IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

According to the psychologist David Winnicott, the loss of temporality
engendered by modern life is also a feature of psychotic and deprived individuals
who have lost the ability to connect the past with the present. The
bridging of the present into the past, and into the future, says Winnicott,
is a crucial dimension of psychic integration and health. By scrambling
our mind-and-body clocks, speed society creates the preconditions for
psychosis. 24
Speed 35
Sociability, too, suffers at speed. ‘‘A rapid pace of life virtually requires a
disregard of strangers,’’ laments Levine. 25 Some cultures are less well placed
to resist than others. The English language, for example, has no word with
a positive connotation to describe lingering on the street; we have at our
disposal only negative words like ‘‘loitering.’’ Italians, on the other hand,
speak of dolce farniente, which, loosely translated, means ‘‘sweet doing
nothing’’—a nonactivity that is highly treasured in some cultures as a
productive and creative force. The Kabyle people in Algeria, the sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu discovered, despise any semblance of haste in their social
affairs and refer to the clock as ‘‘the devil’s mill.’’ 26 For the Kelantese people
of the Malay Peninsula, an emphasis on slowness is deeply embedded
in their beliefs about right and wrong, and haste is considered a breach of
ethics. ‘‘At the core of this ethical code,’’ writes Levine, ‘‘is a willingness to
take the time for social obligations, for visiting and paying respects to
friends, relatives and neighbours.’’ 27
Critiques of speed by writers like Robert Levine and Jeremy Rifkin follow
a long tradition. Complaints about speed occur throughout the modern
age. In a book about the first industrial age cities in England, Building Jerusalem,
the historian Tristram Hunt gives dozens of examples of writers complaining
about speed. ‘‘How men are hurried here,’’ wrote Thomas Carlyle
of London in 1843; ‘‘how they are hunted and terrifically chased into double-quick
speed, so that in self-defence they must not stop to look at one
another.’’ Alexis de Tocqueville described ‘‘crowds hurrying this way and
that, their looks preoccupied and their appearance sombre and harsh.’’ 28
In 1881, George Beard published American Nervousness, in which he introduced
the term ‘‘neurasthenia’’ to describe a new mental illness caused by
the increased tempo of life made possible by the telegraph, railroads, and
steam power. 29 Beard deplored the fact that a businessmen could conduct
one hundred times more transactions in a given period than could his
eighteenth-century predecessor. Other nineteenth-century medical experts