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sustaining the touch of intimacy.         The second condition for acting on what matters is to choose intimacy in the face of an instrumental world. The challenge is to sustain our humanity when all around us is in the process of being automated. Intimacy is about the quality of contact we make: It values direct experience over electronic or virtual experience. It is immersion into the world of feelings, connection with the senses, and vulnerability—all of which, not incidentally, are considered liabilities in our institutions. In an instrumental world people are considered assets, resources to be leveraged; they are not valued as unique and highly variable human beings. Institutions are based on consistency and predictability, while intimacy relies on variation and surprise.

The Pull of Disconnection

Instrumentality turns our bodies into tools—or, in the end, crops. My friend Peter Koestenbaum tells of conducting a Philosophy in Business seminar with an oil company. As he begins to speak, one of the participants interrupts and says, “We want you to know, professor, that we have brains made of cement.”

Peter responds, “Well, you have a heart, don’t you?”

“We call that a pump.”

In the world of commerce, the heart becomes a pump. Everything gets defined by its utility—so often and for so long—that we apply that thinking to our own selves: My body is no longer valued as the temple of my soul, but as a commodity, a mechanical puzzle, the ultimate clockworks. There will come a time when my body will become completely replaceable, from my brain to my heart, as well as all the rest of my organs and limbs. And if there is a spare parts shortage, no problem, my body can be cloned—an exact copy of myself can be made. Supply and demand. Upon death, my net worth goes up. My organs, when harvested and sold off individually, have a market value of close to a million dollars. So in the end, the sum of my parts could be worth a great deal more than the whole. When this happens the world of commerce has transformed the human body into a product. Quite a contrast to the idea of the body as the physical incarnation of our existence.

Intimacy requires free and willing disclosure, often at the expense of instrumental values such as role playing, control, and negotiation. Intimacy values the detail and nuances of life, it cares for the color, shape, and light in a room. It attends to the detail of interaction with other people. It is sensitive beyond comfort and recognizes the pain of existence. Intimacy cares more about the fate of a person than the success of an institution. In this way, intimacy can become a political stance that seems to endanger institutions. This is one reason we fear intimacy in the workplace: If we get too close to an idea, or people, or even a product, we will not have the detachment necessary to engage in tough institutional surgery.

Intimacy, like idealism, has little market value. Intimacy can’t really be measured and is difficult to price and purchase, try as we might. When you think of becoming an artist (the archetype of someone who is on intimate terms with nature, with ideas, and with the world of the senses), the word starving follows quickly. Intimacy also implies an element of activism, the willingness to show up—often. It is to be in dialogue with others, to be in their presence often enough to know what they look like, think about, feel like. It is the experience of sharing doubts and talking through differences. It is a contact sport, where touch is fundamental.

The Virtual Experience

Intimacy is becoming obsolete with the growth of the electronic culture. We choose video conferences rather than face-to-face meetings, we attend school online, we email, voicemail, and more, all for the sake of cost and efficiency. As Robert Putnam and others keep reminding us, civic engagement and social capital, which are collective forms of intimacy, are on the decline in our communities. We stay home at night, the porch has moved to the back of the house, and we are too busy or too exhausted to join in activist, collective endeavors. We only show up in numbers for sports and entertainment. Instead of contact sports, we want spectator sports.

In its ability to replace or enhance human effort, computer technology also changes the nature of human experience. For all its ability to make the world work better, it may unintentionally increase my feelings of detachment and reduce my capacity to sustain an intimate relationship, not only with people, which is always difficult, but with my environment, my workplace, my neighborhood, my world.

One way to view the impact of technology on our experience is to notice how it drives us towards a more virtual existence. Virtual is defined as “being in effect, though not in actual fact” (Webster). Virtual reality gives us the appearance or simulation of an experience, without having the experience itself. Much of the electronic technology offers us efficiency and infinite access to information, instead of direct experience. The direct experience it does offer is with a monitor, a keyboard, and a variety of magical devices. Where I once knew the bank teller, now I am friends with my ATM machine. Where I once went to a store to shop, I now go online. In all of this I gain convenience, but sacrifice human and material contact.

Intimacy as Marketing Strategy

Language is another example. We are defined by our language and we are increasingly bringing the language of technology into our daily dialogue. What was conversation is now considered “information exchange.” When we want a private conversation we “talk offline.” When we talk about “community,” we are referring to a long-distance network with people we may never have met.

And commerce is now co-opting for its own use the language of relationship. We now hear the term customer intimacy. A large technology company proudly advertises that it is “in the relationship-building business” and offers the latest ways to develop customer intimacy. What they mean by “relationship building” is knowing enough about me to have the right product at the right place at the right price at the right time. This is their version of a relationship: detailed customer data ready to be monetized into a sale.

Where intimacy once meant a close encounter, it is now a marketing strategy. Companies know everything there is to know about me, the customer: my income level, whether I am a high-or low-maintenance customer, what my buying patterns are, the other kinds of products people like me tend to buy. They know more about my buying patterns than I do. Some day I expect them to know me well enough to send me new clothes that I never ordered. And what bothers me the most is that they will be right: I will probably like what they have drop-shipped to my house. This form of intimacy could get very expensive. Plus, if they can offer me pants today, can a spouse be far behind?

It says something profound about the nature of our culture when intimacy becomes an instrument of trade. It is interesting that before the term was commercialized, it was not welcome in institutional life. Now that it has lost its original meaning and can be used to sell, it becomes strategic and therefore acceptable.

The Disappearance of Place

When we take the language and knowledge once reserved for close friends and family and, through technology, commercialize it, our sense of place in the world shifts. What we once did with friends, families, and loved ones will now be done with suppliers. Commerce creeps closer and closer to the center of our lives and starts to create an electronic membrane between us and what was once, if not holy, at least human and personal.

The result is that intimacy with the natural and material world is being supplanted by intimacy with the electronic world.

I now spend many hours, even days, learning how to navigate and becoming dependent on this electronic world. I used to be able to set and wind a clock, turn a page in an address book, be surprised by who calls on the phone, cook food over a fire, read by simply turning a page. I could write readable cursive, I could spell, walk down the hall to communicate with co-workers, add, multiply, and divide. Now I can do none of these things. Every time I buy a new labor-saving and life-changing device— which I do because I have a mild addiction to them—I spend hours selecting modes, changing settings, waiting for blinking numbers to calm down, hiding passwords I can never find, and buying batteries.

Technology is amazing, useful, efficient, and at times life saving. But it also has the effect of funneling us into a more virtual way of being and reduces our capacity to live a life that matters. For example, it gives me the illusion of going somewhere. Microsoft asks, “Where do you want to go today?” Well, I am not actually going anywhere. I am sitting right here in front of my monitor. For all its benefits, technology increases my passivity, it isolates me, and it automates more than just my work.

The Illusion of Electronic Reality

I lose touch with myself when I lose touch with what is real, with what is essential about being a person, a part of the earth, intertwined with other human beings. When I become accustomed to a virtual experience, when my private life becomes increasingly organized around my work life, when an electronic world, perfect as it might be, begins to replace my imperfect, decaying, but living and breathing world, I become like that tool.

Here is a summary of the impact our loss of intimacy has on our ability to act on what matters.

The End of the Touch of Reality. When I live a virtual life, in which I can choose my experiences off a menu, I gain the illusion of complete control over my life and those around me, which in clinical terms could be called a mental illness. It is the ultimate state of being out of touch with reality. It is the equivalent of many people’s wish to have a garden that requires no maintenance. A friend, Allan Cohen, cleverly argues with my concern by asking why we think that plastic flowers are not real. They are real, he says. They are real plastic. You might argue that our electronic experiences are real, they just happen to be electronic.

The End of Nature. In a way, the loss of intimacy in our modern culture is making nature itself obsolete. In agriculture, we have the terminator gene in a seed. This means that the seed is good for only one crop and one harvest. The traditional regenerative power of the seed, as eternal giver of life, has ended. The moment the terminator gene was introduced, the life-giving aspect of nature was ended and now the ability to grant another harvest has been vested in Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland.

Or consider the way the outdoors is now being manufactured. Go to Las Vegas or the Opryland Hotel in Nashville. They both essentially replace the out-of-doors by covering it on a grand scale. You leave the hotel, walk outside, down a street, and discover that what you thought was outside is just a large dome that covers the immediate world. In this simulated world, the temperature is always 71 degrees, it never rains, and the sun is never in your eyes. I remember going to a restaurant in Las Vegas where we were asked whether we wanted indoor or outdoor seating. We chose outdoors and they seated us on the patio: nice evening, stars above, last light of day slowly fading, quiet breeze from the southwest. Then we suddenly realized we were under a big dome. The twilight, the stars, the breeze were all part of a manufactured natural setting. Who needs nature when you can get a night like this?

Leveraged Learning. Computers and long-distance technology are changing our classrooms and conference rooms. Learning is essentially being “leveraged.” Long-distance learning is automating the college campus and the classroom. My favorite teacher now will be someone I have never met. We will be taught by a “master teacher” in a remote location. The possibility of the master teacher in one location, broadcasting their wisdom and knowledge to a thousand other locations, is a growth industry. It is a case of confusing learning with information exchange. Long-distance learning devalues the intimacy of the traditional teacher-student relationship. If we believe that all learning is social and thereby intimate then learning becomes one more way our desire for efficiency and economic value replaces our need for human connection.

Digital Activism. Our capacity for intimacy is also threatened by the way electronic technology substitutes for social and civic engagement. I think I can get all I need from my home entertainment center and never leave the house, meet my neighbors, know my local government. Part of the problem is that the technology is sold as a creator of community. What is the value of connecting with people in China if I never go next door or downtown?

Technology increases our isolation while at the same time promising to overcome it. My mother used to keep the TV on all the time to try to overcome her loneliness. It didn’t. It only made enough noise so that she did not have to really make contact with others who might have offered some genuine relief.