Searching For Silence

Alan Jacobs responds to William Deresiewicz's fear that technology is depriving us of solitude:

As Diana Webb has recently shown in her new book Privacy and Solitude: The Medieval Discovery of Personal Space reviewed here medieval Europeans in general simply accepted their lack of “personal space,” but others valued it and desired it sufficiently to retreat from the world, as hermits and anchorites, in order to get it. But these were necessarily special cases. Until the nineteenth century in Europe and other economically developed parts of the world, very few people have been able to find either solitude or silence. (Deresiewicz actually acknowledges this, though without seeming to be aware that such facts compromise his argument.)

If our technologies are making solitude and silence harder to come by, they are merely returning us to the condition of our ancestors and many of our global neighbors. Welcome to the human race, then.