Self-Reliance Revisited: Why Does the Slave Embrace His Chains?

We Have Followed Too Much the Devices…

Self-Reliance Revisited: Why Does the Slave Embrace His Chains?

Having explored the downsides of bucket lists in an earlier article and then waded into the murky waters of device-driven commercial media last week, Farwell now turns his attention to the devices themselves—and to the effect they’re having on how we experience our world. Do you think this doesn’t have anything to do with canoeing? Well, you couldn’t be more wrong. That’s Farwell’s notion, anyway. Why not see what you think?
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by Farwell Forrest | February 16, 2018

I don’t suppose that anyone reads Emerson anymore. I know I don’t. No, that’s not true. I didn’t. But I do now. And only now do I realize what I’ve been missing. My belated foray into the thickets of Transcendentalist literature began prosaically enough. I was chasing down the source of a quote I’d seen in The Complete Walker, and the search took me to one of Emerson’s most celebrated essays: “Self-Reliance.” I found the quote I was seeking in short order, but I also found a lot more—an exhaustive, eye-opening discourse on the worm that lurks in the apple (or should that be “the Apple”?) of progress.

Here’s the first paragraph that caught my eye:

Society never advances. … The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind.

This was written twenty years before Confederate guns opened fire on Fort Sumter, so it may require some translation. For “coach” read “minivan,” and for “Geneva watch” read “iPhone.” That being done, Emerson’s observations on the shortcomings of “civilized man” are as pertinent today as they were in 1841. Shortcomings? No, that’s not right. Self-inflicted wounds is closer to the mark. And what are the scarifying scourges that we employ to inflict such injuries on ourselves? Three stand out from among the many: the private automobile, the commercial airliner, and the “device.”

I’ll leave it to others to tally the butcher’s bill associated with the first two, but measure it how you will—in dollars, in lives lost, or in the diminished prospects for both our and other species’ survival—the cost is certainly high. For instance, in every month of every year our cars kill more of our fellow citizens than the airliners-turned-flying bombs that brought down the Twin Towers. Yet we accept this carnage without a second thought.

But as I said, I’ll leave these weighty matters to others. I’ll confine myself to the third scourge: the device. It’s a suitably elastic term for an endless variety of electronic sugar tits that defy easy categorization. New devices emerge every month, or so it seems, but the best known examples are probably the smartphone and the mini tablet. And yes, I chose the “sugar tit” label deliberately, not because I was seeking to offend, but because the qualities of this now seldom-seen domestic article—its pacifying properties, its addictive nature, and the empty calories provided by the content it delivers—are nearly identical to those of the smartphone and tablet.

Now consider the costs we incur when we make such devices our principal windows on the world. We become willing slaves to a host of invisible masters, for one thing. We offer our favorite places up as sacrifices to the juggernaut of mass tourism, for another. And that’s not all we sacrifice. Here are just a few of the things we surrender in the unequal exchange that occurs every time we power up our devices. We blunt our awareness of our surroundings. We hasten the loss of critical skills—skills that many younger device-dependent folks will never develop. And perhaps most importantly, we are denied the opportunity to know the satisfaction that comes from surmounting obstacles by means of our own efforts. “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” has been superseded by the babbles and bleats of little Sir Echo. In short, the device represents the triumph of the hive mind over the human spirit.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these outrageous assertions, shall we? The first—the notion that slaves to the device lose all awareness of their surroundings—is easily confirmed. Just spend ten minutes in any HyperMart. Look for a shopper who appears to be permanently grafted to his smartphone and then wait for him to blunder heedlessly into another shopper’s cart or sideswipe an aisle display kiosk, after which he’ll likely shamble on without giving any indication he’s even aware he hit something. And if this isn’t enough to convince you, simply keep watching. If my experience is anything to go by, you won’t have to wait long before you see a repeat performance.

As for the idea that people suffering from device dependency syndrome lose critical skills, consider the case of the wayward trucker. The window over my desk looks out on a town road. The road—it’s styled “Main Street” on the signs—bisects a rural hamlet that saw its last good jobs move out more than half a century ago. Little now remains beyond a library (whose shelves run mostly to romances and “how to help your addicted family member get clean” DVDs), a down-at-heels tavern, and a glorified nail bar-cum-“health spa” that serves as the grave marker for a wetland. So despite the road’s grandiose name, it leads from nowhere to nowhere—at least nowhere that anyone in full possession of his wits would want to go. It’s also narrow, with unbanked curves and several 25-percent-plus grades.

You wouldn’t think that a tandem tractor-trailer would venture onto such a death trap, would you? Yet it happens every month or so, only for the driver to come to a halt when he reaches a four corners whose tightly radiused turns make further progress all but impossible. And what brought him to this impasse? You guessed it: his GPS. So confident was he in its inerrant accuracy that he ignored the still, small voice in his head, preferring to put his fate in the hands of the god in the machine—until he found that his god had led him astray.

Such misadventures are not without their comic moments for any spectators, but they’re far from comical for the drivers, some of whom have found themselves having to back a tandem trailer up an icy hill in order to regain the state highway. Yet these entertainments have become commonplace in recent years, as more and more truckers, accustomed as they are to taking orders from a bleating box in the cab, have allowed their painfully acquired route-finding skills to atrophy past the point of no return.

That leaves only the loss of independence to consider, and to my mind, this is the greatest loss of all. Independence is what sets recreational canoeing apart from most other water sports. Spared the need to gas up at the end of every day, and piloting a boat that draws only a few inches of water, the canoeist, like the dinghy sailor and the rower, travels freely and at will. Moreover, his discoveries and adventures are earned, not purchased, and the attendent joys are dividends paid out on his copious sweat equity. Every trip, even a simple circumnavigation of Golden Pond, is therefore a personal achievement. Or at least it can be. But this happy state of affairs is fragile. Canoeists, too, are tempted by the device’s siren song of efficiency and convenience. The seduction began innocently enough many years before Steve Jobs gave the iPhone to a waiting world, as light, impermeable nylon duffles and tents replaced heavy, mildew-prone canvas and the roar of the gas stove drowned out the crackle of the log fire.* But consider what has now come to pass. Travel blogs and online forums make “researching” remote destinations a matter of minutes rather than days or weeks, eliminating the need to study quads and read the first-person accounts of early explorers. Then, once you’re under way—or immediately on your return, if your travels took you to one of the few places on earth without network coverage—Facebook and YouTube make it easy to share your trip photos and videos with the world. And you won’t be alone. Since digital technology makes shooting pictures essentially cost-free, the volume of trip photos and videos in circulation continues to grow exponentially.

Meanwhile, on the practical side, the GPS has replaced both map and compass in the navigator’s toolbox. The knack of reading the landscape from the contour lines printed on a quad is all but lost, as are the arts of triangulation and the noon sight. Few canoeists ever bothered with the latter, I know, but for a handful of perverse souls who haunted the string bogs of the James Bay Lowlands and the stark solitudes of the Barrens in the days before Navstar, the ability to get the latitude by sextant often proved very useful indeed.

Those days are long gone, however, and if a modern adventurer’s batteries go dead, or if salt spray cripples his electronic cicerone, he is well and truly lost. We now find ourselves exploring the tricky terrain of moral hazard. In the pre-device era, when a missed portage, a wrecked boat, or a broken leg might mean weeks of misery and could even end in death, canoeists who sought out unfrequented waters took pains to armor themselves against misfortune, knowing they would get precious little outside help to meet emergencies. Not so today, when hikers leave well-appointed lodges to climb treeless summits in midwinter without so much as a map or a change of socks, confident in the knowledge that if something goes wrong—and that can be something as trivial as a painful blister or a frost-nipped nose—all they need do is call out for a chopper to shuttle them home, usually at someone else’s expense.

Of course, GPS receivers, digital cameras, smartphones, and travel blogs are good things, are they not? Certainly they are. But they are also subtle knives, steadily whittling away at canoeists’ and hillwalkers’ self-reliance. And why does this not trouble us? Because we value security, convenience, and efficiency more that we do independence. And if this means that the remaining wild places must become theme parks, and that we must be electronically tagged and tracked—for our protection, you understand—for the duration of what the park websites are sure to call our “wilderness experience,” so be it. I’m sure that few canoeists will really miss the old, untidy, manifestly unsafe havens of the wild. We are slaves to the devices that serve us, after all, and we have learned to love our chains.

* No, I haven’t forgotten that the number of canoeists now hoping to get away from it all makes campfires unjustifiable extravagances in most wild places, and that stoves not only make good sense but are often required by law. But I also know that synthetic fabrics are poisoning the earth and its waters. These are matters for another time, however. The loss of innocence is always painful.

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