Do we spend too much time looking into our screens and too little looking into human eyes?

Christine Rosen on Uncommon Knowledge Now.

Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson.

Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a senior editor at the New Atlantis,

a regular contributor to Commentary Magazine, and a co-host of the Daily Commentary Podcast.

She holds a doctorate in history from Emory. Christine Rosen's most recent book published this autumn,

The Extinction of Experience, Being Human in a Disembodied World.

Christine, welcome.

Thanks for having me.

Christine, your argument. Let's lay out the basics of the argument.

From the extinction of experience, I'm quoting here,

our understanding of experience

has become disordered in ways large and small. More and more people create their own realities

rather than live in the world around them. What do we lose when we no longer talk about the human

condition, but rather the user experience. What do we lose?

Well, I think we lose an important part of our humanity and an understanding not only of ourselves

as individuals, but of our role in communities, in families, in culture.

And the title, although it sounds a little bit portentous, extinction of experience

actually comes from a naturalist, Robert Michael Pyle, who worried about children growing

up in a world where they didn't actually experience nature. They didn't get muddy, they

didn't run around in forests, they had no interaction with wildlife. And then when they grew up,

if a species, for example, went extinct, would they care?

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