Technology As An Infinite Solution

We have seen the burgeoning of a certain, fundamental conviction in our time; not one that was born here, but one that certainly grew up in the West in the last century. Grew up, waxed and even became slightly obese. The conviction is that at the core, mankind will remedy its ills and earn its destiny through the continuous expansion and refinement of technology.
This is a deeply persuasive conviction because it has a track record. Some large segments of our past trials and griefs have been remedied by the use of it: the eradication of small pox has spared millions of tears, as has the banishment of childbed fever and the discovery of penicillin.

For uncountable years our origins and our efforts have been involved with the things that technology helps: conquering the environment so it will not hurt us, getting enough food and water, defending our selves and families against catastrophe and against attack by other species, and finding better ways to coordinate these efforts. Thus, technology has grown up as the most needed of our intellectual children, the one area at which we were superior to carnivorous tigers and athletic apes.

These challenging material goals have been met, moved up, and met again repeatedly because we relish those of our kind who come up with technology, pay them well and give them praise. We educate our young to see as heroes the Edisons, Fords, Jobs, Eli Whitneys and Nikolai Teslas of our various eras. Even when we vilify our inventors, as when Isaac Semmelwies was run out of town for curing puerperal fever or when Harvey was mocked for asserting circulation of blood as a system, we use their discoveries and grant them recognition in the backhanded flattery of assimilating their inventions. If Einstein is the man of the 20th Century, so Newton was of the 18th, and perhaps Watts of the nineteenth.

But this is perhaps a constrained perspective with some blinders at the edges. Not all of our miseries of the last millennium (1000-1999) were induced by physical needs unmet, although many were. In modern Africa, the gentle fields of Zambia were painted red by the wanton murder of thousands of Tutsis by Hutu tribe members gone amok, and vice versa; and in proud Zagreb the gutters ran with the blood of ethnic Albanians eliminated by Milosovic's ancient venom. As our young children might well ask, "What's UP with that?".

This is not a new game. The British slaughtered Scots, Boers, Hindi and Irish in their efforts to consolidate their extended empire; tens of thousands of shallow graves have been filled by Stalin alone, and before him by the troops of the Czars; millions more were filled by civilized Germans being led pell-mell to their destiny by a psycho midget. The Crusades spilled the blood of thousands of fathers and brothers; the Union army died in droves and spent the equivalent of millions likewise killing droves of Confederate men, most of whom had loves and many of whom left fatherless children behind. Afghanistan, Kuwait, not to mention Tarawa and the bloody battles of Midway; the slaughter of millions by Japanese Imperial forces even before the Second World War. The bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fried mothers and infants in the same fireball that vaporized their homes, their parents, their grandparents, their dreams and their hopes. "What's UP with that?", repeats the voice of our next generation.

The jails of our great democratic experiment, where we put the failures, are stacked high with the wasted lives of men and women who were driven to manslaughter and mayhem in the most prosperous nation the world has ever seen. Is there a cognitive dissonance here?

Even short of physical assault, our psychiatric wards across the planet are also filled with those whose burdens were too great to stand, who lowered the drawbridge and allowed the floods of insanity to sweep the donjon keep of their inner centers; they could not cling to the shell of accepted civilized interchange, finding it without substance in the battle of demons, a paper weapon quickly crisped by the deep fires of their insanities. Out streets, in our centers of commerce across the planet, are lined with the poor and homeless who have not been able to find a way to build happy lives. While we can blame them for their misfortunes, doing so does little to find causes. What's up with THAT, dude?

Here is what's up: we do not know who we are. We do not know what our minds are capable of, nor do we know how they work. Those to whom this work has been entrusted are largely failures, are often more in need of therapy than their clients, and have not provided a model we can relate to. Without a clear view of our own natures, we are left facing the fact that, as a species, a large part of our numbers is completely mad, and the rest possess a large portion of madness which could readily overwhelm them under the right duress. Human sanity is not a known equation, and the elements which make it and destroy it are unknown elements. In its place we have build a machine driven often by clunky opinions and frail whimsy. That we have managed at all to build societies and commerce and products worthy of exchange is a tribute to our resilience and the overwhelming good that also lies within all our kind. But these are not issues for which physical technology can provide an answer directly, aside from perhaps instrumentation.

Thus the dream of solving existence with technology is a bounded one, a dream full of richness and value but one that is not ultimate in any sense, and one which covers only a part of the playing field. Beyond technology, we need--with a burning need --- to find a language with which we can see our own hearts, resolve our own insanity, and build a civilization of which we as humans can be proud instead of ashamed. This is another game, beyond the scope of electronic designers and nanotechnologists.

It can be argued that technology remedies the factors of want that lead men to desperate acts, and much can be said for that view. But the failures that lead humans to desperation are not just material failures. They are also failures in compassion, failures in imagination, failures in social design, failures in insight, failures in initiative. When we lose the battle of civilization to the barbarian hordes of madness, mayhem, chaos and the dogs of war we are losing through shortfalls of communication, of human affinity, of creative power, much more than we are to a lack of technology. That is the challenge for our kind to turn to next.

If politics, economics, schools, business practices and manufacturing plants were all informed by a vital and clear cognizance of our actual natures, by some proven vocabulary of the spiritual and mental and emotional dynamics that lurk within our makeup as individuals and as members of larger groups, we would be on a bridgehead indeed, with greater conquests ahead than any we could claim before.

Maybe we should start.

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