As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional “unconscious identity” with natural phenomenon. These have slowly lost their symbolic implications. Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree is the life principle of a man, no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His contact with nature has gone, and with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied.
– Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols (1968)
When I was a kid in a small city in Central Wisconsin in the 1970s, I would often look deeply in the sky on a clear night in awe of a sky dome dotted with stars and the Milky Way. Although I lived in an urban environment, there was an almost nightly connection to the wonders of nature exhibited in the dark sky above.
Today, in 2022, when I return to my hometown, the prevalence of neon, xeon, halogen, mercury lights and LEDs has polluted that ethereal view. And, with that technological pollution, the latest generations have lost that simple and frequent connection to the daily greater experience with the world.
And, the simple irony remains: as humanity has pushed progress in making the availability of inexpensive, high quality, bright lighting, this technology serves a wedge separating each person from their connection to the natural world.
As a technologist, I’m keenly aware that technology itself is neither inherently good nor evil. It’s the the way that humans apply and use technologies that can lead to great good or harm. In this case, the way we’ve used technology to light our world has come at the cost of our connection to the natural world. And that connection is critical to our psychological and emotional well-being.
In 1968, when Carl Jung wrote "Man and His Symbols", he was already concerned about the growing disconnection between humanity and nature. He foresaw a world where technologies would slowly strip away the emotional connection between humanity and nature.
Sadly, his predictions have come true.
As humans, each one of us must seek to reconnect to the natural world. To remain human, we must seek a path out of our self-inflicted techno-dystopia and regain true human connections to the physical world around us: from dehuman to rehuman.