As children of scientific materialism and the Newtonian enlightenment, we are used to thinking of space and the universe as objectively real. But that is only a story we tell, a way of interpreting experience. It’s a good story for many purposes—putting satellites into orbit, making lunch appointments, driving cars, building computers, etc.—but it leaves out of account a large chunk of the world as we experience it.
Look at your own experience without presuppositions, and you will soon see that you do not inhabit a single, objective reality. Instead, in the existential reality of our lives as they unfold from day to day, we practice a kind of serial monogamy. One moment we are firmly bound to one particular reality; the next we commit ourselves to a completely different reality.
The easiest illustration of this point is dreams. We lie in bed, fall asleep, and fall into a dream: a fully articulated world. Something disturbs us, and we wake up for a few moments, then fall asleep again. This time we fall into a completely different dream, a whole new world. And each world in turn is real for us. We commit to it completely, like a man or woman taking marriage vows. Yet our vows prove fickle. The next dream is like entering a new relationship, bound by new commitments. It is in this sense that we are serial monogamists: faithful to one existential reality at a time, but inescapably moving from one such reality to the next.
As in dreams, so in our waking lives. Standing at the bathroom sink in the morning, brushing my teeth, I notice a strange taste in my mouth. But in the next moment, I am thinking of a phone call I will have to make once I get to work, and that becomes my reality. The feel of the toothbrush, the taste in mouth, my face in the mirror are all gone, or perhaps present in the most peripheral of ways. We live this way from one moment to the next, practicing the existential rule of serial monogamy, wholly committed to one reality, then wholly committed to the next, usually not even aware that we have made the switch.
Think what it’s like to drive a car. When we first learn to drive, the reality of guiding a huge machine through traffic at high speeds is all-consuming; nothing else is on or in our minds. But as we grow accustomed to driving, we stop noticing what we are doing, and our existential reality is once more up for grabs. Our senses may be attuned to the world of traffic and cars and traffic lights, monitoring for problems and dangers that might command our attention in the next moment. But that sense-reality is not the existential reality we inhabit. Instead, our minds wander. We think of last night’s movie, talk to the person sitting next to us, or marvel at the greed of the persons whose crimes are featured on the radio news.
Perhaps this split between the existential world we inhabit and physical reality is not quite this extreme. We might speak instead of a kind of subliminal awareness of the world we are speeding through in our car, in the same way the serial monogamist might find herself casually attracted to someone she sees on the street. Still, the basic pattern holds. One moment we are ‘here’; the next moment we are ‘there’, and the break between here and there is close to absolute.
Enter the cell phone. Soon after cell phones became available for use in cars, it became clear that speaking on the cell phone while driving was a significant risk factor in accidents. Roughly speaking, to drive while holding a phone conversation was equivalent to driving while drunk. In both cases, accidents followed at an alarming rate. After a few years many jurisdictions began passing laws that prohibited driving while holding a cell phone, on the theory that one-handed driving, combined with the basic problem of distraction, was the source of the danger that cell phones posed.
This way of dealing with the problem, however, has not worked. People who carry on hands-free phone conversations while they drive are still about as likely to have accidents as drunk drivers.
Then perhaps it is the problem of distraction? But in itself, distraction cannot be the issue, for the reasons already suggested. Many drivers, perhaps most drivers, speed around on our city streets in a state of almost constant distraction, letting habit and a kind of readiness-to-respond substitute for conscious experience, their minds wandering furiously.
Here is where it helps to reflect on the existential rule of serial monogamy. When we talk with someone on the cell phone, we are no longer monogamous. Instead, we are trying to live in two worlds—two realities—at once. We are in the car, attuned in a non-conscious way to the physical realities of car and road and traffic; but we are also in a conversation with another. Present with that other (for that is what happens in a phone conversation), we engage a wholly different existential reality. And we cannot do it. We cannot be in two worlds at once, any more than the drunk, his body responding to the chemicals coursing through it, can walk a straight line. We have become adulterers, in the most literal sense, adulterating one reality with another. It doesn’t work.
Notice that this is completely different from holding an animated conversation with the person sitting in the passenger’s seat next to us. Our traveling companion inhabits the same reality we do (at least for present purposes), and therefore takes a role within that reality. A news broadcast or song we hear on the car radio also has its place in the monogamous universe to which we commit ourselves. But the person at the other end of the telephone conversation is (existentially speaking) somewhere else. She inhabits a different reality, and we try to share that reality. That is the source of the cell phone dilemma.
Perhaps we will learn in time to treat phone conversations differently, without the same level of existential engagement, though this of course would lead to a breakdown of certain communication possibilities. Indeed, we do already treat them differently: a different level of existential engagement for the business phone call, the phone call with a friend, or the occasional phone call that is truly charged with meaning and significance. After, for a phone call that really matters, would you keep driving as you spoke? Or would you pull off the road, so that you could give yourself fully to what was being said, returning at least for that moment to the serial monogamy that governs most of our waking and dreaming lives?