Poignantly, Poitier Peers Into Our Future

I recently had the pleasure of reading The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography by the legendary, awe-inspiring actor, and fascinating human being, Sidney Poitier. Near the end of his remarkable tale, Poitier shares his anxiety about where humankind is headed.

He explains, "I've read of studies done... with chimps that have profound implications for our species and our life on the planet. The scientists behind this research know what it takes to raise a healthy baby chimp with a real mother -- all the nutrition and the calories and so on. So they create a wire mother, with maybe a bit of fur, a perch like an arm across the chest, and nipples that project through the wicker-and-wire mannequin. The nipples, attached to a sort of baby bottle, supply all the nutrients a chimp is known to need -- the same nutrients that would come from a real mother's milk, maybe even more.

But despite the fact that baby chimps can climb up on their "Wire Mothers" and be safe and get all the same nutrients, the same protein, the same basic protection from the elements they'd get from their real mothers, the chimps with the wire mothers wither and die.

'My fear is this: I fear that we as we cover more of our planet with concrete and steel, as we wire our homes with more and more fiber-optic cables that take the place of more intimate interactions, as we give our children more and more stuff and less and less time, as we go further and further away from the kind of simplicity I knew as a child on Cat Island, our Earth, Gaia or not, will become for us the Wire Mother, and our souls will wither and die."

Poitier's book was published 10 years ago. That was long before Google became a corporation gigantic enough to tangle with the most heavily populated country on Earth. That was before iPhone. That was before wireless Internet was ubiquitous. That was before TiVo, I think. The point is that, sadly, what he feared is coming upon us. Wire has become our mothers. Our personal interactions with our children and other human beings are becoming less and less frequent, and our souls, and societies, are paying for it. Technological innovation can and does bring much good to us personally, and to us as a species. It's making this post possible, and right now is helping to alleviate some of suffering among Haitians in the wake of this week's unimaginably devastating earthquake.

But we must do better at maintaining a balance. For our children's sakes, if nothing else. Let the wired among us beware.