Say for a moment that you have a manufacturing operation in Malaysia. Since we don’t make much stuff in the USofA these busy days of a sleepless planet, it’s not unreasonable. You call them up at some bleary-eyed time to find out how it’s going:

“So, how are things?”
“Good. You flying out here soon?”
“Um, no. It’s really far.”
“Oh, then things are excellent! Couldn’t be better!”

Communication at a distance is what we do these days. You, the reader, have probably never met me. You have no idea who I am or what I’m really like. But we assume that doesn’t matter. Our view of the world is what comes at us, or many times what is sent our way. Want to visit a pacific island? They’re all paradise, you know. Know anything about Nigeria? Well, you had a distant cousin recently die and leave you a big insurance settlement.

Add in a level of anonymity, and you can be sure there’s a lie in there somewhere. Any investment chatroom is full of people who got filthy rich off the market. And a dating site? Let’s leave that to your imagination- there’s a lot of imagination in one of those places.

This wouldn’t matter much but there is so much at stake. We supposedly live in a Democracy, an arrangement where we need to understand what is going on. So take a nation of, say, 300 million people. How many of them do you know? So of those people you don’t know, how many do you believe? And if that nation has a tendency to wang bombs at other nations from time to time, how do you learn about how much they deserve to be blown up? Usually, it’s reported to us by someone whose main qualification is that he thinks he looks cool in a flak jacket.

Communication at a distance is inherently flawed because it lacks the human element. People say different things to you when they aren’t looking you in the eye. Oh, and the check is in the mail.

The end result is something I call “Cultural Autism”. We are bombarded constantly by words and pictures that have been ripped out of their context. We respond by focusing on the bits that somehow caught our attention and holding onto them as the truth. Our view of the world is as big as our ability to handle all of it, and no bigger.

Nevermind how small that view is. Moslems appear to spend their days blowing things up, because that’s what we hear about. French people apparently set fire to their own cities for the same reason, at least when they aren’t sneering about us. These are what we can latch onto. It’s all we can take.

The distant voices that make the information age are not the same as the voices we hear in our ordinary lives. They are inherently less truthful, either intentionally or not. Information may bombard our brains constantly, but some of this is always processed by the intuitive heart rather than the intellectual brain. And when staring at the warm glow of a CRT or leaning into a telephone, there is little for the heart to go on.