Wednesday, August 03, 2005

What Price Progress?

The machine has become glorified. We worship at the altar of technology. Supposedly labor and time saving devices define and delineate our existence. Where would we be without our computers, cell phones, pocket PCs, DVDs, televisions, game players, etc? Where would we be without our panoply of drugs designed to forestall dying, disguise aging, enhance sexual drive, motivate us, calm us, distract us and pacify us? The list of appliances and products keeps growing; such is the hallmark of what we collectively refer to as progress.

Unfortunately, we pay a high price for this kind of progress. The human intellect has become dulled and dim-witted by the profusion of devices that inundate the senses with insignificant and self-serving information. The market place panders to almost infantile kinds of personal gratification and values the whims and fanciful notions of the individual above all else, including the general good of society. We have created an environment in which we are relentlessly bombarded by information of a purely commercial nature.

As a result of this kind of societal evolution, we are becoming numb to the natural world and to our place in it. This would partially explain why the general population is so unresponsive to the rate at which human activity is degrading the environment we depend upon for survival, and so unable to really modify behavior in order to protect the future of our own children from a devastated planet.

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