It Has Overwhelmed Us Completely
What on earth am I talking about? What is this it?
It is the thing I am using to write this posting, and you are using to read it. It is the result of a whole chain of events that started with the discovery of electricity, strange stuff our senses cannot understand – unless we get hit by a bolt of lightening, which would will probably be the end us – just as its many refinements have also been the end of us – because we cannot resist them, we have accepted them without question – and still refuse to consider their effects on us.
We insist it is only some technology, something that does not affect us at all – when it has completely changed what we are (not who we are). If one of us were magically transported back to 1600 (hardly no time at all) he would die of shock as surely as if we had been transported back ten thousand years to the stone age. He could recognize his fellow humans as being almost like him – but at the same time so different as to be incomprehensible.
If he were in England he would still be able to understand the language, which hadn’t changed very much. He could have understood the necessity for all of the horses, and even perhaps delighted in them – if he was a horse person and didn’t mind all the horse manure. But the slowness of everything would have been incomprehensible. Power would have been limited to animal, water, and wind power – as it had been for thousands of years. The world would have been more natural, more human. The arts would have been flourishing (as in the Renaissance) as they have never done since then.
The only drawback would have been the high death rate – but this was compensated for by the high birth rate – as it always had been. Mortality and decay were a common fact of life, one could see it everywhere – it was not put off and denied, as it is now. People had always lived with it, and learned to cope with it – a common theme of poetry, for example.
But then something happened that has overwhelmed us completely. The world started changing so rapidly we could not keep up with it. Things took over and we became nothing but their means of reproduction and improvement – their reproductive organs, as it were.
Most felt this was an excellent bargain, who doesn’t like being a sex object? Who doesn’t like change and novelty? Who doesn’t like having unlimited amounts of power? The only thing we lost was us as humans – which we were not anymore.
Indeed, most cannot now imagine what being human could be – or once was. They are now much better than human (they feel), and they like being that way. They like being inhuman – to put it bluntly, because they are now something much better.
I myself like technology, I am spending part of the precious time I have remaining to learn programming again ( a very strange world, believe me). I have my own espresso machine, so I can have the most decadent coffee available (something also completely unnatural) – and at one time I had a car, an airplane, and a motorcycle, and have the scars to prove it.
But I am also regaining my humanity in a culture that is not so obsessed with progress. The main business of life is being human – not being a machine.
Wow great post I love it.