your constantly making or getting phone calls!" Controlled guy that I am, such words were never spoken--not out loud anyway--and I eventually managed to tune the guy out and continued to enjoy the game.
But why did I get so set off to begin with? It wasn't as if I were trying to enjoy a cozy dinner in a cozy restaurant with a few cozy friends and was being interrupted by cell phone conversations at the next table. Some restaurants now actually have "cell phone free" areas--akin to their "smoke free" areas--to deal with just such situations. But I was in a ballpark with close to 30,000 noisy people, and was making my share of noise as well. In this type of setting what difference should it have made if someone behind me was making extensive use of his phone? It certainly wasn't personal. I wouldn't know or recognize the guy if he were sitting here this morning. But in another sense, I believe it was personal. It was personal in the sense that my reaction to the gentleman "at the old ball game" was personally revealing about some of my gut level feelings concerning the latest in communications technology.
Actually its not the technology itself so much, as it is the ethos that seems to be springing up around it that I struggle with. Its an ethos that holds that since we now possess the means for being reachable by practically anyone, at any time, and from any location then we somehow should be this reachable. If we can now "reach out and touch" anyone, anywhere, at any time, and from any locale then this is what we somehow ought to be doing. Maybe I'm spitting in the ocean here, but I at least have to say, "Wait a minute ... can't we at least, ah, talk about this?" Do we really want a culture in which the unpardonable sin, dear God forbid, is to be "out of touch" once in awhile, or incommunicado now and then?
I guess I should state all the requisite disclaimers at this point. Yes, I want to be reachable by my family, friends, and members of my congregation whenever the need or wish arises. If I leave town, even if its just part of a day, I leave numbers where I can be contacted. I own a cell phone. I now include my e-mail address on my business cards. I still draw a line in the sand at carrying a pager or a beeper, but I also know that lines in the sand can be easily washed away. I am delighted at the number of people who are discovering our church via the web; and I can accept the irony that a sermon in which I question the ethos of 21st century methods of communication will be posted on our church's website.
Having now assured you, I hope, that I am neither a hermit in search of a cave, nor a 21st century Luddite, let me return to the question of just how desirable "ultimate communication" really is. Shortly after my aforementioned night at Fenway, I read a column by Thomas Friedman on the New York Times op-ed page that helped answer my own question about why I reacted as I did. The title of his piece is "The Y2K Social Disease." I'm going to read a few excerpts: "As the millennium nears, many people will be looking for the story of the century. I've already found mine. It is actually the story of the next century, and it was carried on the wire services from Israel: An Israeli man 'was pulled over Monday after a policewoman nabbed him with a mobile phone in each hand. Engrossed in his conversations, he was operating the steering wheel with his elbows,' the daily Haaretz reported. 'A policewoman flagged him down when she saw his gray Mitsubishi meandering from side to side.'"
Friedman continues: "This motorist with a cell phone in each ear, driving with his elbows, gets my vote as the poster boy for the social disease of the next millennium--over- connectedness. This is the real Y2K virus for developed countries. It is the anxiety that is going to be produced when telecommunications combines with the 'Evernet'--the technology that will soon allow people to get on line from their watches, their cars, their toasters, or their Walkmans--so that everyone will be connected all the time, everywhere. This virus of overconnectedness is spreading daily, and it has no known cure."
A few lines later Mr. Friedman gave me at least the assurance that I'm not alone, and maybe not even all that crazy, in my feelings about the person behind me at the ballpark: "More and more [quoting him again now] I find myself reacting to people with cell phones the same way I react to people smoking cigars at the dinner table next to me--violently. I call it Y2K rage." Reading those words was like have a doctor explain what's ailing you: So that's what I have. Y2K rage. I was actually proud, upon reading that, that I was able to keep myY2K rage so well controlled. As I said earlier, the guy at the ballpark was hardly a disturbance in the midst of a noisy ballgame, but he represented an ethos I rebel against.
But is Friedman being excessive in using words like "social disease" and "virus" when it comes to discussing communications technology? Being a New York Times columnist I'd be willing to bet he's even more wired in, more connected, than I am when it comes to his line of work. I think he is right to use the term "anxiety" when he writes of the anxiety that will be produced when, as he puts it, "everyone will be able to be connected all the time, everywhere." One response to Mr. Friedman might be to say that what is happening right now with these rapid and phenomenal advances in how we human beings can be connected to one another is simply the latest version of something that has been happening over the course of the history of the human race. Many anthropologists see in the story of the human race the dymanic of human beings creating tools, and then in turn being re-created or re-defined by those very same tools.
Acquiring the ability to travel great distances in short times, for example, has done more than just move us more quickly from point A to point B; it has also changed our concept of the self, and of ourselves. Today we don't see ourselves as tied, or rooted, to a particular geographical locale in the same way as our ancestors of only a few hundred years ago did. Whether one actually travels a great deal or not, or re-locates frequently or not, knowing that we are mobile beings in a way that earlier humans could not have even conceptualized, really shapes our understanding of what it means to be human in a way that differs from that of how peoples from an earlier age defined it. So, maybe this is just another case of our being redefined by our tools and let's not get too alarmed or upset about it. In fact how, first, computers, and then the internet, and now the approaching "Evernet" as Friedman calls it, are challenging and changing some of our concepts about outselves could make for several sermons--sermons which I hope to undertake over the course of this church year.
But for today let's keep the focus on this matter of "overconnectedness." As you've seen I resonated with the term quite well, and found myself nodding my head in agreement as I read the entire Friedman piece, especially when I came to this sentence: "Time and distance provide buffers and breathing space in our lives, and when you eliminate both you eliminate some very important cushions." One of the reasons I go to baseball games, and sometimes I even go by myself, is indeed for the very purpose of creating some time and distance from some of the other aspects of my life. Its only for a few hours, and then I'm back in the zone of time and space that I usually occupy; but I've experienced a very important time and distance cushion. Making and receiving phone calls while sitting in the stands would deflate the cushion altogether.
I think part of the challenge and joy of being human is finding the right mix, or ratio, of connection and boundary. The "right ratio" is, of course, not going to be the same for everyone; but without that mix I feel an essential part of our humanity is lost. Achieving that mix, however it may be particularly constituted for each individual, means dealing with two countervailing truths. One of those truths was stated very well by Kurt Vonnegut in one of his non-fiction essays when he said that "one human being is no human being." What he's saying is that we are, by definition, relational beings. Without ties or connections of some kind to other human beings we are something less than human ourselves. Vonnegut is absolutely right. As for the countervailing truth, however, I could play with Vonnegut's words a little by saying that an overconnected human being is no human being either--or scarcely human anyway. This is why I think Friedman is right to anticipate "anxiety" at the prospect of "everyone (being) able to be connected all the time, anywhere." We are defined, I am trying to say here, by our connections and by our boundaries. And if Vonnegut gives us one side of that truth it is Robert Frost who provides us with the other. Let's shift our attention to him for a few minutes.
"Mending Wall" may not be Frost's best known poem (I'd say that's a tossup between "Two Roads Diverged in the Wood" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"), but I'll venture to say it contains Frost's most oft quoted line about good fences making good neighbors. When you read "Mending Wall" all the way through, however, you see that Frost is actually the one who is resisting the idea of rebuilding the wall. Its the neighbor who is more invested in rebuilding the wall after hunters have toppled a portion of it. It is Mr. Frost who questions the why of rebuilding the wall at all:
Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,v That wants it down...
But for all of his teasing protestations Robert Frost can get no more out of his neighbor than a repeating of "Good fences make good neighbors." And the poet, in his wisdom, gives his neighbor the last word. I obviously don't know all that Robert Frost intended to convey in this poem, but I see his wall as a metaphor for that which encloses our personal self. To mend it is to care for that part of ourselves best known to us, and to those with whom we choose to share our most intimate thoughts and feelings. Frost is quite right to say "something there is that doesn't love a wall," but without a personal boundary then I question what we have to offer when we reach over the wall. Mr. Frost's neighbor knows a truth we would all do well to heed.
"One human being is no human being." "Good fences make good neighbors." Part of being human involves knowing how to creatively live in the necessary interplay between connections and boundaries; and learning how one enhances and strengthens the other. However much our tools may, and do, and will redefine and re-create us, I believe there are certain aspects of the human condition that remain basic. If our tools come to redefine us so that we are always "on", or so that we are nearly always a receiver, a transmitter, or a responder to dispatches of one kind or another, then a very essential part of our humanity will, I feel, be lost. I believe the anxiety about overconnectedness that Mr. Friedman identifies is a fear that too much connection may eventually leave us with very little real, deep, lasting human connections at all. Being available or connected to everyone, everywhere, all the time actually means being connected to no one in any meaningful fashion. Evernet or no Evernet, I somehow doubt that we well ever get to such a point, but I think a caution, at least, needs to be sounded.
It was some 30 years ago, back in the Dark Ages before even personal computers had come onto the scene, that the theologian Michael Novak wrote a book called Ascent of the Mountain; Flight of the Dove. It has remained one of my basic texts of religious liberalism. Mr. Novak himself has moved in a steadily rightward direction over the past 3 decades and has become one of the leading lights for religious and political neo-conservative movement (which isn't even all that "neo" anymore). But in that book Novak said that the two basic religious questions are "Who am I?" and "Who are we, under these stars?" He may not even believe that himself anymore, but I still do.
The cultivation of a personal identity, the exploration of "Who am I?"; and the ways in which we choose to relate ourselves to the Larger Life of people, and the earth and the universe itself--"Who are we under these stars": These are ultimately and religious and spiritual matters. To pursue these questions is to search for the connections that mean the most--both within us and beyond us--in the midst of whatever superficialities and distractions come to be visited upon us. It could well be that the challenge of the next century will be to learn how to cut through all of the overconnections that will come out way in order to get to what it is that really binds us to ourselves, to one another, and to the Larger Life which enfolds all of us.
I think we will need communities like the one gathered here, and to which we continue to welcome new members, to keep us focused on that journey.
Copyright © 1999 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
