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THE ASCENT OF HUMANITY
is ironic indeed that the car, which in theory should bring people closer together by reducing travel time, has had the opposite effect. Consider that without the automobile, suburbs as we know them would not exist. Without the automobile, every house needs to be within walking distance to various shops, post offices, schools, and a train station. It is no accident that older towns and cities, built before the Age of the Automobile, are much denser than the sprawling suburbs-without-a-city that comprise newer metropolitan areas. In depopulating the outdoors we have conceded it to cars, creating space inhospitable or downright dangerous to people, especially children, driving them even more indoors. The usual vicious circle of technology. The outdoors becomes the road, not a real place at all but merely a distance to be traversed between destinations. The apotheosis of this trend, the superhighway, goes so far as to prohibit pedestrians—that is, people—altogether. By bringing the world under control, we have made huge sections of it off limits, a development presaged by the reduction of the infinite described in “The Origins of Technology”. Whether for children or adults, the migration of life indoors is so extensive that some people feel uneasy to be outside at all. They perceive the outdoors to be not entirely comfortable, safe, or secure—it is the undomesticated realm that is not under complete control. Often this perception manifests physically as intolerance to even modest levels of heat and cold, pollen, biting insects, and so on—another example of how technology generates dependency on technology. The less we utilize and challenge our capacities, the more those capacities wither. Could this be another type of physiological capital we are converting into money? (Not to say life indoors causes pollen allergies, though I doubt that many rabbits or deer suffer from such sensitivities. Similarly, animals and pretechnological human beings are far more tolerant of temperature extremes than are civilized humans.) No matter. When life happens in a box, there is hardly a need to go outdoors at all. In the winter some of my neighbors literally go weeks without spending more than two minutes at a time outdoors—the time it takes to get from parking lot to building. The same is increasingly true in summertime as well, when life takes us from air-conditioned home to airconditioned car to air-conditioned store or office. Spend some time in less developed countries and you’ll be amazed at how much more time people spend outdoors, and thus how life there is correspondingly much more public. When houses are small, close