Somebody said the mark of our generation is ‘ironic detachment.’ I
recently bought a freezer magnet, only to find it barely stuck to the fridge by
itself. And with a piece of paper under it, both the paper and the magnet fell to the floor.
Apparently there are times when detachment is not what’s called for.
So much technology is frittered away on the trivial and the
deadly, cool stuff and smart weapons. Yet so much good work remains to be done
in the world – teaching, healing, feeding and mending – and we have so many
tools now to do that work. Detachment is not an option.
Running parallel with the need to develop composure,
is the need to manifest it as compassionate action; to engage in what poet
Rainer Maria Rilke called, “the great work of the world.”
This is the second gold nugget from antiquity that can guide
us in our silicon society. Along with the Golden Mean, living in moderation, we inherited the Golden Rule: treat
others as we wish to be treated. And share. We have the tools to do that; we
need to leverage them.
When we leverage kindness and empathy to guide our tool use,
work becomes a form of prayer. We have superb technology at our disposal; we
can use it to regain a human and humane handle on our ingenuity, and not be
manhandled by it.
We have not acknowledged this for a very long time, but
tool-work and heart-work are mutually interdependent and give each other
meaning and direction. The work of farmers, teachers, nurses, artists,
physicians, telco engineers and well-diggers is a sacred undertaking. The life,
safety, health and integrity of the community depend on those efforts. To those
to whom much good leveraging is given, much leveraging for good is expected.
But what’s happening instead is that more tools, with vastly
more leveraging ability, are consolidating into the hands of an increasingly
smaller coterie of highly-educated, highly-compensated knowledge workers who
are, unwittingly, designing the systems that will ultimately put them out of
work. What the steam shovel did to John Henry, nanobots will do to brain surgeons.
Technology enabled us over the last thousand
years to go from serfdom to net surfing. And perhaps the greatest invention during that entire sweep of history
was the development of the middle class, giving the poor hope and, by the power
of the vote, keeping the rich and powerful in check.
In 1970, a middle-income wage earner could
afford a decent house, good health care, and excellent public higher education
for the kids. Only one generation later,
that’s all going away.
The great lie of our time is this: even as we
are encouraged 24/7 to consume, the jobs that enable that consumption are going
away – shipped offshore or lost through automation. This is a terminal condition.It hollows out our economy; it hollows out
our souls.
We appear to be heading into a New Feudalism, a two-tiered society of
info-haves and info-have not’s, where intellectual property rather than real
property is the basis of wealth. This is especially unnecessary in the digital age where information is infinitely
replicable and inexpensively distributed.
And it makes no sense even for the ‘winners.’ Enlightened self-interest
alone would make one realize there are no gated communities secure enough to
keep out the rage and despair of the many left behind.
We’ve become the natives who trade their land, their freedom, their birthright,
for trinkets of cool stuff. And while we are distracted with the pretty colors
and shiny celebrities during round-the-clock entertainment, jobs are destroyed,
communities eviscerated, and the moral order neutralized.
After all this time we seem to have forgotten
that we are still only one species among many, just gifted with big brains and
flexible hands. If all the other species could vote, would we be voted off the planet?
For two million years, we’ve used our big brains to expand the notion of who we are
and what we can do, and our flexible hands to make and use tools to achieve those visions.
But now it’s flip-flopped: we are expected to adapt to the gadgets. As noted before,
Windows for Dummies is mis-titled. The dummies are those who make such
complicated, unintuitive and unstable software, not the users.
It’s up to every thoughtful person to begin to in-form the tools at his/her disposal.
Don’t wait for the mandate to come from above. It won’t. It starts with individuals and
communities that are keenly aware that the times are out of joint. Nothing
stops an idea whose time has come, and nothing’s impossible to those who
believe nothing’s impossible.
We can employ more people today, more productively, remediating our misapplied
technology; cleaning out the toxins the early model left us with: poisoned water,
air, soil, cities and souls. And rethinking and recasting archaic institutions
modeled on the wedge, dividing some from all.
So what specifically can we do – as individuals,
communally and globally – to take this sad song and make it better? Here are
some sites to visit. This list not exhaustive, but it’s a start:
Appropriate Technology:
- For the past 25 years, the
National Center for Appropriate Technology
has been serving economically disadvantaged people by providing information and
access to appropriate technologies that can help improve their lives.
- Amory Lovins’ Rocky Mountain Institute
an entrepreneurial nonprofit organization that fosters the efficient and
restorative use of resources to make the world secure, just, prosperous, and
life-sustaining.
- See also Engineers without Borders,
modeled on medicine’s Doctors without Borders.
Conflict resolution:
Green Technology: A place to start is Green Power Zone.
Small tech: E.F. Schumacher painted a picture of how a cooperative
economy might look in
Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered [Blond & Briggs,
Ltd., London, 1973] Rethinking our institutions from the bottom up would require
the best minds of a generation.
Technology Tithing: Just as it sounds, described by MIT
Professor Arnold Pacey in The Culture of Technology
(MIT Press, 1985)
Rural Renaissance:
In the 19th Century, as Americans spread out from
the Cumberland Gap to the Golden Gate,
settlers wanted to be no more than a one-hour’s ride away from their market
center. Since the speed of a horse-drawn
cart then was eight miles per hour, that meant new towns were built across the
new nation about sixteen miles apart – each with its eight-mile radius. So during the 19th Century about
10,000 towns were established across the US,
but they didn’t have time to put down multi-generational roots before the
automobile came along. By the early 20th
Century, 90 percent of those towns were redundant, because the car had
transformed the one-hour marketing radius from eight miles to sixty. Our cities
are overcrowded and here are all these towns with plenty of space, waiting to
be rediscovered, rebuilt, revived and reconnected with cosmopolitan centers.
Community bartering: In some parts of the country, local
churches have been shut down for budget reasons, even though the people there
insist the church is theirs and is the cornerstone of their community. Maybe they can keep the
facility, and truly use it as the community center: bartering skills, jobs, community food bank,
day care center, senior center…
Volunteering: Many groups need volunteers. Here are
some recommended starting points:
Related online resources:There are many, these three in particular are
noteworthy.
And if nothing here suits your
fancy, start something yourself. The only thing necessary for wickedness to
prosper is for good people to do nothing.
Is it naïve and dangerous to talk about unity in a world of
such fierce divisiveness, terrorism and religious fundamentalism? Not at all. It’s the failure of so many institutions to
appreciate unity that has created our crisis.
Disunity has been at the heart of much of our religious tradition, beginning with the
ancient idea of the Covenant – of The Chosen against The
Other. That God would make all the people, then arbitrarily select some as
Chosen and abandon all others, blasphemes the real “God” – whatever source
brought being into being.
Belief divides; faith unites. Dogmatic beliefs are like
crash test cars, smashing into walls. Faith is like the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars,
or the car in Back to the Future – it accelerates and takes us to places beyond imagining.
Belief is a clinging to archaic worldviews; faith is letting go in the
conviction that things work to a good end. It’s a leap, into the unknown.
The core teaching of all faiths is constant: show compassion. And that
takes faith because many of life
experiences say that forgiveness and compassion are the marks of suckers. But
why then do people continue to be kind. And why, as Gandhi noted, has no evil regime ever endured?
This core teaching is in the Hebrew Testament (“Love
justice, act mercifully, and walk humbly with your God.” Micah 6:8); the
Christian Testament, (“Love one another” John 15:12); and the Islamic
Testament (“God has 99 names, and the foremost of these are the all-compassionate,
the all-merciful”).
Once, we learned from nature. Then we learned to master nature. Now need to
go back and humbly learn from the balance, harmony, integrity and cohesion the
new sciences are showing us were in nature all along.
We are standing with the scientists and philosophers atop
Devil’s Tower, visited by the spacecraft in Close
Encounters of the Third Kind: “People, it’s the first day of school again.
