A post submitted by CGI member Leathur.

While not our usual fare, at News oriented RMN, I'll allow it this once. If you enjoy it, let me know.

Lynda

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"Technology does not just happen; it is rooted in a philosophical premise of control, the inability to let the earth breathe and to stop trying to control life. This is a human choice."

Curtin's posts are full of eloquence and poetry. Intelligence and Truth.

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Ed Curtin
June 6, 2023

“The technical achievement of advanced industrial society, and the effective manipulation of mental and material productivity have brought about a shift in the locus of mystification. . . . the rational rather than the irrational becomes the most effective vehicle of mystification.” – Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

“General, man is very uselful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.” – Bertolt Brecht, “From a German War Primer”

Langdon Winner opens his prescient book, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (1986), with an anecdote about John Glenn and his experience orbiting the earth in 1962 aboard Friendship 7. After long, rigorous training in simulators, Glenn found that when he looked at earth from orbit – only the third man after Soviet pilots Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov to do so – he felt as if he had seen it all before. Rather than a sense of awe, he felt that his training exercises had deprived him of true experience. Winner writes, “Synthetic conditions generated in the training center had begun to seem more ‘real’ than the actual experience.”

Glenn’s example might seem unusual for the early 1960s, but it is now commonplace, the rule rather than the exception. I think many people today sense, but can’t admit, that technology has usurped direct human experience while presumably enhancing it with so-called awe-inspiring, tech-enhanced products. Just as people walk around embalming time with their camera phones, there is something funereal about activities that have been rehearsed, reviewed, and planned on digital screens before they are undertaken. It’s as if the hearse doesn’t come rolling in soon enough.

I just checked the local weather forecast and “they” say there is a 37.235 % chance of showers on Saturday, six days away. Should I start worrying today since I have planned a picnic for that day? Would I be wrong to wonder when on that future day, if it ever arrives and I am around to greet it, that the 37.235 % chance of showers applies? Day or night, morning or afternoon? The picnic is scheduled for 1-3 PM, so should I play it by the odds and assume those 8.33 % of the 24 hours have a decent chance of avoiding the 37.235 %? Should I live by numbers and computer simulations?

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis, a man not opposed to science, tells us:

There is something that unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique. . .

Why was Glenn circling the earth anyway?

If the novelty of experience and the real objective value of the outside world have been crippled by the repetitive and predictive nature of technology, it is worth reminding ourselves of the simple truth that technology does not just happen; it is rooted in a philosophical premise of control, the inability to let the earth breathe and to stop trying to control life. This is a human choice.

It is possible to show reverence for nature and our part in it and to use technology for humane goals, not because we are adept at techniques, but because we understand that human beings are emphatically not machines but spiritual and moral beings. This has seldom been the case in modern times. To do so demands asking what are our first principles and what are the ends we are seeking. This requires subordinating science and technology to higher values. All technical decisions are political and all political decisions are moral.

CONTINUE READING: https://edwardcurtin.com/rehearsed-lives-and-planned-history/

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