Editor’s note: This commentary is by Joseph Gainza, the founder of Vermont Action for Peace and the producer and host of “Gathering Peace” on WGDR and WGDH. He lives in Marshfield.
[A]s I see more people glued to their phones in public, even on delightful sunny days, or walking with their friends, I wonder if the disruptions of technology are outweighing its benefits. We are connected, but what we are connected to is increasingly the products of our own hands and minds. We are spending more and more time with a narrowing field of vision. We are talking to ourselves and shutting out the world from which we come, and which has formed and nourished us throughout our evolutionary history.
Our global village is becoming inbred and isolated. We are threatened by having future generations no longer able to stand in awe and be inspired by natural phenomena. The night sky will be shut out by the artificial light of our mega cities; the quiet stillness of a forest or desert will be denied us as our motors penetrate ever deeper into what was once the wild. Tigers, rhinos, elephants and thousands of other animals and plants which have inhabited our imaginations and populated our stories will be gone, forever. This disenchantment of our earth, of our lives, will be complete.
Viewed from this perspective, the technologies that make possible global connections, are, in effect, cutting us off from the matrix of life of which we are a part, and our interior lives which enable us to live as whole and authentic persons in the world. They also dull our awareness of our need for contemplation of ultimate values and the Divine.
It is not that the connections which technology enables are themselves harmful, indeed they could and sometimes do expand our perceptions of what it means to be human. They enlarge the circle of our empathy and concern. The global movement for human rights is, in part, an outcome of these connections.
Technology, which now dominates our culture and world, is not neutral, and whether it is harmful is not solely dependent on the purposes to which it is put. Technology is answer oriented, we create technology to resolve a
problem or to extend our reach; it is instrumental. A world drenched in technology runs the risk of being answer oriented to the exclusion of “loving the questions.” Most of the things in life which make it worth living, beside not being things, are the questions we struggle with and which can open us to a larger understanding of ourselves and the mysteries of life, love, creativity, friendship, and the limitless expanses of space – outer and inner. Technology tries to erase mystery, which is not the unknowable but the ever expanding horizon of the knowable. If we could ever explain everything, it would not only be the end of history, but the end of what is truly human.
The quest to explain everything is a quest for mastery, for power, for control. We are not masters, we are creatures who evolved with millions of other creatures from a living planet. We are creatures of memory and imagination which enable us to tell the story of the created universe and develop some specie of wisdom. But we know little of the source or destination of love, kindness, humor, tenderness, empathy, compassion or wonder.
We see this narrowing down of our vision of life and ourselves when educators are expected to promote the STEM subjects and allowed to neglect arts and letters. Science, technology, engineering and math are certainly worth our attention, but will they alone tell us how to live on a finite planet, where many cultures, faiths and world views make up the rich soil of the human experience? Will they make us more sensitive to, and care about, the realities of the lives of others and to the other-than-human inhabitants of this fragile and glorious earth? Or can we no longer afford to ask such questions?
We have reached an impasse: many of the environmental, social, economic, political and military tragedies rushing at us have as their common source a spiritual crisis. But the spiritual is suspect in a growing number of corporate, political and media circles and, as with Laplace, more and more people think they “have no need for [the] hypothesis” of God. We are becoming less able to see the unity of the whole as our politics and economics keep pointing out our differences and try to convince us that personal accumulation will bring happiness. Thus far they have brought us despair.
Have we lost hope because we are told there is nothing to have hope in except our ability to grow the economy and to develop fix-it technologies? Have our analytical minds so fragmented the world that “the unity of all being” sounds like the ravings of a charlatan faith healer? Has the word “value” come to mean only what something costs? Do we no longer seek wisdom? It is time to come to the public square with these and similar questions, and to listen to one another intently, with an open mind and heart as we, together, struggle with them.
