A slogan in an advert in a London tube train recently caught my eye: "To be truly free requires a life without boundaries. The passport to that future is technology."
It is as succinct a summary of the beliefs of the modern world as it is possible to imagine - a kind of up-to-date version of "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life". It is also a more elegant version of the guff we are hearing more and more from politicians and other public figures, most of them incapable of wiring a plug. Usually expressed in platitudes like "Technology is the future", or "The world is a different place to when we were growing up", such sentiment has more or less replaced mantras, like "Did you realise that 50 per cent of the population is under 25?"
Technology is the great latter-day fetish of restless minds. Machines change things, of course, but rarely in the ways we imagine.
The average human being still has two legs, arms, ears, eyes, a nose and a mouth, still gets up in the morning, works, plays, eats three meals and goes back to bed. Moreover, he or she has broadly the same needs, desires, emotions and aspirations as every other generation of humanity since the beginning of human civilisation.
One thing you wouldn't pick up from all the guff is that technology makes things different but not necessarily better. Most people, for example, at first thought the telephone answering machine was a wonderful invention. It meant that you could get messages even when you were out.
But then people began to suspect that this was a two-edged sword. It wasn't possible to filter out the messages you didn't want, and the average experience was that you were somewhat more likely to walk in the front door to unreasonable demands or torrents of abuse than to the news that you had won the National Lottery. Anybody who thinks about telephone answering machines knows that, most of the time, they serve the interests of others.
My own experience is that not having an answering machine protects me from most of the aggravation that comes from being available on demand; and yet, people who need to speak to me can generally do so within a reasonable period. Whenever I see people who clearly consider themselves so important to the confluence of human affairs that they cannot drive their cars, eat their dinners or go to the toilet without a mobile phone stuck to their ears, I wonder how it was that people managed long ago.
Computers provide an example of another aspect of this syndrome. People are always asking me if I'm "on line" yet, and when I say no, they react as though I have just enthusiastically told them of my theory that the world is flat. I sometimes say something like "I was thinking of getting a new fountain pen, though", but they never seem to get the joke. They believe that computers are not simply changing the world, but actually creating a new world, to which humans will, sooner or later, have to migrate.
I used to be afraid that this was actually true, but then I bought a word processor and found that it was simply a more efficient way of doing what I was doing anyway. The technophile logic had it that word processors were a further stage on from typewriters, which were a stage on from fountain pens. My experience is that the word processor actually takes us backwards in the sense that, appearances notwithstanding, it has more in common with pens than with typewriters.
When I wrote with a pen I used to draft everything out on loose sheets of paper and then put them in the right order. When I was happy with the draft, I would write the finished article out in my best handwriting. When I started using a typewriter, I found that it changed this process, to the extent that I needed to have everything worked out in my head before I started typing. Errors meant that whole pages had to be scrapped.
But lo and behold, I find that the word processor allows me to go back to the pen and paper approach: to draft, scribble, shift, mix and match, in precisely the same way as before. And so, what at first appeared to be the linear development from pencil to word processor is actually a circular process, with the typewriter revealing itself, in retrospect, as something of an aberration.
And this appears to be the pattern with technological developments in general: an initial hysteria is followed by an adjustment which enables the new development to be absorbed into the culture of human society on terms which restore human sensibility to its primary status.
I think this will happen with the recently-developed telephone with a built-in lie detector. This device, apparently, works on the basis of picking up tremors in the human voice to which the human ear is insensitive. At first glance, it is a development of absolutely seismic proportions in human society given that, since rumours of the death of God became widespread, there has been little or no sanction by which society's need for truth could be enforced.
In this sense the technophiles appear to be vindicated: technology is indeed God. But whatever God may be, He is most certainly not a machine. And while truth is an undoubted good, it is not an unambiguous concept, unaffected by questions of lesser evils and greater goods.
Since fibs are often essential to the survival of human relationships, I believe this telephone to be an attack on human nature itself. The idea of this machine sitting in judgment on human affairs, and in a manner uninformed by the subtlety and complexity of real life, should be deeply frightening to human beings. It is the kind of thing civil liberties campaigners might be taking up were it not that to do so might suggest they have things to hide.
Our society is now so literal-minded about truth that this device would appear to offer a future in which emotional fascism will be the main currency of human exchange. At first glance, this device would appear to restore to human society an almost catechismal requirement for truth. It would appear to put back in place the sense of a God that is all-seeing, all-hearing and always watching.
But I shouldn't worry. All it will change is our attitudes to telephones, and this can only be a good thing. It will make us more careful and discreet. It will cause us to use the telephone more sparingly, and treat it as something useful but ambiguous, rather than an object of fetish.
If nothing else, the putative presence of lie detectors in the circuit might reduce the public nuisance of mobile telephones and allow decent people to go about their business without being assaulted by empty prattle and driven off the road by vehicles with no visible means of control.
The time may come when telephones will be used only in an emergency, and then in the presence of a lawyer.