(6 of 8)
But just so you know that human nature has not entirely altered as of this writing: what America once feared as the Soviet Union, we now fear as the Russian non-union--seething duchies with warheads underground. China, with its split personality, continues to make us nervous; we court its markets while trying to improve its government. In the Balkans, Christians spent the better part of the past nine years massacring Muslims. In Sudan, Muslims continue to massacre Christians. Over the past 100 years, we have advanced from Sarajevo to Sarajevo. If Sarajevo is again involved in a war as you read this, we may be on to something.
Our more mysterious problems are, as usual, internal. Mergers aside, we are in an increasing mode of separation from one another. The American class system (always vehemently denied) has never been more stratified. People who make the same money live in the same neighborhoods; they socialize with the same people; their kids go to the same schools; their habits, speech patterns, clothes are the same. The so-called middle class consists of a dozen subclasses earning anywhere from $20,000 a year to $200,000. Distribution is skewed. The top 20% of American families make as much as the remaining 80%. The top 5% of that 20% makes nearly as much as the remaining 15%. In that 5%, the top one-fifth (or 1% of the total population) makes as much as the remaining 4%.
The emerging technologies that purport to bind people together have also created a new information class imposed on the others. Not everyone has a computer, so there is that class of outsiders. Even among the insiders, people seek virtual localities where they find their own kind--chess players chat with chess players, militia members with militia members. Since communication is the soul of democracy, the Internet should have become the great equalizer, but most people are in touch with their own, home alone.
At the same time, individual privacy is both systemically invaded and willingly forfeited. Businesses spend fortunes spying on the competition. A few weeks ago, a Russian spy was caught listening to a bug planted in the State Department, having possibly made a comfortable shift from cold war espionage to industrial espionage. CD-ROMs are sold with essential information on millions of citizens. Banks divulge how much money one has; credit companies, how much one owes. Yet privacy is also eagerly, happily surrendered--on radio and TV talk-revelation-boxing shows. Everyone owns a camcorder, so everyone is on TV. One has never been more in the open, or more apart.
I wonder if we really want to have as much to do with one another as we have always claimed to want. Connectedness--that was supposed to be the desperate cry of a world frightened by modernity. "Only connect," pleaded E.M. Forster at the outset of the century. Inventions were concocted to bring us closer to one another, the machinery of communication especially. Observe a riot of fans at a soccer game and see how close we are. Historically, there has never been as much communication as in our 20th century, or as much mass murder. Communication, mistaken for a virtue in itself, has substituted for sympathetic, beneficial social existence. If living with one another merely means living in touch with one another, no wonder so many people feel closer to their computer screens than to other people.