My dad hired my son to scan all his slides, because nowadays no one ever sets up the projector and screen and bores the dinner guests to tears. Every so often I’d hear laughter, and when I asked Mitchell about it, he’d say: “Just another picture of you.” One of those pictures shows me with my younger brother, John. It was taken in ’68, probably on a Saturday morning after we had watched Johnny Weissmuller tame darkest Africa and Spiderman tame the streets of New York City. My parents were conscientious people who cared about how they raised their boys. They wanted their boys to grow up to be responsible adults with solid values. What North American parent wouldn’t want that? But the pressure to conform must have been difficult. John and I must have been merciless, pestering our parents for toy guns. All the other kids had them. Why couldn’t we? Certainly, my dad was a peaceful man. But at that time, he had three cousins and an uncle serving in Viet Nam. If he was too insistent about nixing the guns, would his family interpret it as a betrayal? Back when I was a kid, things were complicated and ambivalent—not like today when everything is so clear-cut.
A generation later, and it would have been politically incorrect for us to buy a toy gun for Mitchell when he was little. No longer do our children play cowboys and Indians. Instead, the school curriculum encourages sensitivity to First Nations Peoples. It has been hard work, but we have managed to decolonize our playtime. And yet we have given in to other pressures, though pressures of a different sort. Mitchell used to pester us about games for PS2 and GameCube. In these games, there are no Indians to shoot, and schools don’t seem particularly concerned to teach sensitivity to weird-looking aliens or soul-dead zombies. But is there any qualitative difference between an Indian and a zombie? We find it so easy to shoot them in play because we encounter them as less than human. We find it so easy to shoot them because we have learned not to use our imagination. Empathy requires an enormous act of imagination. As soon as a child feels the possibility of pain in his target, it becomes far more difficult to pull the trigger—even in play.
Toy manufacturers tell us that war games and toy weapons have no impact upon the incidence of violence. Even if we surmount the methodological obstacles for establishing such a claim, and even if we accept it as true, there may be other impacts which diminish us nevertheless. One notion that has stuck with me as I study ethics is the notion that moral agency—being good—is more than simply doing good things; it also demands character formation, developing habits that foster a general attitude toward the world. What sort of habits do video games foster? No, I don’t think they are more likely to put us in the frame of mind to pull the trigger whenever we encounter somebody we don’t like. But they may put us in the frame of mind not to like people in the first instance.
If we condition ourselves through repetitive simulations to treat the different-looking as less worthy of our regard, then we will carry that habit from the virtual to the real world. It will put us in the frame of mind to treat any difference as cause for deliberate alienation. It will put us in the frame of mind to treat as worthy of public debate the question of whether Islamic women should be forced to remove their burkas because it is a “mark of separation that made other people feel uncomfortable.” It will put us in the frame of mind to dismiss the connection between the (Microsoft) browser we use to read these words and the Chinese journalist who sits in a jail on the other side of the planet. In short, toy guns and VR simulations may well kill our capacity to feel human.
But the clever reader will object: look at the picture of you as a child; you were exposed to these habits of mind, and yet, by your writing, we can see that it had no lasting impact. My answer is twofold. First, can you be so certain that I have avoided lasting impact? When I submit to self-examination, I find that my natural response is still xenophobia. I want to shy away from the foreign. It is only by an exhausting act of will that I ever acknowledge the possibility that foreign might be friend in disguise. Second, I don’t think even an act of will would allow this if I first hadn’t undergone what I would describe as a “conversion” experience. But the opportunity to be humbled into conversion is not something we actively seek; it happens by accident. For me, it arrived thanks to the grill of a car, which taught me in a concrete way just how vulnerable I am, and just how dependent I am upon those who might reasonably look upon me as foreign. This is not a conversion experience I would recommend, but for me it was effective.