As, in Ruskin’s words, “I am, to my much sorrow, now an older person,” I’ve come to realize that the aches and pains of aging are not entirely physical. Perhaps they’re only a symptom of accumulated experience, knowledge, regret, and the sadness for our fallen state. We carry too much. The aged view does not permit things to be merely what they are. A lifetime of experiences and associations attends all that we see. Everything is encumbered by ‘baggage.’ Younger people often choose not to listen to their elders since they often find it too disheartening. The broader view afforded by age is not necessarily a pleasant one.
People today speak of our culture as “polarized” or divided. There’s a distinction. The existence of poles presupposes that there is a transitional space, a gradation, between one and the other. Polarization does not mandate total separation, but division may go beyond simple polarization and can refer to complete and absolute separation.
In a world that has translated everything into ones and zeros, what else could we expect? In a world of ones and zeros, we are cataclysmically divided and isolated, not polarized. It is mystifying and contradictory that our 1/0 culture wants to take those things (i.e., gender) which are, by nature, divided and biologically distinct, and focus on a mythical transitional space. The acceptance of a polarized view of gender contradicts a technological culture that views the world in a binary manner. Early references to the computer as a “brain” were unfortunate and we’ve now come to accept a computerized model for human thought that, like most models, omits the most interesting and important parts. I prefer a landscape, seen in person, to a map.
1/0 existence is not + and -. In a +/- duality there is room for debate and/or dialectic. There are degrees of positivity and degrees of negativity and a transitional space between them. There are no such degrees or transitions when everything translates to either a one or a zero. Ones and zeros permit no debate – you are either “on” or “off.” There is no middle ground. It is, of course, ironic, that the original meaning of “digitize” was to “touch with the fingers,” when the infinite variations of the sense of touch do not permit translation into ones and zeros.