The tyranny of the visual.

We are prisoners of our eyes. Or at least I am. We have five senses, according to common wisdom: we hear with our ears, we taste with our tongues, we smell with our noses and we perceive temperature, pressure and balance with our nerves, skin and vestibular apparatus. But we absorb information mainly by seeing things, using our eyes. It's how we know what time it is, where we are, what the news of the day is and what is around us. The dependence on our eyes to mediate between our brains and the rest of the world has been increasing drastically as technology evolves. So much of our interaction with the world is on screens and paper, and the degree to which we rely on screens and paper is mounting almost daily.

It's not just technology that has created a tyranny of the eyes. To a large degree, we recognize things by what they look like and always have. Back when I was a kid I used to watch a lot of Star Trek (the original show, with William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and lots of cheesy props and expendable extras). In one episode the Captain switches bodies with some woman. I don't remember the episode well enough to tell you who the woman was or why she switched bodies with Captain Kirk, but what absolutely sticks with me was my firm conviction that you can't just switch bodies and still be who you were when you started. Just being in a different body changes you. It also changes how other people deal with you. Why? Because you look nothing like "you." They have no way to deal with the person other than by treating him or her as the one they recognize.

It's not just television, either. Consider folk wisdom: "a picture is worth a thousand words." "Seeing is believing." Consider political debate: yes, much of it is done by sound bites, small bits of the spoken word that encapsulate something about the speaker. But sound bites are mainly transmitted on television - a highly visual medium. They are effective because we see the speaker saying the memorable words. We remember events by taking photographs - it's our digital cameras that we carry around with us, not our sound recorders, and we save photographs much more than sound clips.

Visual imagery is powerful. It conveys a lot of information. We can look at a person and estimate her age, her social status, her mood, her bearing. What things look like can tell us a lot about what they are: shape, size, color, texture. Chipped wood looks old. So does rusted metal. Shiny cars look new, and we can tell what model year they are by looking at them. We know who people are by looking at them, which is why movies like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" are so terrifying - the person we thought we recognized is not that person at all.

But appearances can't tell us everything. And because we are subject to the tyranny of our eyes, we often let what the eyes tell us govern our judgment more than we should. What something looks like is not the same as what it is. Here's an example. Anti-abortion protesters often wave placards bearing photos of early-stage fetuses. The fetuses look like miniature babies, with small arms and legs, and heads with recognizable though rudimentary facial features. The message the protesters are sending is: "Can't you see this is a baby? Just look at it!" It's not my purpose to comment on abortion here. All I'm pointing out is that the message on that placard proceeds from a visual-based premise: the fetus is a baby and should be treated like a baby because it looks like one. But that premise is faulty: whatever one thinks of abortion, the decision shouldn't turn on what the fetus looks like, as opposed to what it is or is not, and what the mother's situation is. Appearances carry too much weight in that discussion.

So the eyes deceive us by substituting appearance for essence. What made me think of this was an article in the Washington Post: Scientists Find A DNA Change That Accounts For White Skin. The human genome has billions of matched pairs of acids strung along rungs of the double helix of DNA, embedded in chromosomes resident in the nucleus of every cell in our bodies. What we are takes billions of genes to express. What we look like takes up only a part of that, and much of what we look like - and what allows others to recognize us - is tied to the color of our skin. One gene mutated. One, out of billions. So much of what we are, so much of our essence comes out of that massively complex DNA. Yes, culture and upbringing and education shape us, but the raw material for the shaping is supplied by the DNA. And out of all that DNA code that creates human beings, the color of skin traces to a difference in one gene. But it's that gene that triggers our eyes.

If not for the tyranny of the eyes, how much trouble could have been saved. Just think of it - think of having the ability to understand what things are rather than what they look like. Understanding that what things look like is not what they are, but only a hint of what they might be.

Seeing is believing - but only if what should be believed is accurately conveyed by sight.