An autotoxin is a poison that acts on the organism that generates it. (For example, marriages often prove to be autotoxic.) And technology, when you come to think of it, can be too. Neil Postman, quoting Sigmund Freud, speaks to the point:
“One would like to ask: is there, then, no positive gain in pleasure, no unequivocal increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time after a friend has reached his destination that he has come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed? Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in enormously reducing infant mortality and the danger of infection for women in childbirth, and, indeed, in considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man?”
Freud knew full well that technical and scientific advances are not to be taken lightly, which is why he begins this passage by acknowledging them. But he ends it by reminding us of what they have undone:
“If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if travelling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What is the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage. . . . And, finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?”
(From page 5-6 of Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, by Neil Postman. Vintage Books, 1993. Postman is quoting Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.)
For a brief biography of Neil Postman, click here. For images of or relating to Neil Postman, click here. For a brief biography of Sigmund Freud, click here. For images of or relating to Sigmund Freud, click here.
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