Right On, Ruskin!

One of my favorite men of letters, Nineteenth Century art historian and social critic John Ruskin, wrote in Letter 5 of Fors Clavigera (1871) that two small English hamlets, Buxton and Bakewell, nestled in a valley "divine as the Vale of Tempe, you might have seen the Gods there morning and evening--Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the light--walking in fair procession on the lawns of it and to and fro among the pinnacles of its crags." at some distance apart.

Oblivious to the valley's beauty, however, and seeking cash from new enterprise, the two hamlets built a railroad through it, blasting thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream, Ruskin writes, but enabling "every fool in Buxton to be at Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton, which [they] thought of as a lucrative process of exchange--you Fools Everywhere."

And in the same letter, referring to the recent expansion of telegraph lines, he scoffs at his countrymen for "knotting a copper wire from London to Bombay and flashing a message along it and back.... But what was the message, and what the answer? Is India the better for what she replied? If not, you have only wasted an all-round-the-world's length of copper wire. If you had, perchance, two words of common sense to say, though you had taken wearisome time and trouble to send them,...[it] would have been worth the carriage, and more. But you have not anything like so much as that to say, either to India or to any other place."

In configuring my latest pride and joy, a new media edition computer, I am reminded of Ruskin's remarks. It has doubled my processor speed and tripled my storage space, enabled me to plug in all kinds of peripherals and display media files in amazing new ways. But when it comes down to it, it can't really do anything my previous clunkers couldn't do at all. It just does them faster and slicker. Like the citizens of Buxton and Bakewell, I was seduced by the siren of Technology, by the assumption that bigger, faster, and more, would somehow mean better.

It makes me wonder if all our cellphones and cable networks, satellites and iPods, internet phones and accumulated communications advances of the past century have done us one bit of good, if we still cannot muster "two words of common sense" to say to one another. As I sit here writing on my laptop, I note my icons for AIM, for Googletalk, and for Skype--all vying for my choice to carry my immortal words to my distant friends and family--and notice that with improved bandwidth and audio, some are adding video in their latest editions so that we can not only hear each other say nothing sensible but see each other doing it as well. And that passes, in our time, for progress.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against advancements in technology. I just think it's foolish to equate them with advances in civilization, which can only come when the human element catches up, when our sense of common humanity catches up with our technical ingenuity. If and when we get more "common sense" to say, more wisdom, more tolerance and concern for each other, we'll be able to say it fast enough, and begin to justify the development of whatever means we use to say it.