I’ve been in the grip of a battle royal for the past few months in a professional association of about 100 people – a body that is supposed to simply offer support and insurance for its members.
There’s been a painful split in the committee that runs it. Some people have behaved very badly. There has been a disrupted AGM and talk of dodgy ballot papers. You know the kind of thing – it’s how groups of human beings behave the world over.
In this dispute, some people have been showing common sense, some people got the wrong end of the stick completely, some threatened legal action and some people had extravagant nervous breakdowns.
One of the most antagonistic, devious and disreputable players in this bitter dispute, waged almost completely via email, announced today that he agrees with his many detractors and accepts he is insane, and is therefore withdrawing from the fray.
It’s comic as I write it – but, sadly, perfectly consistent with the nature of the dispute, which has always had its absurd element.
I, like many others, am preparing to resign, in regret and relief, and move on. Life is too short.
This way of communicating between groups or associations, from gardening clubs to multinational corporations, is now commonplace.
The normalising, civilising nature of face-to-face meetings in conflict resolution, which, in the main, tends to dampen the wilder excesses of hyperbole and poison, is now losing out to the chaotic insinuating madness of the email flame war.
One person, on their own in front of a computer, can create enormous havoc if they want to. The problem is that we can’t see the glint in their eye or the sneer on their lip to know they’ve lost the plot.
When I began writing this column, 12 years ago, I had to print it out every fortnight on my whiny dot-matrix printer, bring it to a quaint little employment agency across the road with fake wood panelling on the walls and a plastic “Fax Service” sign in the window, and ask a young woman called Maureen to fax it to Dublin. There, someone would type it out again.
A couple of years later, I signed up with Compuserve, and had my first proper email address, but I had to wait another year or two before this publication entered cyberspace, and was able to accept my copy by email.
That might as well have been the ‘50s. It seems such an antiquated way of doing things now. In the last 10 years, the internet has changed the structure of our society in an extraordinarily rapid way.
What interests and worries me most, however, is its effect on our minds. In particular, what it’s doing to the minds of men, given our curious capacity to obsess and isolate, given that we are three times more likely to be sociopathic and/or commit suicide than women.
Naturally this is highly relevant now, not least because of the recent bombings in London. Information about explosives is readily available on the web, as well as access to any extreme philosophy or belief system that homo “sapiens” can dream up.
The stuff of private nightmares is now no longer private. There is nothing you can think of that hasn’t been already pictured, filmed, or described in full gory detail on the net.
Websites proliferate that are steeped in hate, in abuse, in exploitation and destruction. They revel in pain and suffering and something that can only be properly be described as rampant psychosis. What Jung called ‘the shadow’, that which is repressed and therefore unknown to our conscious mind, but bubbling up through dreams or compulsive or “accidental” behaviour, is not so unknown any more.
We can all google ‘the shadow’ now.
I think, eventually, as history demonstrates, world governments will find a way of trying to repress it again, probably through policing the net – a monumental and expensive task. Yet if the legions of the dispossessed and aimless continue to find better ways to connect with each other and create havoc unchallenged, the way hackers do at the moment, for example, there will come a time when it will be deemed to be necessary to monitor every email, every chatroom, and every website.
It’s started already, with the EU trying to get every email sent across the internet in Europe copied and stored. It is being done in the name of security, to combat terrorism. I can understand the reasoning behind that.
However, it is not hard to imagine how a future regime could interpret that policing function in a different way. For example, if abortion becomes illegal in the United States, it is not farcical, in the current climate, to imagine women getting a knock on the door from police because they’ve skipped a period and surfed the web looking for help.
But then, I imagine humanity, ever-resourceful, will in time find new technologies or ways of communicating that will be out of reach of big brother. And so the cycle will continue.
But rather than focus on the big picture, I’m interested in the impact the net is having on the individual, closer to home. The appeal of the net to many young men, with its emphasis on sex and fantasy and ideas, and easy escape from emotions and relationships and accountability, is one that needs to be taken seriously.
If we ignore the psychological, relational, existential and teleological dilemmas of our teenagers, and simply let them get on with it in their bedrooms in front of their computers, we are going to see a marked rise in sociopathy and suicide – or both together, if they are unlucky enough to fall under one particularly heady spell.
This is not because children are innocent and need protecting from an evil world outside; this is because adolescence, in particular, has always been a seething mess of idealism and hormones and rage and hurt and despair. The best way to negotiate it – indeed, survive it – is through talking about it, normalising it, sharing it, face to face; to talk about how confusing it is, not to fool ourselves that we can find a way out of the confusion through a computer screen.
Computers can’t teach emotional literacy and wisdom. Only people can do this, through being in each other’s calming presence, through listening and telling it like it is in the real world, not in the dismembering vacuum of cyberspace.b