Consider the following

I have long had an idea in my mind about the the cultural phenomenon of disparaging past cultural systems of belief because of technological advancement. I asked myself, What is it about technology that makes us feel so superior to past cultures? What does technology give us? When I use the term technology I am thinking about scientific discovery and the development of electro/mechanical tools. The Emperors New Clothes Technology on its face is phenomenal. When I think of the majesty of technology, I think of hover boards, lazer guns, and 44 inch paper thin televisions. On a serious note, we have as a society received tremendous aid from medical advances and mechanical advances that have the potential to increase physical well being. Part of the rub - if we are merely material beings, sans soul and spirit, than it might seem like the increase in a societal standing of basic physical health would be a good thing. Even from the materialistic view, when we loose the ability to commune and continue as a multi-generational family unit, we loose life. But what if science could fix that? I recently read Outliers, the famous Malcom Gladwell book. In it he cited a study of a city in Pennsylvania that had a less than 1% rate of cancer. The crux of the story was that the community was living together, and sharing life as a multi-generational conglomerate of some sort. The message was human love and interaction heals the body. It was a wonderful story and I was euphoric after reading it, realizing that fat italians who smoke and drink can be in amazing health if they learn to live with and love each other on a regular daily basis. But what if medicine can fix that, what if we can take pills that dispel all our diseases, what if we left humans with everything they wanted - a big TV, ordering take out every night and watching the new season of some new show. Would we spend our lives watching other people live theirs? What is soft tyranny? Why is the Roman appeasement of bread and circus so reviling? Does technology actually create the temperate condition for soft-tyranny to flourish? The point of this book is to show the dangers of technology and the implications those dangers leave us with. The primary generation is separation from our fathers. I mean historically, but it is also pretty amazing that we actually let or fathers and mothers rot in nursing homes. That technology gives us a sense of empowerment by knowledge. The Bible says knowledge puffs up. That it does, and that puffing–the sense of pride that is fostered–makes us feel like our moral decisions are superior to the decisions made by our ancestors. First we must ask what does technology give us. I do not mean in species, but in genus. Not in the specific manifestations of technology but the category of human profit. I think technology is primarily beneficial in two ways: speed and preservation. Think about the greatest inventions: the plow; the wheel; the printing press; refrigeration; the telephone; the steam engine; automobiles; lightbulbs; computers; the internet; medical sciences breakthroughs. These species of the genus technology can be tied to [I think technology would be family, these would be genus, and kind of light bulb would be species, but whatever] speed and preservation. To start with the plow, a man can till a field by hand, but when he ties a plow to a horse, the field is tilled at a much faster rate. The wheel obviously increases the speed of going from point a to point b. The printing press increases the speed of copying documents. What about odd things like glass, I guess an answer is the purpose of glass is to let light into rooms, for increased productivity inside of a house: pre-lightbulbs. But there are technological advances that are aesthetic, that is they exist to bring pleasure not because of speed or preservation, in fact the reason we love these items is because they cause us to be filled with a sense of awe. Take for example, the invention of stained glass. Now we see it as boring and sometimes done well. But when the light comes through the glass the light changes its character and turns colored, it was as close to a lazer-light show as the medieval folks would come. Speed and preservation are great but they are essentially a-moral, without morality. A professor and I had a long discussion about the morality of a hammer. He said that we know that hammers have morality because they are good or bad. I said that they do not have morality, they have functionality, a thing can function better than another thing, but that does not mean we apply moral right to it. But it is more complicated than that, because from a large scale perspective we can say, shouldn't things function the best they can. This might be a reduced kind of benthemic perspective that we can find the utility value of a transaction and gauge happiness based upon that transaction. So, where do we find morality? Well I think one of the places is from our ancestors. How did they do life, and marriage and family, and whether I should leave the world and live in a fake existence, and why? Head in the clouds. What exactly is wrong with living life in the clouds? Well it certainly breathes a kind of dreaminess. The danger is that it is not real. But what if it is real. What if I'm dreaming of becoming a writer and I do write. But what if I live in a chemically induced cloud where I can behave in any method, like not forgiving a despised enemy or being narcissistic. What if my cloud takes my natural biological response of pain or depression and makes me able to deny what my own corpus recognizes as right. That I should be depressed if I am living with hatred and lonliness, But I drug myself to make the feelings go away. What if technology is to powerful for us? Or what if it only gives us speed and preservation. What if we have merely created faster ways to destroy ourselves. While it may have taken the Roman empire 250 years to fall, it may take us 25.