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Technical Progress

“…Perhaps our remote ancestors had no sooner invented the slingshot than they reared back on their hind legs and proclaimed that their technical progress had now enabled them to do without religion.”

– Joy Davidman, Smoke on the Mountain, quoted in From the Library of C.S. Lewis, p. 10

And now we have particle colliders and iPhones, yippee!!! Just face it: 1000 years from now, folks will be laughing at us. That’s not to say we don’t have some pretty great stuff; it’s just to say that it’s not that great.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
What is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him? (Psalm 8:3-4)

 

 

 

Big Brother in the Mirror

One of the more interesting points in Bill Wasik’s book And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture is his conception of a ‘Gladwellian Dystopia’ (see p. 136). Now, I am a reader of Malcolm Gladwell, and have gained something from reading him, but Wasik’s point is well taken.

The trend of sociological/quasi-scientific writing has served to demonstrate that humans are fascinated with humans. It has also served to demonstrate that humans are fascinated with controlling humans. The scary thing, from my perspective, is that these fascinations – with humans and controlling humans – are becoming more and more digital. For instance, there are people who I would not even speak to if I saw them on the street, yet I am absolutely fascinated with their existence online. Take another example: think of the grubby, anti-social teenager who would be scared to death to smart-talk someone to their face, and yet trolls everyone and their mother online.

Wasik puts it simply thus: The old Orwellian dystopia envisioned a future in which Big Brother was watching you. Modern reality is that we are Big Brother – and we are all watching each other.

So, if you take Neil Postman’s paradigm from Amusing Ourselves to Death, Orwell saw a future of state power lording it over the common man by taking all things away from him, and conversely Huxley saw a future of state power lording it over the common man by giving man all that he wants. We now find ourselves, having experienced some of Huxley’s future, using all that we have gained and attempting to lord it over each other.

Omni-Everything Through Technology

Another post for the ‘technology and modern man’ category:

…With the development of of science and technology, humanity has begun to claim for itself the omniscience and omnipotence it has formerly reserved for divine beings…The telescope extends the power of vision to the very distant; the microscope extends the power of vision to the very small. The telephone extends the range of the voice and the power of hearing; television extends the range of the eye and the ear. With the aid of modern forms of technology, humanity has achieved an undreamt mastery over nature and thus converted itself, as Freud puts it, into a ‘prosthetic God.’

-Lee Hardy, The Fabric of this World, p. 40.

I read recently that some techies are even attempting to upload their memory and consciousness to mega-computers in order to create some form of consciousness that can go on after their bodies die. Eternal life through silicon. Not surprisingly then, Google itself is working on the whole everlasting life thing. It may take them a while, they say, but hopefully death is curable.

As technology increases our reach, and our lifespans, we must be very careful that it does not increase our pride. A prosthetic god is no true god. Like all prosthetics, it is lifeless and powerless, though it may not appear that way to the naked eye when it is covered by articles of clothing. It is a good prop that allows for more activity, but at the end of the day it will be removed. Eternal life through silicon ends when silicon melts.

Technology and Modern Man: Universal Time, The Clock is Ticking

The state of frenzy in which we live now was a long way off in the nineteenth century. People lived under the same darkening sky, but they did not live simultaneously. This is an important distinction to contemplate today, when so much of what we do – and especially what we communicate to one another – depends of simultaneity…

People around the world – let alone in the next town over – did not occupy an agreed-upon sense of time and place. They lived on a multiplicity of slightly different schedules (John Freeman, The Tyranny of E-mail, p. 65).

He quotes George Miller Beard:

Before the general use of these instruments of precision in time, there was a wider margin for all appointments…men judged time by probabilities, by looking at the sun, and needed not, as a rule, to be nervous about the loss of a moment, and had incomparably fewer experiences wherein a delay of a few moments might destroy the hopes of a lifetime…We are under constant strain, mostly unconscious,oftentimes in sleeping as well as in waking hours, to get somewhere or do something at a definite moment (p. 78).

We have quantified time to exact precision. That’s why I know exactly when I am late for work. Or that I have stayed up far too late, like right now.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away. They fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day.

The clock is always ticking. Deadlines are bearing down. The day is gone. The night has come. The night has gone. The day is here again. The endless cycle. But it isn’t an endless cycle. The hands on the clock may go in a circle, but universal time is heading in a straight line. All the world may not realize it, but time has an end. The clock is not just ticking up, it is counting down. It’s not just flying, it’s migrating to a destination – for all the world, and for you. How much longer do you have left? Your Rolex, or Timex, will tell exact time for you, but it isn’t prophetic, it doesn’t know which tick will be your last.

If our time technology tells us anything, it is that we must ‘improve the time, for the days are evil.’ ‘Lord, help us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom.’ If you have 10 clocks in your house, one on your wrist, one on your phone, one on your laptop, one on your iPad, and one in your car (that makes 15 give or take) and you aren’t numbering your days, stop hitting the snooze button. Wake up.

Realize that time is not repeatable. YOLO (You Only Live Once) is questionable. But there is no question about YOLRNO – You Only Live Right Now Once. What are you doing with it? Every tick or blink of the clock is a question mark.

Technology and Modern Man: Letters

As Laurin Zilliacus reminds us, the Book of Esther describes ‘the use of posts to order the slaughter of the Jews throughout Persian-ruled territory, and then the swift sending of the counter-order that saved them and turned the tables on their persecutors…

All of the books of the New Testament, save the Gospels, are written in the form of letters.

– John Freeman, The Tyranny of E-mail, p. 27

It is worth noting that most of the books of the New Testament are letters (it’s debatable if his exact summary is correct). I do hope that social media and email do not completely destroy the ancient tradition of writing letters, and of postal services. Our future descendents will have no trace of our past correspondence. Bye bye paper trail. Will there be future anthologies of the emails and tweets of the greats of the internet age? Will future anthologies of blog posts be published in the place of good old fashioned published essays? Let’s hope so, and pray the internet never crashes for good.

It is interesting that God chose to reveal himself in the writings of Scripture (on actual physical objects like stone and paper) rather than other forms of media. Could he have waited for radio? The telegram? Television? The internet? You betcha. But he didn’t. Are there implications to this fact? You betcha. What are they? You tell me.

And, as a side note, I remember that Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones mentions, in Preaching and Preachers, a preacher who made a point about the ‘antiquity of saddlery’ from Numbers 22:21 (‘Balaam rose up early and saddled his ass’). You could make a similar point (understand I am mostly kidding here) from Esther about the antiquity of letter writing and the postal service.

Phone-Art

My daughter and I went to the art museum today.
They have a special exhibit featuring Monet.
But I was mesmerized by the self-portrait of Van Gogh,
And a bunch of people talking on cell phones.

They move on from one portrait to the next,
Not raising their eyes, as they send their texts.
A girl sitting before the likeness of the crucifixion of Christ,
No need to look, the pictures on her Facebook app sufficed.

As I explained to my daughter, my parental duty,
That portraits are illustrations of human creativity and beauty,
We critiqued each one, admiring shades and hues,
And wondered what these painted men would say if they could.

They’d probably say, ‘Get off your phone,’
And let out a groan.
There’s only one thing more awkward than being stared at when you’re beautiful,
And that’s being ignored.

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Not my best poetry, but true nonetheless.