One of the major themes that has been elucidated in this column is the loss of psychological grounding that results from the sensory distortion that is generated from modern technology. The emphasis in this column has been on loss of psychological grounding, because it is so intangible and nebulous and therefore so easy to overlook. This is distinct from a loss of physical grounding, when people feel a need or desire to move from one physical location to another. In the past, there have been several reasons why such physical dislocations have occurred. First, there is the situation of nomads, who are forced to move from location to location for reasons of survival. A good example is the Bedouins of North Africa, who constantly moved from oasis to oasis on the Sahara Desert in order to find water and areas where their animals (camels, horses and sheep) could graze. As a result, such people had been forced to find their psychological grounding in very tightknit family structures and in their religion.
Then, there is the situation of people, usually ethnic minorities, who are expelled from their homelands or pressured to leave their homelands as a result of the prejudices of the dominant ethnic groups. Unfortunately, Jews are a group who have fallen into this category many times. Nevertheless, Jews have been able to find a strong psychological grounding in their Torah, Talmud and other holy religious works. They are not known as the people of the book for nothing. Of course, nowadays when Jews are expelled from countries in the diaspora, they can go live in Israel, a country rich in both physical and psychological grounding for them. The Pilgrims and Puritans who came to America to escape religious persecution in England would have to be included in this category as well of people who have to live their homes because of prejudice. As would all the different groups who are being displaced as a result of ethnic hatred in today’s world.
Finally, there is the situation of people who purposely give up their old physical grounding in order to obtain unusual scarce figures in the form of riches, intriguing adventures or new life opportunities as well as to obtain new physical grounding in the form of new land or territories. Here would be included conquerors like Alexander the Great, Atilla the Hun, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Hernan Cortes, and Francisco Pizarro, explorers like Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Ponce de Leon, Vasco de Balboa, Jacques Cartier, Henry Hudson, Ferdinand Magellan, James Cook, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, and finally all the people who move to someplace else to seek new life opportunities, whether for work, love, education or retirement.
Although there have always been these physical dislocations occurring in the world, there is no doubt, that most people in traditional natural societies have experienced the world as a place of fixed physical grounding. The people in most traditional natural societies have tended to stay in one geographical location. The major moves for traditional people occur in patrilocal societies, where women tend to move in or near the homes of their husbands’ families and matrilocal societies, where men tend to move in or near the homes of their wives’ families. But these moves do not require the people who are moving to go any significant geographical distance.
During my years living in Mexico, I learned that it was very common for people in rural Mexican villages to have spent their whole lives living in their village of birth and to never have even visited the village that was over the hill or down the road from them. For these villagers, psychological grounding was very much tied up with physical grounding. And this is very different from the lives of most people in modern technological society, where there is so little flowing blendable continual organic stimulation, where there are so many defined discrete free-floating life opportunities in the experiential vacuums of their lives and where one of the major forms of abrasive stimulation to shock them out of their numbness is through physical dislocation. To the extent that people maintain any sense of grounding today, it is through an uprooted psychological grounding that is able to maintain a coherent sense of self for a person for a certain period of time without physical grounding. That is until numbness and entropy set in, at which point, it becomes necessary to try to restore a fixed physical grounding again. Certainly, when people are tourists and temporarily uprooting themselves, there usually is no problem with numbness and entropy setting in, in the more organic touristic places. It is just when the travel requires a sustained period of uprooting, that the experiential vacuum can take over. Particularly in today’s world where the travel itself in planes, cars and trains is so numbing. And all destinations suffer from much of the same sensory distortion that, in reality, home does. When people used to travel, in a world where traditional living environments dominated, there was a sense that, in spite of being physically dislocated, these people were never totally experientially uprooted, because they were surrounded by so much organic stimulation and so much primary experience in their living environments. They could move along and still maintain a certain sense of sustained psychological and physical grounding. That life situation is unfortunately gone, and travel – moving along in the world – is much more perilous than it ever was before.
© 2023 Laurence Mesirow
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