George Clooney Motorbike Crash and Our Brave New World

Three years ago George Clooney was in a motorbike crash that could have killed him. “I was waiting for my switch to turn off,” he says. He was in Sardinia, going at 75mph, when a car turned in front of him and he flew over the handlebars. Groggy, lying on the ground and screaming, he realized a crowd was gathering — he was being filmed by people on their phones.

So begins an exclusive interview with George Clooney that appeared this past week in The Times. The experience disturbed him not because he'd almost been killed, but because he became keenly aware that human empathy had vanished. Moments like these were to be captured and shared. His near death experience was being used as entertainment. 

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Yesterday I finished reading Brave New World again, Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel about the future and the dehumanization of man. For those unfamiliar, a primary character in the story is a man named John, also known as "the Savage" because he grew up on a reservation in America and has now been brought to civilization to see the wonder of it all. 

It's not a wonder to him, however. Everyone there is happy and blissful, free of worry and stress and any vestige of humanity. They have been literally brainwashed since pre-infancy, living in a soma-induced state till they die. "One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments." 

One of the features of this world is the use of technology to experience movies called Feelies. When you sit in the Feely theater, what's happening on the screen is being imparted into your mind so that when you watch porn you are experiencing the porn. (There are no morals here, sex is for everyone and with everyone.) 

Well, the effect that this world has on the Savage, who is still human, is heartbreaking. He has retreated to a tower, isolating himself. He's made a whip with which he flogs himself out of despair. But he is not alone. The Feely movie-makers have their cameras out and will transform his suffering into a Feely for the masses.

THIS SCENE FROM THE BOOK IS WHAT I'D JUST READ when I saw the George Clooney interview. Brave New World supposedly takes place 600 years in the future, but in less than a hundred we're already there. Maybe it's not Feelies yet but it's definitely become a world in which everyone is filming every shocking thing and turning it into entertainment for "friends" in social media.... and some of these go viral.

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As I read the Clooney piece it brought another memory to mind. About four or five years ago I was pumping gas at the Holiday Station on 27th Avenue West when I noticed that a young man and a neon green bicycle was lying in the middle of the road. He'd been hit by a car. There were no police or first responders there yet, but a couple people from one of the cars were attending to him until professional help could get there.

My first reaction, though, was to reach for my phone. As I did so, I felt a prick of conscience. I felt that this was a private moment. Cameras don't belong here. 

All the technology in our contemporary culture has been a challenge because we've had to wrestle with new ethical issues we hadn't previously encountered before. Certainly no one in 1650 or 1310 reached for a camera to capture photos of a stranger who was gored by a bull or mauled by a bear, just to entertain friends in their "social network."

It's a strange new world for sure.