Often when I encounter something beautiful—a swiftly passing sunset or a timeless work of art—I experience a subtle disappointment in the midst of the bliss.
This same sensation arises sometimes when I’m engrossed in deep conversation with a friend. I’m struck by a desire to hit a pause button somewhere in the universe and take the thing and put it in my pocket for preservation.
The advent of the ubiquitous smartphone camera almost provides such a button. André Bazin, a French film critic, once said that “photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.” Smartphones have made it possible to embalm each passing moment of the present and share them immediately with our friends through social media.
It’s tempting to think that smartphones help tie us more tightly to the present and help connect us more closely to people by enabling us to embalm and share images from our lives instantaneously. The pictures that crowd social media, though, are not actually the present, for—however immediate—they are moments that are already completed.
The Present Perfect
An experience of connecting to others through images in the present perfect is similar to Lewis’s description of riding a train with our backs to the engine. We watch each moment pass by the window without seeing the broader context of the actual present, as we would if we were facing forward.When we submit our attention and relationships to various media of the present perfect, we submit them to historical interpretation. Lewis describes historicism as “the belief that men can ... discover an inner meaning in the historical process.”
I wonder if, similarly, we think we can derive some real connection to our friends by viewing pictures of what they had for breakfast today while on their getaway vacation to Paris. Are we not both being fooled?
The Age of the Smartphone and Amusing History
In “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” Nietzsche warned that living in constant awareness of history is an obstacle to happiness. He complained, “We are all suffering from a consuming fever of history and ought at least to recognize that we are suffering from it.”Consider the cattle, how they graze, he suggests, completely and always in the present moment, oblivious of the past, its triumphs and regrets. They are completely free to enjoy the present.
“We need history, certainly,” he admitted, but “for the sake of life and action, not so as to turn comfortably away from life and action.”
Accordingly, he identified three types of perspectives on history: monumental, antiquarian, and critical. And he noted certain uses and disadvantages for each. We can look back at history and be inspired, gather a context for our lives, and maintain a sense of justice that transcends our present. But we can also be deceived by our impressions of people in the past, trap ourselves in an unwholesome context, and come to think that we are more enlightened than all those who came before us.
Amusing history is useful for distracting us from anxiety with innocent diversions. It also helps us stay informed of the lives of others, providing a medium to communicate via image often more than word.
Amusing history is a disadvantage, however, when it draws us away from the thinking and action required to deal with the causes of the anxiety we’d like to ignore. It can also contribute to the construction of an illusion that we are connecting on a genuine level with other people, when all we are doing is affirming one another’s projections of an ideal self.
This is no Luddite call to destroy our technology, but, rather, a reminder that technology is meant to serve life, not turn its users into the cogs of its own framework.
Lewis proclaimed that “the present is all lit up with eternal rays.” Let us not let the cool, blue glow of our phones blind us from seeing the grandeur and significance of those rays.
