Pandora's Seed by Spencer Wells

Author:Spencer Wells [Wells, Spencer]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-679-60374-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 23: SCENE FROM THE TUCKERS FACTORY IN BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND, 1910. (PHOTO COURTESY OF PAUL TUCKER.)

In the final chapter of this book I will discuss how this alienation has been a driving factor in the rise of fundamentalism during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For now, though, we need to turn from the origin of art and job specialization to the curious nature of modern-day stress and its impact on our hunter-gatherer psyches.

THE DRONE OF MODERN LIFE

Cars rush by outside your window, a horn blaring occasionally. The refrigerator hums in the corner of the kitchen, and the heat coming out of a duct over your head whooshes softly. Bills sit stacked on the counter, insistently waiting to be opened. A television—perhaps one of several in the house—blares advertisements from the next room, and Internet pop-up ads interrupt your attempts to check on your retirement investments. The cacophony reaches a crescendo when your spouse’s cell phone rings, vibrating along the tabletop like some sort of angry digital dervish. The blare of the outside world goes on all around us, even while we attempt to focus on our “real” lives.

We are constantly surrounded by surreptitious stimuli—so much so that we take it all for granted. We are used to the notion that advertisements saturate our lives—exposure estimates for the average American range from several hundred to several thousand every day—as promoters try to sell us everything from life insurance to an enhanced sex life. Data flows at us from every direction. Information is ubiquitous and, with the rise of the Internet and broadband connectivity, more easily accessible than ever. But even things we might not think of as intrusive bombard our subconsciousnesses with stimuli. Inadvertently, the machines we have created to improve our lives may actually be causing some degree of psychological harm.

The journalist Toby Lester, in an article published in the Atlantic magazine in 1997, pointed out that ours is the first generation to live in an environment where background sounds from machines saturate our lives. He explained the various tones he hears at work, made up of noise from the heater, computer fan, and telephone: “My office plays a curious combination of intervals, one joyous and stable (do-mi), another devilish and inimical (do-fa-sharp), and the third (mi-fa-sharp) emotionally neutral. The overall result is an ambiguous chord that, at its upper end, begs for resolution.”

According to musical theorists, who have assigned moods to certain chords, this combination of notes is particularly dissonant. The medieval Catholic church called the chord generated by Lester’s office machines the diabolus in musica (devil in music), and it creates a strong feeling of unease in listeners. As Lester asks later in the piece, “Could this ambiguity and tension be one reason I so often feel on edge?” Perhaps—and it certainly provides an impetus to cherish the silence that is so rare in modern life.

This same sort of constant stimulation exists in our other sensory realms as well. We are all bombarded visually on a

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