Sometimes I feel I have to write a blog because something has happened which, I know, is another step towards a change in human affairs and that my grandchildren will be living in times that make today prosaic by comparison. On QI, that TV programme which occasionally reaches the twin peaks of erudition and comedy simultaneously, there was much amusement at historical quotes from famous people and their incapacity to forecast what products, inventions or activities would take later hold of universal consciousness and become commonplace. The domestic computer sticks in my memory. No chance. Why would people want such a thing? But the computer is now part of an inexorable drift in the way we see and deal with the world. It has become a seedbed of ‘applications’.
The other day I saw someone use a calculator to work out what she owed me from five pounds. I had bought something from her stall for one pound fifty. It had become for her, a surrogate for that part of the brain that does sums. From the onset of writing via pictographs through to phonographs, tape recorders, film, video, holographs and now the microcomputers we carry in our pockets, machines have steadily appropriated mental functioning for us, recording our thoughts, offering strategies for our futures. And we now use computers to build better computers (the doomsday scenario for many science fiction writers from Asimov on) so that they can take on more sophisticated tasks for us.
At other levels (see old blogs here) they are used to create simulated environments in which people can play, vicariously, with each other, virtual worlds which they can inhabit, alongside this one. In these worlds people can try out new personalities, new genders, new ages. Some are so intoxicated that they become addicted and lose the thread of their 'real' lives.
This weekend, in the UK newspaper. The Observer ( I receive it by certain means, here in Ghana, two days late!) there was a magazine article about Grindr, a new website that locates, via your mobile phone and GPS, the nearest enrolled gay man to you at any time you inquire. He could be anything from a mile to a foot away. A grid of pictures on your screen shows the nearest person top left and then down to the bottom right, the furthest away. In the article, there were comments about how sex had never been so instantly available. It will be unrolled as a heterosexual application very soon...
What is happening here? Yet another facet of consciousness is gradually being technologised so that we don’t have to use our instincts or our intelligence. Instead of being in a room, sniffing the pheromones in the air, wondering whether we might meet a woman or a man who could change the next few minutes, hours, days, weeks or years of our lives, all we need to do is call up Grindr (or whatever the hetero-equivalent might be) and get it on.
There will come a time when everything we do from our basic instincts to our higher order consciousness will be managed for us by technological prostheses. What will happen then to our sense of identity?
Leaving the grotesque nature of war aside and the appalling way that international politics is geared to decrease the chances of states like Ghana from achieving trade parity with the west, the news recently on other obscene fronts is equally dispiriting. Spying and assassinations are all the vogue.
Israeli hit squads travel across borders to erase their enemies without any moral qualms or consideration of the sensitivities of foreign governments, never mind the inhuman nature of these acts against individuals that are far beyond the parameters of justice. Likewise, the Russians poison dissenters with plutonium and bump off free thinking journalists and develop a spy network in the United States which seems to exist in a suburban world that mixes Desperate Housewives and 24 Hours. All of this comes to light through the usual bungling of which even the most professional human beings seem capable. As I have often remarked in these columns, entropy is endemic in human affairs. No matter how like Bourne or 007 these agents of state terrorism try to be, they slip up. Forged passports, indiscreet emails, letter drops, buried bank notes and writing in invisible ink bubble to the surface of scrutiny as though they have a life of their own, unbeknownst to their human couriers.
This is what we can see. But, like the proverbial iceberg, most of it we can’t, though, eventually, it will percolate into the public arenas of the future as spies write their autobiographies, or files eventually come to light as state apparatuses change.
It seems to me to be totally unforgivable that governments from west to east and north to south play with each other’s employees in this inhumane way, as though their lives have no other meaning than virtual figures in computer games. Ministers of State must sit down in their grand offices and discuss, coldly, the extermination of foreign nationals. War is obscene and unfathomable but there is something even more evil in this personalised visciousness.
But it is only a jolly game, after all. Obama and Putin’s puppet are keen to keep the latest spy furore as a sideshow because they have ‘greater considerations’ driving them. Israel still gets its huge subsidies from the United States despite the sickening nature of its apartheid policies and its high seas piracy. China is not really challenged on Tienanmen or Tibet. We witness everywhere Governments who have no sense of moral credibility, whether they be our own or those of others.
The fact that the eleven Russian spies lived and worked among US citizens for so long may show levels of deep-seated ideology on the one hand but they also show that they are like you and I or they wouldn’t have been able to exist, untroubled, in that every day ordinary world.