Is Dysfunctionalism the New Norm in Modern Life?

Abandoned computerized fast food ordering stations now look like monoliths in science fiction movies.

Source: Courtesy of Dennis Clausen

I am concerned with the possibility that dysfunction in institutions, politics, and the complicated ways we are required to do everyday tasks create a despairing sense of chaos in all areas of our lives.

If so, we are the product of the dysfunction that surrounds us.

Political dysfunction has become so common it feels like we are watching parodies of actual governance. Political actors appear to be auditioning for roles far above their competency levels. Yet, they rail on in the strained, over-the-top dialogue, creating more dysfunction in an already dysfunctional world.

Politicians are not the only ones who are perpetuating dysfunction. My profession has created its share. One of my older colleagues recently commented that when he entered the profession of teaching college students, “There was very little bureaucracy.” He added, “Now there is so much bureaucracy, it is becoming almost impossible to teach.”

Some of the educational bureaucracy is self-imposed. Other forms of dysfunction come from outside agencies and may even be well-intentioned. However, many of the educational reporting requirements have become so onerous they make teaching extraordinarily difficult.

But shouldn’t teaching be the major priority of any educational system and everything else a supplement to that goal?

Big tech, which has created many time-saving gadgets to simplify mundane tasks, has often complicated our lives to the point where we must devote much of our time to learning and relearning new systems and apps.

(Incidentally, what was wrong with the term “software programs?” It was simple. It was direct and easily understood. “Apps” seems more like bulging stomach muscles that need to be toned and flattened.)

AI-generated writing programs created even more dysfunction when they forced teachers and professors to pretend that they were evaluating student essays—and students had to pretend they wrote them.

Will students learn how to write or think under these conditions?

A recent study by D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt shares an even more critical view of the influence of cell phones and other technological influences on students. They report that teachers and professors agree that “the problem of flighty or fragmented attention has reached truly catastrophic proportions” in our nation’s classrooms. They add, “Increasingly, powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours.”

Should we not expect an increase in dysfunction in a nation that promotes the very technologies that create attention deficit disorders on a massive scale?

Why, in the search for simplicity, do we inevitably create more complexity? Is there something in human nature that can’t accept that we may have reached the apex of technological intrusions and other distractions in our lives? Perhaps we should step back and take a closer look at who we are and why we exist in the first place.

Before making a futile attempt to answer those questions, here are a few more examples of modern dysfunction in everyday life.

I visited a fast-food restaurant that had incorporated a stand-alone, computerized menu for customers seemingly trying to escape for a few quiet moments away from their computer-dominated workplaces. They ignored the computerized menu and lined up instead by the counter to place their orders. The computerized menu stood nearby unused, like a rejected suitor at a company dance.

An endless loop of frustration
Customer service departments, which were created to expedite customer complaints, often have byzantine, unnavigable computer-driven voices that answer phone calls. However, anyone caught up in the bureaucracy of filing a complaint knows it will take an endless loop of transfers to different departments, often with long waiting times, until they reach someone with a real human voice—and that person may send you back to a computer search.

Then, self-driving functions in cars were presumably built to create simpler, safer modes of transportation. Some of those cars have recently been recalled because drivers used their cellphones or pursued other distractions while driving—thus making their vehicles safety hazards for those who pay closer attention to the road.

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Is there a point in human endeavors when we inevitably create more complexity in all things until everything becomes dysfunctional? Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the eighteenth-century British satirist, said we should value anyone “Who could make two ears of corn . . . grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before.”

In the modern dysfunctional world, however, the extension of this would be to try to increase the yields of even more ears of corn by using growth hormones and insecticides until the soil becomes so contaminated it can no longer produce a single ear of corn. Furthermore, all of this would be done in the name of progress.

Nothing is perfect in an imperfect world. But have we reached the point in our slavish devotion to technological solutions that human life itself is threatened? When that happens, haven’t we passed the point of planned productivity and entered the world of regressive dysfunction? (Yes, I know that sentence could be stated in simpler terms.) Or don’t we see the potentially disastrous consequences of a misstep by technologies lacking human interventions and safeguards?

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) certainly thought we needed to take a long, careful look at the societies we have created and try to return to more simple solutions to problems. His book Walden Pond is a testimonial to the virtues of living simply so as not to skip over the surface of life.

When we complicate everything
But what happens when powerful financial interests decide to exploit Thoreau’s fame and commercialize Walden Pond—thus destroying the very simplicity Thoreau found in the small, unpretentious tree-lined body of water? Fortunately, those with less modern impulses fought off the intrusions into Thoreau’s memorial to a simpler lifestyle and saved it—at least temporarily.

Is there something in human nature that will inevitably complicate everything until it creates dysfunction? Is that how great civilizations, throughout time, rise and fall? Is that what the ancient Mayans and Egyptians were trying to communicate in their stone art?

The impulse in human nature that is driving us deeper into dysfunction reminds me of yet another American writer and philosopher. In his autobiography, Henry Adams (1838-1918) describes a “Dynamic Theory of History,” a term he coined after viewing the many new inventions at the Paris World’s Fair of 1900. He was deeply concerned that science was promoting change for its own sake without carefully considering its consequences for the human race.

He speculated that what we refer to as human progress might be an accelerating pattern of change that is increasing exponentially and dangerously. What once happened over 100 years would eventually happen over 50 years, and later yet occur over 10 years, and so on. Eventually, these changes would occur so rapidly that they could not be controlled—and the existence of the human race would be threatened by the very technologies that were created to simplify, not complicate our lives.

In more vernacular terms that Mark Twain (1835-1910) might have preferred, we may all be on a train approaching an especially dangerous curve, and the engineer at the controls is shouting, “Full speed ahead.”