[pf] Technology, Trauma, and the Wild

by Tom Wheeler

21 December 2000 04:33 UTC

Technology, Trauma, and the Wild

Chellis Glendinning

I met with a young political activist for conversation last week at my
favorite cafe. A profeminist man and founder of an antiwar youth
organization during the Gulf War, this twenty-one-year-old lives to explore
social issues and act on his convictions. His burning question of the hour
concerned technology. "Has television made people less intelligent?" he
wondered, and he based his conclusion on the deconstructionist dictate that
one speak only from personal experience. His answer was, "Decidedly not."
Indeed, this young man's mental capacity was as substantial and his wit as
sharp as I had seen in anyone of any age. But I could not help noticing that
even before a quadruple espresso latte had exploded into his brain cells, my
young friend was ranting at 120 words per minute, vibrating in his seat like
a rocket poised for takeoff, hurling about words like VPL and Macromind, and
answering his own questions in quantum leaps across paradigms unintegrated
by any coherent world-view, physical reality, or moral obligation to life.

Like my friend, most of us who inhabit mass technological society find it
difficult to understand technology's impact on social reality, let alone on
our psyches. Like the tiny aerobic bacteria that reside within computer
hardware, we are so entrenched in our technological world that we hardly
know it exists. Yet widespread radioactive contamination, cancer epidemics,
oil spills, toxic leaks, environmental illness, ozone holes, poisoned
aquifers, and cultural and biological extinctions indicate that the
technological construct encasing our every experience, perception, and
political act stands in dire need of criticism. Further, such a critique
requires integration by a coherent worldview, physical reality, and moral
obligation to life.

At this point in history, it is essential that we ask difficult and
searching questions about the place of technology in our lives. What is the
essence of modern technology? How does it structure our lives? Our
perceptions? Our politics? How does it shape our psyches? What does it say
about our relationship to our humanness and to the Earth? Unfortunately,
obstacles to answers are entrenched, like concrete piers at a freeway
exchange, in both our social and psychological reality.

I discovered the scope of such obstacles while I was on a promotional tour
for my book When Technology Wounds. The book is based on a psychological
study of technology survivors: people who have become medically ill as a
result of exposure to some health-threatening technology. I interviewed Love
Canal residents, atomic veterans, asbestos workers, DES daughters,
electronics-plant workers, Dalkon Shield users, homeowners whose groundwater
had been contaminated, and Nevada Test Site downwinders, as well as
sufferers of cancer, environmental illness, chronic fatigue, immune
dysfunction, and many other problems.

By all accounts, this population is on the rise. Forty-one thousand
Louisiana residents are exposed to 3.5 million tons of toxic landfill along
the industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Thirty million
U.S. households, or ninety-six million people, live within fifty miles of a
nuclear power plant. One hundred and thirty-five million residents in 122
cities and counties breathe consistently polluted air, while 250 million
Americans--every one of us--are exposed to 2.6 billion pounds of pesticides
each year, in addition to all the radioactive fallout ringing the globe from
Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and the nuclear test sites in Nevada and
Kazakhstan.(1)

On the book tour, I suggested that since people everywhere are getting sick
from technological exposure, we had best enter into an informed and reasoned
conversation about technology. Such a conversation was not forthcoming. In a
debate on National Public Radio with MIT Professor Marvin Minsky, the
inventor of artificial intelligence, I was asked if I had any objections to
computers. I expressed concern that the deadly chemicals used to manufacture
computers contaminate the biosphere. I mentioned Yolanda Lozano, a
thirty-six-year-old worker from a GTE plant in Albuquerque who died of
cancer after being exposed to chemicals on the job.   Professor Minsky
replied, "It doesn't matter." Elsewhere on my tour, the conversation ended
almost before it began. "Get this woman off the air! She's the stupidest
guest you've ever had!" shrieked one talk-show listener. "I can't give up my
mammogram!" howled another. "As soon as we take care of this environmental
thing," insisted one man at a book fair, "we've got to colonize Mars. It's
imperative for our belief in the future."

Techno-Addiction

As a psychologist, I compare today's public awareness of the impacts of
technology to people's views of alcoholism in the 1950s. Back then,
everybody drank. It was more than socially acceptable to drink; it was
required. Alcoholics Anonymous was twenty years old and growing, but its
members still considered it an embarrassment to belong. In the past forty
years, a major revolution has occurred in our awareness of the destructive
potential of alcoholism. I see a similar necessity in the coming decade to
rethink another dangerous attachment: our addiction to technology.

It is not a new idea that we who live in mass technological society suffer
psychological addiction to specific machines like cars, telephones, and
computers, and even to technology itself. But the picture is bigger and more
complex. As social philosopher Morris Berman says in The ReEnchantment of
the World:

Addiction, in one form or another, characterizes every aspect of industrial
society. . . . Dependence on alcohol, food, drugs, tobacco. . . is not
formally different from dependence on prestige, career achievement, world
influence, wealth, the need to build more ingenious bombs, or the need to
exercise control over everything.

The editor of Science magazine describes the nation's dependence on oil as
an addiction, while Vice-President Al Gore claims that we are addicted to
the consumption of the Earth itself.2 In Steps to an Ecology of Mind,
evolutionary philosopher Gregory Bateson points out that addictive behavior
is consistent with the Western approach to life that pits mind against body.
Bateson concludes, "It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced
technology and this strange polarized way of looking at its world can
survive."

To clarify this notion that contemporary society itself is based on what I
call "techno-addiction," we would do well to remember that no machine stands
alone. In other words, we will forever be trapped in a narcissistic "but I
want my mammogram" analysis as long as we view technology only as specific
machines that either serve us individually or do not. What Lewis Mumford
calls the "mechanical order" or the "megamachine" is an entire
psycho-socioeconomic system that includes all the machines in our midst; all
the organizations and methods that make those machines possible; those of us
who inhabit this technological construct; the ways in which we are
socialized and required to participate in the system; and the ways we think,
perceive, and feel as we attempt to survive within it.

What I am describing is a human-constructed, technology-centered social
system built on principles of standardization, efficiency, linearity, and
fragmentation, like an assembly line that fulfills production quotas but
cares nothing for the people who operate it. Within this system, technology
influences society. The automotive industry completely reorganized American
society in the twentieth century. Likewise, nuclear weapons define global
politics. At the same time, society reflects the technological ethos. The
social organization of workplaces, as well as their architecture, reflects
the mechanistic principles of standardization, efficiency, and production
quotas.

>From our everyday experience within mass technological society, we will note
that "normal" acts like standing in line, obeying traffic signals, or
registering for the draft all constitute acts of participation in this grand
machine. Regarding our minds and bodies as disconnected in health and
disease, or thinking that radioactive waste buried in the Earth won't
eventually seep into the water table, are symptoms of the fragmented
thinking that emerges from such a mechanical order.

Technology and society are completely interwoven. "Technology has become our
environment as well as our ideology," writes the Dutch social critic Michiel
Schwarz. "We no longer use technology, we live it.

Vine Deloria, a Sioux Indian and author of many books on Indian history and
politics, describes the results of this social-technological imbrication as
"the artificial universe":

Wilderness transformed into city streets, subways, giant buildings, and
factories resulted in the complete substitution of the real world for the
artificial world of the urban man. . . . Surrounded by an artificial
universe when the warning signals are not the shape of the sky, the cry of
the animals, the changing of seasons, but the simple flashing of the traffic
light and the wail of the ambulance and police car, urban people have no
idea what the natural universe is like.4

Langdon Winner, in Autonomous Technology, moves the idea further, arguing
that the artifacts and methods invented since the technological revolution
have developed in size and complexity to the point of canceling our very
ability to grasp their impact upon us. The socially structured
scientific-technological reality that now threatens to determine every
aspect of our lives and encase the entire planet is out of control, he
asserts.

Total immersion, loss of perspective, and loss of control tip us off to the
link between the psychological process of addiction and the technological
system. Addiction can be thought of as a progressive disease that begins
with inner psychological changes, leads to changes in perception, behavior,
and life-style, and then to total breakdown. The hallmark of this process is
the out-of-control, often aimless compulsion to fill a lost sense of meaning
and connectedness with substances like alcohol or experiences like fame.

Throughout the technological system, the recognized symptoms of the
addictive process are blatantly evident. They are obvious in the behavior of
those who promote technology to maintain control over society or to inflate
their own bank accounts and egos. And they are evident for us all because
our experience, knowledge, and sense of reality have been shaped by life in
the technological world. Symptoms of the addictive process to be discussed
here include denial, dishonesty, control, thinking disorders, grandiosity,
and disconnection from one's feelings.

Denial

A hallmark of any addiction is the presence of denial. The practicing
alcoholic pretends that everything is normal and holds up appearances at all
costs. Similarly, with regard to technology and environmental destruction, a
societywide stance of "business as usual" pervades our lives. Denial
abounds. The automotive industry at home and abroad keeps cranking out new
models of polluting cars. Television runs ads for them. We continue to buy
them. The U.S. government denies a link between technological development
and global warming, while one president after another calls for more
technological development as the answer to environmental disaster. The
plastics industry inundates world markets with petroproducts, even using the
idea of park benches made from recycled plastic as an excuse for further
production. The medical establishment denies the existence of environmental
illness. Corporations deny the environmental impact of toxic manufacturing
processes.

Technology survivors suffer further pain as they encounter widespread denial
that their illnesses are caused by technology--denial by the insurance
industry, the justice system, the medical establishment, the media, and even
by friends and family. As Love Canal activist Lois Gibbs told me,

I went to my son's pediatrician, and I said, "Look, there are eight patients
who have you as their doctor. All of them are under the age of twelve, all
of them have a similar urinary disorder. Why is this? What do you make of
the fact that you have eight patients who live within a few blocks of Love
Canal who have the same disease?" He said, "There is no connection." (5)

Dishonesty

This symptom is acted out by the alcoholic in secret drinking, sneaky
behavior, and lying about feelings and activities. With respect to
technology addiction, dishonesty reveals itself most blatantly in the
behavior of corporations and government agencies whose self-interest lies in
purveying offending technologies. We know, for example, that officials at A.
H. Robins, the makers of the Dalkon Shield, knew in advance of the potential
medical risk of their product. Nonetheless, they sent it to market, and when
reports and studies indicating ill effects became public knowledge, A. H.
Robins claimed complete ignorance.6

Control

Addicts need to control their world to maintain access to the source of
their obsession. A workaholic I know who directs a small institute is
incapable of negotiating even the smallest agreement, because input from
others upsets her sense of control. Likewise, today's multinational
corporations display an obsession with controlling the world's resources,
consumer markets, workers' behavior, and public opinion toward their
products.

Let us also consider the very structure of modern technology. The kinds of
technologies a society develops are not as absolute or preordained as our
ethos of linear progress would have us believe; they express a society's
goals, both conscious and unconscious. In mass technological society there
exists a striking resemblance between the kinds of technologies produced and
tyrannical modes of political power. We could, in theory, focus our
technological efforts on inventions that would permit us to meet basic human
needs in as sustainable a manner as possible. Instead we strive to develop
technologies, from dams to anti-aging creams, that allow us an increasing
degree of control over the natural world.

This desire for control often backfires when humans assume a position of
extreme dependence on technical artifacts, and the lines blur between who is
master and who is slave. What happens to our lives when cars break down or
telephones go out? What happens when you don't own a fax machine, a
computer, or a car? Technology's mastery over our lives translates into
political disempowerment as well. The very conception, invention,
development, and deployment of new technologies involves a highly
undemocratic social process that is rationalized as "progress." The life
experience of technology survivors attests to this fact: they are usually
exposed to technological events that rob them of their health and livelihood
without any warning or choice.

If the particular kinds of technologies in our midst exist to promote
mastery and power, we might ask, for whom? And over whom? Windmills and
tepees express democratic and ecological values because the very people who
invent, produce, and maintain them are the same people who use them. By
contrast, the technologies disseminated in mass society reflect a mentality
of control over the natural world, space, other people, and even ourselves.
As Jerry Mander points out, running a nuclear power plant requires tight,
centralized control by both government and industry, first to produce such a
capital-intensive project, then to master public opinion, and finally to
provide military backup in case of sabotage, accidents, or public protest.
The presence of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons in a nation's
arsenal not only controls that nation's enemies; it also frightens and
intimidates, and thereby controls that nation's own citizens.

Thinking Disorders

Alcoholics and other substance abusers typically employ modes of thought
that serve the immediate needs of the addiction, rather than the long-term
well-being of the person. This is seen, for instance, in the alcoholic who
drinks to alleviate the physical and emotional pain of the hangover.

Likewise, much thinking in mass technological society is dysfunctional. Many
people embrace the "technological fix" as the answer to social,
psychological, and medical problems caused by previous technological fixes.
For instance, a proposed government program seeks to cover the oceans with
polystyrene chips that, it is hoped, will reflect "unwanted" sunlight off
the Earth's surface and save us from global warming. Likewise, some
scientists suggest orbiting hundreds of satellites around the planet to
block the sun's light.7 This is techno-addictive thinking at its most
convoluted.

Grandiosity

The practicing alcoholic's delusion of inflated power is well known. The
delusion of grandeur that fuels technological development is less apparent,
more assumed. This grandiosity insists that mass technological society is
superior to all other social arrangements. It implies that human evolution
is linear and always progressive, and that all societies should be judged by
the yardstick of technological achievement.

Technological society's main organ of socialization, public relations,
purveys the grandiosity of technology. "Master the Possibilities," teases
the MasterCard ad. "What Exactly Can the World's Most Powerful and
Expandable PC Do? Anything It Wants," promises the Compaq Desk-pro. At the
same time, the "smart weapons" unleashed during Desert Storm and televised
at home advertise that American technology, and America, are "Number One."
Behind this all-too-earnest insistence lies the out-of-control, often
aimless compulsion to create ever-increasing expressions of grandiosity--and
the hallmark of the addict, to return continually to the source of
aggrandizement. We need more cars, more televisions, more dams, more new
technologies to prove our grandiosity.

Disconnection from Feelings

Alcoholics are brimming with emotions, but they can't express themselves
directly or constructively. Instead, their feelings are hidden from view in
the shadows of their unconscious minds, and so they deny their feelings and
live in a state of frozen emotion.

Likewise, survival in the technological system requires that we act "cool"
and behave like machines. The hallmark of technological education is to
learn mathematics to quantify reality, and to master fragmented thinking to
function in a mechanistic world. Every subject we learn in school seems
unrelated to the others.

Mass technological society is structured "top-down," its fragmented nature
keeping most of us from ever grasping an understanding of the whole. The
Manhattan Project that built the bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of
people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was constructed according to a mechanistic
military model. The project included thirty-seven installations scattered
across the United States and Canada, each providing one fragment of the
production process.(8)  At the Los Alamos Laboratory, work was purposefully
accomplished with a compartmentalization of tasks and a censoring of
communication between scientists that enabled everyone involved to lose his
or her sense of vulnerability and to engage in activities the consequence of
which could neither be felt nor understood.

The upshot of such an approach to life is that feelings, experiences, and
perceptions become disconnected from each other, and the unconscious mind
becomes the receptor of repressed feelings. As a result, many of us tend to
reside in a semiconscious state: the hideous and subterranean violations
around us catalyze our feelings, but unacknowledged and unwelcome by the
mechanistic world, we act them out in behaviors we neither feel nor
understand. Like dropping the atomic bomb.

We must recognize systemic addiction in mass technological society if we are
ever to achieve a state of psychological and technological wellbeing. The
twelve-step recovery movement says that the addict must make "a searching
and fearless moral inventory" of him or herself. On the personal level, this
includes claiming responsibility for instances in which we have violated
another person's integrity. On the collective level, we would claim
responsibility for technological society's uncounted violations against
humanity, animals, the plant world, and the Earth. But lest our bleeding
hearts overtake the process, let us be alert. As psychotherapist Terry
Kellogg tells us, addictive behavior is not natural to the human species. It
occurs because some untenable violation has happened to us.9

And indeed, we have undergone an untenable violation: a collective trauma
that explains the insidious reality of addiction and abuse infusing our
lives in mass technological society. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorder defines trauma as "an event that is outside the range of
human experience and that would be markedly distressing to almost anyone.
"10 The trauma endured by technological people like ourselves is the
systemic and systematic removal of our lives from the natural world: from
the tendrils of earthy textures, from the rhythms of sun and moon, from the
spirits of the bears and trees, from the life force itself. This is also the
systemic and systematic removal of our lives from the kinds of social and
cultural experiences our ancestors assumed when they lived in rhythm with
the natural world.

Vine Deloria rightfully asserts that we technological people "have no idea"
about much of anything residing outside "the artificial technological
universe with which [we] are familiar." Human beings evolved over the course
of some three million years and a hundred thousand generations in
synchronistic evolution with the natural world. We are creatures who grew
from the Earth, who are physically and psychologically built to thrive in
intimacy with the Earth. A mere three hundred generations ago, or 0.003
percent of our time on Earth, humans in the Western world began the process
of controlling the natural world through agriculture and animal
domestication. Just five or six generations have passed since the industrial
societies emerged out of this domestication process. Our experience in mass
technological society is indeed "outside the range of human experience," and
by the evidence of psychological distress, ecological destruction, and
technological control, this way of life has been "markedly distressing" to
almost everyone.

Though largely ignored, evidence jumps from the pages of anthropological
texts suggesting that the very psychological qualities so earnestly sought
in today's recovery, psychological, and spiritual movements; the social
equalities for which today's social justice movements struggle valiantly;
and the ecological gains sought after by today's environmental movements,
are the same qualities and conditions in which our species lived for more
than 99.997 percent of its existence.

Nature-based people lived every day of their lives in the wilderness. We are
only beginning to grasp how such a life served the inherent expectations of
the human psyche for development to full maturation and health. In
nature-based people who today maintain some vestiges of their relationship
to the Earth and their Earth-based cultures, we can discern a decided sense
of ease with daily life, a marked sense of self and dignity, a wisdom that
most of us can admire only from afar, and a lack of the addiction and abuse
that have become systemic in civilization.

The loss of these psychological and cultural experiences in the face of an
increasingly human-constructed and eventually technology determined reality,
and the loss of living in fluid participation with the wild, constitute the
trauma we have inherited.

The hallmark of the traumatic response is dissociation: a process by which
we split our consciousness, repress whole arenas o[ experience, and shut
down our full perception of the world. Dissociation results not only from
direct traumatizing experience, but also from the kinds of social changes
that took place in the historical process of domestication. In Nature and
Madness, Paul Shepard describes this process as the initiation of a
heretofore unheard-of tame/wild dichotomy in which all things considered
tame (domesticated seedlings, captured animals, and the mechanical and
controlling mentality required to keep them alive) are prized and protected,
while all things considered wild ("weeds," wild animals, and the fluid,
participatory way of being human) are considered threatening and to be kept
at bay.

This split between wild and tame lies at the foundation of both the
addictive personality and technological society. Ultimately, such a split
imprisons us in our human-constructed reality and causes all the unnecessary
and troublesome dichotomies with which we grapple today--from male/female
and mind/body, to secular/sacred and technological/ Earth-based.

Technological society's dislocation from the only home we have ever known is
a traumatic event that has occurred over generations, and that occurs again
in each of our childhoods and in our daily lives. In the face of such a
breach, symptoms of traumatic stress are no longer the rare event caused by
a freak accident or battering weather, but the stuff of every man and
woman's daily life.

As human life comes to be structured increasingly by mechanistic means, the
psyche restructures itself to survive. The technological construct erodes
primary sources of satisfaction once found routinely in life in the wilds,
such as physical nourishment, vital community, fresh food, continuity
between work and meaning, unhindered participation in life experiences,
personal choices, community decisions, and spiritual connection with the
natural world. These are the needs we were born to have satisfied. In the
absence of these we will not be healthy. In their absence, bereft and in
shock, the psyche finds some temporary satisfaction in pursuing secondary
sources like drugs, violence, sex, material possessions, and machines. While
these stimulants may satisfy in the moment, they can never truly fulfill
primary needs. And so the addictive process is born. We become obsessed with
secondary sources as if our lives depended on them.

Today the world is awash in a sea of both personal and collective
addictions: alcoholism, drug abuse, sex addiction, consumerism, eating
disorders, codependence, and war making. In her book Co-Dependence,
psychotherapist Anne Wilson Schaef points out that beneath these behaviors
lies an identifiable disease process "whose assumptions, feelings,
behaviors, and lack of spirit lead to a process of nonliving that is
progressively death-oriented." While her words describe the addictive
process of individuals, they also characterize the techno-addiction of a
civilization. Society is addicted to specific technologies like cars,
super-computers, and biological weapons, all of which facilitate an
unhealthy propensity to control, numb the psyche from pain, and momentarily
feed a craving for power.

Techno-addiction is also an addiction to a way of perceiving, experiencing,
and thinking. As the world has become less organic and more dependent on
techno-fixes for problems created by earlier techno-fixes, humans have
substituted a new worldview for one once filled with clean rushing waters,
coyotes, constellations of stars, tales of the ancestors, and people working
together in sacred purpose. But the ancestors from the Western world took on
the crucial task of redefining their worldview in a state of psychic
dislocation, and so they ended up projecting a worldview that reflects the
rage, terror, and dissociation of the traumatized state. They dreamed a
world not of which humans are fully part, but one that we can define,
compartmentalize, and control. They created linear perspective, the
scientific-technological paradigm, and the mechanistic worldview.

Life on Earth encased in the product of such a construction is, to quote the
Hopi, hopelessly koyaanisqatsi, or out of balance. As a psychologist, I
believe that to address this imbalance at its roots will require more than
public policy, regulation, or legislation. It will require a collective
psychological process to heal us technological peoples who, through a
mechanized culture, have lost touch with our essential humanity.

1. David Maraniss and Michael Weisskoff, "Corridor of Death along the
Mississippi," San Francisco Chronicle, January31, 1988;Jay Gould, Quality of
Life in American Neighborhoods (Boulder, Co.: VJestview, 1986), 2:117-20;
Critical Mass Energy Project, "The 1986 Nudear Power Safety Report"
(Washington, D.C.: Public Citizen, 1986); Danid F. Ford, Three Mile Island
(New York: Penguin, 1982); Aerometric Information and Retrieval System:
1988, with Supplemental Data from Regional Office Review (Washington, D.C.:
Environmental Protection Agency, July 1989); Unfinished Business: A
Comparative Assessment of Environmental Prohlems (Washington, D.C.:
Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Policy Analysis, February 1987),
pp.8-86; Lawne Mott and Karen Snyder, "Pesticide Alert," Amicus Journal 10,
no.2 (Spring 1988), 2; and Information Disease Almanac, 1986 (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1986), p.129.

2. D. F. Koshland, "War and Science," Science 251, no.4993 (February
1,1991), 497; Al Gore, Earth in the Balance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1992).

3. Michiel Schwarz and Rein Jansma, eds., The Technological Culture
(Amsterdam: De Bailie, 1989), p.3.

4. Vine Deloria, We Talk, You Listen (New York: Delta, 1970), p.185.

5. Chellis Glendinning, When Technology Wounds (New York: Morrow, 1990),
p.66.

6. Morton Mintz, At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women and the Dalkon Shield
(New York: Pantheon, 1985), chapter 3.

7. Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and
the Survival of the Indian Nations (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991),
p.179.

8. Richard Hewlett and Oscar Anderson Jr., The New World, I 939-1946: A
History of the Atomic Energy Commission (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1962),p.3.

9. Terry Kellogg, "Broken Toys, Broken Dreams" (Santa Fe, N.M.: Audio
Awareness, 1991). Audiotape.

10. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ofMental Disorders, 3d ed.
(Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1987).

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