A Living Magazine - Day 200 - Homecoming - Anderson: Balancing Morality And Technology

This would end up being an unexciting work day. I worked for a while in the morning at Jan's and then took off to work at McDonald's. I try to walk every day. Missing days can mess with my feet, when traveling needs to begin again. By this, I mean that the rest of my body can take a break and then handle a long distance walk, but my feet easily revert back to a weaker state after only a few days of sitting. 

I'd noticed this in Athens. There was a difference between the days of walking only a couple miles to Starbucks, a few other places, and then back to the campsite, and the rarer, longer trips to the University 16 Cinema or WalMart across town. Even those longer walks were relatively short, compared with walking between towns.

My heels were especially sensitive lately. I'm going to elaborate a bit on my physical condition before leaving Anderson and tell about another issue with my left foot; one that hasn't caused any problems since leaving Maine, but may be exacerbated by the heel problems. For now, it is just something I'll have to keep an eye on.

I got to McDonald's but for some reason their Wi-fi was not working. I tried for an hour to connect without success. I even asked the very kind staff to check the router and reset it if necessary, which they did. Apparently, something else was going wrong. They do sometimes have glitches with their online machines. For instance, the card readers malfunctioned one morning. And, after the manager blamed three of four customers for not having adequate balances on their cards (myself included), had to embarrassingly admit that it was the reader (not the customer) that was at fault. I got a free coffee out of the deal.

So after eating my McDouble, small fry and drinking my small senior-discounted lemonade (total cost for lunch, $2.80!), I headed back to Jan's. There were no pictures on this day, because I really didn't find anything interesting to capture.

All of the above is just a pretext for instead publishing a short essay that I'd been working on for a while, but was inspired to finally finish and publish after a Facebook conversation today with my good friend, Marc. He'd observed that cars have become a way that we separate ourselves from each other. His insight was very much in line with some of the things I'd been writing about here and that society has been dealing with recently. 

Please leave a comment if you'd like and share this blog post if you think it might be relevant or similar to your own thinking... 

* * * * * * *

BALANCING MORALITY AND TECHNOLOGY

I have observed that there are material things that represent stretched out pieces of history and are like bridges between ages or eras.

Our cars (and carriages before them) have been one of those long semi-dirty bridges between the clean walking of our ancestors and the clean flying of our someday-descendants.

I think cellphone texting (as another experience) and its distractive power over us is a much shorter bridge (from speaking directly over short distances in the past, to letters, to printing, to phone calls, to - in the future - eventually speaking directly over long distances without a gadget). We are at least trying to communicate with them, but running (sometimes literally) into walls as we walk down the street, or guardrails as we drive down the street. We may be virtually connected to those we text, while the people in our own neighborhoods - or even our own families - are still disconnected from us.

Of course there are many such bridges (guns, drugs, and money come to mind), long and short. We seem to invent first and then spend time (the bridge) understanding what we've invented; learning to control it. I believe if we were a more moral species (if the balance between morality and technology were not so heavily weighted toward the latter), we would conceptually understand things before inventing them. Kind of a tough concept to understand.

Unfortunately, for those of us who have to stand on the incomplete current bridges, the lack of balance between morality and technology means that we mold the natural world around our inventions, instead of designing our inventions to work in symbiosis with the natural world. In the process, we are separating ourselves from the natural world, and making a synthetic world of things we don't fully understand to replace it.

It is a shame that - as a kind of animal, ourselves - made of flesh and bone, we are trying to act as if we are made of steel and glass and silicon. We live in a kind of denial about ourselves that we are attempting to make up for by inventing our way out of nature--of course, an impossibility.

In my opinion, if the imbalance is not made up for, with a re-balance reached in time, our technology will completely replace our morality. And, if that happens, our world will end. It is a kind of calculus, not a value judgement, to recognize that this is the case. But, the way toward re-balance IS based on values, not calculus. We need to steer what we value away from things and back toward meanings.

This can't be done with legislation or top-down enforcement, it must be done in the individual mind, and then shared socially as a bottom-up process. That means changing the way people think, rather than changing what they think about. The emphasis on what we "should" be thinking about, is the problem in its most basic form. This never should have been the method of so-called "progress". The churches, the government, science itself, dictates the what. But the inner connections to unseen and higher realities are the keys to a new way of thinking, and the shortest route out of the potential hell of broken bridges we are slowly building.

It would be a relatively painless and very efficient means of saving ourselves, from ourselves. For those of us who realize this fundamental truth, spreading it without being forceful (from Spark to Spark) will save the world, reestablish the balance, reconnect us, and--as a beneficial side effect, give us a new literal and physical technology to do all that we have ever imagined. We can communicate worldwide without gadgets, fly instead of drive, find consciousness expansion without poisoning ourselves, defend ourselves against evil without the need for deadly weapons, and enjoy an economy based on service to each other, rather than using the self-serving profit motive.

It's all there to be had. It is a matter of personal will-choice; the simplest of all activities and easier than raising your hand to scratch your face. I believe that the generations alive today, will eventually understand this and put it into practice. We cannot wait forever, because our ever-complexifying technology will eventually make the choice for us if left unchecked. And, you can bet your bottom dollar, it will choose its own existence over ours. It will see the logical way of attaining its own limited material perfection, by extinguishing us; knowing that we made the stupid choice to put our faith in that same limited technology instead our own unlimited potential to reach a much richer and unqualified form of spiritual perfection.

Not easy stuff to think about. But once one gets one's head around it, the solution becomes clear as day. It only takes that rarest of all things in our current world--the desire to change it for the better.

* * * * * * *

Jan had made a scrumptious Alfredo dish with carrots, baby corns, peapods, chicken and ziti pasta. It was delightful. I worked some more after Jan went to bed and then hit the hay myself.

_______________________________________________________________________

PLEASE CLICK ON OUR SPONSOR ADS BELOW FOR GREAT DEALS!

_______________________________________________________________________