Time to evaluate the costs of ‘progress’
Like many of you, I spend much of my day in front of a computer. Naturally, I am dependent on (and grateful for) technology. But for a couple of years, I’ve had increasing concerns about the hidden costs of “progress” – aesthetic, spiritual and rhythmic.
Recently, I caught a glimpse of those costs in a rambling and reflective e-mail from my brother. Carl had been standing on the deck of his rural Colorado home, observing hawks as they rode the wind over his property.
Watching them soar, he began wondering if they were aware of their own shadows moving across the land below. Was the shadow perhaps a tool for scaring animals into the open?
After watching one hawk tracking a car very precisely for a few hundred yards, he wondered whether it was waiting for roadkill. Then my brother went on to speculate in a quite leisurely fashion about other animal kingdom patterns.
As I read his e-mail, I realized that at the same time Carl was engaged in wondrous review of his natural environment, I was sitting enslaved to my computer and the Internet. I was a passive recipient of “programmed content” mainlined right into my skull. As I thought for a long time about the contrast, I realized that our respective mornings revealed some of the cost of progress.
First, the download of information and imagery into our brains – from the Internet, television, radio, cellphones, MP3 players, podcasting, Xboxes, etc. – is radically different from a natural, self-directed search for knowledge about our world.
The primary difference is that someone else is making decisions about who, what, when, where, why and how we see and hear. Clearly, news selection is now designed with the market in mind. That’s costly when it comes to the way we discern what is happening in our time. But that’s only the beginning of costs. What are some of the others?
Thinking: Programmed information produces programmed thinking. So our “personal thoughts” are not that at all – we simply download them from the available menu of pre-formulated scripts (business, political, religious, entertainment, etc.).
Therefore, we end up robotically reciting the scripts to one another: “Michael Moore is today’s Paul Revere.” “No question about it; this heat wave is caused by global warming.”
Freedom: “Who doesn’t want to wear the ribbon?” That Seinfeld line describes the social conformity that pulls us into “approved” thought and action.
One measure of our freedom is how much we cherish and protect the freedom to not do what we are free to do. For example, the freedom to vote is precious and has been purchased by human lives. Still, it also includes the freedom to not vote. But casually mention that you didn’t vote in the last election (perhaps in a union meeting, a Sunday school class or a crowded elevator) and see if you get away with all your hair and blood.
Curiosity: Just as we now have scripted thinking and attitudes, much of our curiosity is now culturally directed. When’s the last time you saw a kid gazing into an ant den or a telescope? It seems that we’ve lost the flair of imagination essential to sailing a schooner around the Horn – or endlessly watching hawks in the air.
Today, curiosity has come to mean Googling to find who played “Napoleon Dynamite” or downloading two-year-old satellite photos of your own house.
Conversation: Have you noticed that genuine conversation is disappearing? How long has it been since you had a normal discourse about any of the millions of mysteries in your world? Rather than gathering with others in contemplation and wonder, we have been rewired to merely react to whatever our culture presents.
As a result, we’re trading that fine art of collective and respectful inquiry for shotgun blasts of opinion.
Reality: A new TV commercial shows a family preparing for a driving vacation. But before they can even think about a cross-country trip, they must visit a major electronics store to buy an auto DVD system and various games and other electronic boxes for the kids. The last scene shows them gliding joyously down the highway with the kids direct-wired into those demonic boxes. Outside the window, a real world passes by unnoticed.
Americans have carried on a long love affair with progress, and I’ve been as infatuated as most. But an increasing chorus of voices is now asking: “What are we gaining and what are we losing through progress? Are those losses acceptable?”
Perhaps we’re coming to the end of the affair. I’m personally ready to cash in some progress in order to buy back some lost freedoms, serious curiosity, a renaissance of independent thinking and reality. And I’d love to have a genuine, thoughtful and respectful conversation again.