The Tyranny of Constant Connection

Disconnected Thoughts on the Need to Disconnect

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal

Photo by Cristofer Maximilian on Unsplash

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I remember wanting to write an essay with this title some years back—just before the journalist Nicholas Carr wrote his famous Atlantic article about Google making us stupid, later expanded into his 2010 book titled The Shallows: What the Internet Does to Our Brains. Cutting edge then, that notion seems like old news now. Apart from all the benefits they’ve brought, wave upon wave of technological advancements and their collateral damage have corroded our personal connections, eroded our social competencies, and befuddled our animal brains in known and unknown ways.

It sometimes seems we’ve succumbed to the wrong kind of connection.

Not just “distracted from distraction by distraction” anymore, we are now distracted from T.S. Elliot’s triple whammy of distraction, too.

It’s not only shallow thinking either. It’s paradoxically disconnected. Halting. Stove-piped. Little or no cross-pollination or marination. People locked into their perfectly personalized, curated, impenetrable worlds. No way out. Or in.

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My (sometimes caustic) French mother, who died several years ago, used to deride those she deemed robot people who watched too much TV as “les culs vissés,” their asses corkscrewed to the couch as they stared blank-faced at the flickering screen. What might the appropriately disparaging term be now that we each carry our own little portable screens with us wherever we go? Which of our critical anatomical parts are being corkscrewed now?

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I remember wanting to write a few words (as part of that essay I never wrote) about Teddy Roosevelt who, in 1903, while serving as President of the United States, took more than three months of his first term to travel out West. There, he camped in Yellowstone with his friend John Burroughs and hiked in Yosemite valley with his friend John Muir. Separated from the press of daily events, he was able to renew his appreciation for the natural world and to gain needed perspective. While productively detached and disconnected in that way, he determined to double down on preserving and expanding the U.S. National Park system.

What if TR, as president, had not invested that time, and instead remained locked up in the White House or a Mar-a-Lago-type place the whole while? What might have been the consequence for us? Might we instead have some Trump Plaza and Towers in Yellowstone, complete with slot machines, fools gold, and live Las Vegas-type shows? Might we have an exclusive retreat in the Shangri-la bubble of Yosemite’s gated community, with billionaires dreaming of colonizing Mars while the earth burned? What more? What less?

Can we even begin to imagine a US president going on any such off-the-grid excursion today? (Not even close.) What is the cost of the unrelenting assault? What is the consequence of never letting go? What is the price of being perpetually (as the bureaucratic saying goes) “chained to one’s desk”?

What will the cost be tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow?

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I recall the class I took as a graduate student on Japan’s Emperor System (or Tenno-sei), the organizing principle and pillar of the country’s political system from the Meiji era in the mid-late 19th century through the end of World War II. According to political analysts and social critics, one feature of the Emperor System was its total, all-encompassing, absolutist nature. In political science terms, it was “totalitarian.” Nothing existed outside of it, no perch from which to assess, no perspective from which to criticize, no way out or outside place to sneak away to. That made the system all but impregnable to internal dissent while at the same time acutely vulnerable (as history demonstrated) to the power and tumult of the world beyond Japan.

I remember from my years in Malaysia following the September 11 attacks some analysts making similar observations about the rise of political Islam. If there’s “No God but God,” then there’s no room for anything else. Unyielding and brittle, any absolutist system with no give to give is dangerous, not the least to itself.

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To state a truism, liberal democracy is a political system of structured divisions, discrete roles and responsibilities, separations of power. In a manner of speaking, it is constituted by a series of carefully conceived, built-in, outside perspectives, each serving to balance, offset, and shed light on the other. Unlike autocracy, it is not one single thing; it is many things, inside, outside, all at once.

Some national security analysts focus on the susceptibility of liberal democracies to hostile penetration. Compared to autocratic or totalitarian-type states, they’re open, porous, easy to get into and out of. News stories of stunningly successful long-term PRC spying inside the U.S. reveal the real risks of that porousness. But it’s also true that liberal democracies are capable of stupendous feats of jiu jitsu, absorbing outside shocks and converting them into unexpected advantages and even gaining strength in response—as opposed to, say, collapsing. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb might put it, at their best liberal democracies are highly anti-fragile.

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One of the foreign service ambassadors I most enjoyed working for was a fellow failed writer. (This phrase sounds better in French; and I won’t reveal his name here in the event he disagrees with the characterization.) Like pretty much every interesting person I’ve ever met, he was a voracious reader, always juggling several different books on an array of different subjects. He pointedly read outside our discipline, which at the time would have been Latin American studies, US diplomatic history, and current political events—even if he did a lot of that, too. At one point I recall he was reading a tome about the philosophy of music, and shared a chapter about the ways in which music reflects the human ambition to transcend the limits of the senses. At another, he introduced me to John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, all 23 books of which I have since read and, in certain cases, repeatedly re-read—introducing the magic of MacDonald and McGee to other enthusiasts in turn.

I remember we discussed the importance of cultivating an outside perspective on our own work. In many fields, new insights often come from outside, from those not locked unconsciously into unchallenged assumptions, those who bring fresh thinking to old problems. Outside perspectives can help prevent tunnel vision, challenge confirmation bias, and derail single-track thinking. While there is no guarantee, at the very least you’ll be able to see a familiar situation out of its familiar context, from different angles, in a new light. If you’re lucky, you may discover a problem you didn’t know you had, or find an unexpected way out of one you knew all too well. In a human endeavor like diplomacy, that can make a real difference.

At a minimum, it does no harm.

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We really should take a moment to sit still and do nothing. Not speak. Just listen. Let our minds wander. Settle quietly. Sink deeper into the silence. Make connections.

I don’t quite know how to conclude these disconnected reflections on connection and disconnection. Perhaps a random, hopeful note would do as well as anything else, during this brief pause between endings and beginnings—of years, of presidential administrations, possibly even of eras. Who knows?

If so, then here’s to outsiders, nonconformists, and eccentrics. To those free thinkers who challenge the limits of our open system from outside without plotting to destroy it, to those readers of random books and blogs with no discernible pattern (even retrospectively), to those sitting alone in their rooms thinking their own disconnected thoughts of adventure, discovery and freedom, may you help show us the way.

We may need you now more than ever.