In this way, the proliferation of digital imagery swamps our sensory apparatus, which is increasingly desensitized to visual experience. Or perhaps it is better to say that the multitudinous cacophony of images we casually scroll through day after day trains us to be merely passive consumers of visual stimuli, disinclined to attend to the world with the care that may ordinarily be the condition of wonder. . . . I must work against the grain of my structured experience to register the significance of what I see.
Writing in the early days of manned space exploration, Hannah Arendt noted that recent progress in science, once translated into everyday life, “has brought with it a veritable avalanche of fabulous instruments and ever more ingenious machinery,” which might evoke a certain kind of amazement, but an amazement ultimately at our own ingenuity. “All of this makes it more unlikely every day,” Arendt warned, “that man will encounter anything in the world around him that is not man-made and hence is not, in the last analysis, he himself in a different disguise.” Or, as the playwright Max Frisch once quipped, technology is “the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” Digital technologies have only accelerated this trajectory, which raises at least one critical question: Can the experiences of wonder arise from a technological environment built to rationalize, manage, and control the world? An environment that seeks to make the world uniform and predictable? If we think of wonder—not simply amazement or even awe—as being specifically tied to the gratuity and contingency of what is, then having our attention primarily directed toward what has been planned and fabricated would diminish the odds of experiencing it. In The Human Condition, Arendt warns against a techno-scientific spirit of “rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking).” A gift that, in this spirit, a person may wish “to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.” In making this exchange, we might be unwittingly giving up the experience of wonder too.
This pairs very well with a throwback to Jonathan Pageau in 2014, from his post “Most of the Time the Earth is Flat“:
Men always had artificial spaces, painting, sculpture, maps, but the telescope and microscope are self-effacing artifices, they attempt to replace the eye, to convince us that they are not artificial but are more real than the eye. It is not only the physical gesture of looking at the world through a machine that demonstrates the radical change, though this is symbolic enough, but it is the very fact that people would do that and come to the conclusion that what they saw through these machines was truer than how they experienced the world without them. Yet the great revolution is not simply a technical rectification as it is presented by some today, it is not only that technically speaking we used to believe the earth to be a flat disk at the centre of the cosmos, and now we know the earth to be a big ball of water and dirt swirling around a giant nuclear reactor at the centre of our planetary system. The change happens in the very core of what Truth is, it is a change in the priority of knowledge, a change in what is important to us as human beings. That is the change. In a traditional world, all of reality is understood and expressed in an integrated manner. We describe phenomena in the manner we experience it because what is important is not so much the making of big mechanically precise machines that will increase our physical power, but rather the forming of human beings that have wisdom and virtue. . . . So by projecting ourselves out through our machines into an physically augmented world, we “fall” into that materiality, we inevitably live in a more material and materialist world. And this is modern history itself.
What proceeds from this is my second point, which is that modern cosmology is not only artificial, but it is alienating, it moves Man away from himself. Once Man accepted that what he saw through his telescopes and microscopes is more real than his natural experience, he made inevitable the artificial world, he made inevitable as its end the plastic, synthetic, genetically modified, photoshopped, pornographic, social-networked reality we live in. When at the very core of vision, the shape of your cosmos leads you to believe that technology provides a perception which is more true, more real than your experience, more real than walking out of your house and looking at the sky, then the telescope and the microscope will soon be side by side with the camera, the screen and the accelerated time and space of the car window. The metal and glass frame will swallow us and human beings will lose themselves for their incapacity to fully inhabit the world.