Tag: virtue

Techno-Intrusion

Religion, Society & Culture, Technology

The intrusion of technology in our lives is rapidly becoming domination. The abrogation of humanity to artificial intelligence (emphasis on “artificial”) is real and advancing rapidly.

It is alarming how much our society has become enslaved by the little screen in our hands. And I do mean enslaved. It’s no longer FOMO (the Fear of Missing Out). It’s that for some, even many, every moment of every day is monitored, organized (or disorganized), influenced or controlled by technology. It’s as if we’ve outsourced our critical thinking abilities, self-control, conduct governors, interpersonal communications, hell, our consciousness. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that some have outsourced their SOULS.

I don’t need an “app” to monitor how much I sleep at night. I don’t need to be fed “relevant” advertising when I visit a website. I don’t want “free” stuff. The price of “free” is relinquishing personal data to an amorphous algorithm that creates a digital profile of me. That profile is used (and manipulated) in all sorts of ways, the vast majority of which are driven by the pecuniary interests of the technology company that conjured up, sorted and sold my profile to anyone who would pay for it.

Technology has permeated, or infected, virtually every form of human communication. People facing one another, looking into each other’s eyes, interpreting body language, noting inflection, giving and taking non-verbal cues, interacting with one another in the moment…are behaviors increasingly, frighteningly, diminishing. And since communication, whether incoming or outgoing, is what I would call a basic component of humanity, we are as a result becoming less and less human.

What matters is increasingly lost. Virtue is not even a word or concept in the social vocabulary – it’s an anachronism, out-of-place with life at the speed of text or email traffic. Home and hearth are Hallmark Channel themes. The importance of Family, of doing what’s right, of eschewing wrong, of telling the truth, of adhering to your word, of working hard for an honest day’s wage, of being kind, of self-discipline, of moderation, of humility, of courage, of what used to be common morality…all are for the most part either banned from the new social ether or are relegated to being quaint ideas from the past.

God doesn’t use an iPhone. Many who are tethered to them don’t believe in God anyway. Faith, a moral compass, yardsticks of right and wrong…all have succumbed to technology. Religion is thus also a casualty of technological so-called “progress”.

I admit that I too have been caught by the groundswell. Rather than stick my head out the door to decide what jacket or coat I’ll wear today, I quickly tap my Accuweather app to learn what the temperature is and whether it’ll become warmer or colder. Rather than pick up the phone and call my daughter to ask about some detail of the upcoming grandchild’s birthday party, I send her a text.

Some courageous (and seemingly more happy and content) members of my generation have deliberately eschewed technology. One of my oldest friends still uses a flip phone, and he leaves it on his dresser with a dead battery most of the time. The guy who installed the sprinkler system on our lawn 35 years ago and still services it today doesn’t use email. He carries a cell phone but never answers it. I leave him voicemails but he doesn’t listen to them…he just calls me back when it’s convenient for him to do so.

At first I was annoyed that I couldn’t reach people who had largely disconnected from The Grid, but now I’m starting to appreciate the benefits of lowered blood pressure and appreciation of what IS important that accompanies doing so.

Little by little I hope the pendulum swing towards increasing technological domination of our lives and away from humanity will swing back. It’s happened before in world history. I can hope it will happen again and we’ll all be the better for it.

P.S. I just realized how hypocritical I am for using an iPad to write this post and throwing THESE thoughts out into the social ether as well. Sigh…

Right and Wrong Matter

Morality

One of the greatest casualties of the so-called ‘progressive’ movement and its antecedent, relativism, has been the obfuscation of right and wrong. These used to be obvious. Now, not so much.

Take violent protests for example. Hollywood and the leftist talking heads have created the impression that some violent protests are ok, even justified. Antifa, Occupy Wall Street, the riots at Berkley (choose from the long list)… all are at best excused and at worst condoned because they promote Leftist ends.

Despite the misreporting/outright lie that Far Right violence greatly surpasses Left, violent protest is wrong irrespective of whether it’s engaged in by either side. Yet, you wouldn’t know that by listening to many Hollywood heroes. Madonna, for example, flat out suggested she ought to blow up the White House. Kathy Griffin will forever be remembered for holding up a fake severed Trump head. Snoop Dog wrote a song entitled “Make America Crip Again” with a scene of Trump getting shot.

And the mainstream media and democrat leadership are, to any observer with eyes and ears, no better.

Roll back the clock to the Boomer generation and this kind of rhetoric and behavior was simply…wrong. Not today. It’s all relative, but paraphrasing George Orwell, “Some things are more relative than others.” If it allies with Leftist dogma, it’s right. If it allies with Right (.sic) dogma, it’s wrong, and once again, he who has the biggest megaphone is able to drown out the other side.

As if often the case, someone has said it better than I ever could. In a book titled 1938: A World Vanishing (London: Buchanan & Enright, 1982), Brian Talbot Cleeve contrasted Britain as it was entering World War II and the way it had become in the early 80’s.

“There really was, as nostalgia remembers, an air of greater contentment. Of a sturdier confidence in the future. [People] had a greater stock of moral certainties. Right and wrong were not matters for debate,” he wrote.

He went on to reflect, “To exchange a false morality for no morality at all is not necessarily an exchange for the better. And if, as a survivor of pre-war years, I were to offer an opinion as to one difference between then and now that is for the worse, I would have to choose morality. . . . the morality of believing that there are real and objective standards of behavior, that there are such things as virtues, and such things as vices; that certain things are unarguably good, and others unarguably bad.”

It’s often been noted that democracy carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. The argument, with which I concur, is that what has happened today is the promotion of democratic ideas beyond reason.

“In our modern eagerness to be tolerant, we have come to tolerate things which no society can tolerate and remain healthy. In our understandable anxiety not to set ourselves up as judges, we have come to believe that all judgements are wrong. In our revulsion against hypocrisy and false morality we have abandoned morality itself. And with modest hesitations but firm convictions I submit that this has not made us happier, but much unhappier. We are like men at sea without a compass.”

And what was evident to Cleeve in 1982 is even more evident today.

How can we survive as a civilization if even right and wrong are confused and unclear? I believe the answer is, “We can’t, unless some outside shock brings us all down to earth again, causing us to focus on the basics.”

Right and wrong matter.

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