When I am at my bank, filling out deposit slips in the
management of my vast financial empire, I often think that by
adding up my check totals by hand rather than using the calculator
stationed by the deposit slips, that I am preserving the ways of
the Ancients. This feeling was reinforced when, not long ago, I was
in the office of a recent hire who asked me to take a look at some
problems that his sister-in-law was having difficulty with in an
undergraduate business class. One question pertained to discounting
cash flows (the mathematical expression of the notion that a dollar
today is worth more than a dollar to be received next year). Now
I’m no math wiz, but the mathematical formula for discounting cash
flows is not complicated and pretty intuitive, but when I started
writing it down (thinking that it would throw some light on the
point of the question) my colleague (an accounting major of fairly
recent vintage) looked at me as if I were writing Chinese
characters. He handed me a trusty HP12C calculator and said, “Why
don’t you just use this?” I have it on good authority from an
elementary school principal that children are still taught how to
do math without a calculator. But sometimes I wonder.
Though we may still be teaching math, I recently heard on the
radio that some school districts are discontinuing the teaching of
cursive writing because there is “no demand” for it in “the real
world.” I prefer a real world, however, in which personal
correspondence is not so impersonal that the only contact the
writer makes with the paper is to feed it in to a printer and sign
(or print) a name at the bottom. Granted, most people would no
doubt prefer that I type out or e-mail my letters to them, since my
scrawl is barely legible. But it is always nice to receive
something written in a neat cursive hand (usually written by a
female, for such skill is one of the many differences between the
sexes). Will this be a pleasure unknown in the future? Will people
need to take their laptops and their Blackberry’s everywhere, or be
forced to print their thoughts (if they write at all)?
A couple years ago I experienced one of the greatest tragedies
that can befall modern man: Hard Drive Failure. Or at least that’s
what I initially thought. It turned out to be a bad memory chip,
and my life was back in order in a few days. Though I have managed
to complicate my life to the extent that I can no longer do my own
taxes, I know enough about tax law to be dangerous and volunteer to
prepare the taxes of my siblings every year. And here I was, less
than a month before April 15 with my computer, loaded with my tax
software, inoperable. I was in a panic before I realized that only
a few years before, I was doing these tax returns by hand, no sweat
(or not much). So why the panic?
That’s the problem with modern techno-society. We have allowed
ourselves to become dependent on technology to the extent that it
has reduced our confidence and, indeed, our ability, to perform
basic tasks without it. Just as the Welfare State has nefariously
bred dependency and atrophied pride, self-reliance, and the work
ethic in many, the marvels of modern technology are a lure to
mental and physical sloth.
I am one of the “bridge” group that grew up in a world without
personal computers and managed to get through four years of an
undergraduate education using a device known as a typewriter. But
from graduate school on, I’ve ridden the wave of technology, moving
from 5-1/4” floppies to CDs. My career, to a large degree, has
depended on my mastering a number of computer programs. But I have
also been slow to adopt the techno-lifestyle. I’ve never planned my
life on a Palm Pilot, or used a TiVo, or touched an iPod. I refused
the offer of my company to provide me with a “Blackberry” — a
horrible device that makes you reachable by e-mail almost
everywhere you are — and it was only a few years ago, bowing to
the needs of business travel, that I got a cell phone. But I only
turn it on when I’m out of pager range or when I want to call
somebody, and I still haven’t set up its voice mailbox.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not writing this in a cabin in
Montana with a copy of Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance
beside me. I love e-mail, scanners, $59 color ink-jet printers, and
all that stuff for what they can allow me to do that I couldn’t do
before. What I rue about all these neat inventions is the basic
things they are causing people to stop doing — like simple
arithmetic by hand or in their head, or writing letters by hand.
What will we do if the power goes out — or if a hostile power uses
an electro-magnetic bomb that military planners are now fretting
about that could render all our computerized gadgets useless? How
will we entertain ourselves, how will we correspond with each
other, how will we balance our checkbooks?
Americans play video golf, video football, video car-jacking,
and even video solitaire. No wonder more Americans are obese than
ever before. But it’s more than just our bodies that are getting
flabby. Every so often we should all put down the calculator and
turn off the computer and do things with pen and paper and with our
minds, if only to prove to ourselves that we still can do the
things that our primordial ancestors who lived prior to 1985 did
every day.
