Reply #70: Technology on its own isn't evil (and a bunch of other thoughts) [View All]

[GliderGuider]

Thanks for prompting a bit of Thursday-morning introspection :-)

Technology itself isn't good or evil, it simply leverages our ability to impact the world around us. In the hands of far-sighted, altruistic, empathic people who understand that they are part of a larger web of life, technology does wonderful things. Of course many people, especially those in control of large amounts of highly developed technology, can't be described in those terms. In addition, many people who use extremely destructive technology like automobiles don't see themselves as selfish, short-sighted or alienated from nature. They see themselves as just living their lives - driving their kids to school and themselves to work, or going to commune with nature in distant unspoiled places. Unfortunately, the consequences of their actions are devastating to the planet regardless of their conscious motivation.

I see the combination of technology, shortsightedness and alienation from nature as an "evil brew" because the consequences that flow from it are so manifestly damaging to non-human life, as well as to the quality of life of those we don't see as "us", part of our tribe.

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There appears to be an irreducible proportion of hunger on the planet - sometimes it's a little bigger, sometimes a bit smaller, but its always there. Economists have a term, "frictional unemployment," meaning the basic level of unemployment that always seem to exist, that the system can't eliminate in a free-functioning state. I think hunger exhibits a similar characteristic - not from voluntary causes as in the case of frictional unemployment, but because the global system is too complex to permit perfectly even distribution of food under any circumstance. elimination of hunger is a nice, altruistic, empathic concept, but it appears to be unrealistic.

I also think that we have the food/population equation backwards. It's not that growing populations need more food, but that food enables populations to grow. In the case of people, since we aren't foragers like other animals, there is a feedback loop between people and food that tends to cause the population to grow fast enough to remain, in the aggregate, near the outer limit of the food supply. This ensures a relatively constant proportion of hunger and malnutrition in the world, even in the presence of rising populations and growing food supplies - the growth on both sides of the equation remains approximately in balance.

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Think about the phrase "preserve the world as we know it" for a moment. Have we ever done that? Is the world today the same world we knew 100 years ago? Ten years ago? Last year? Last week? Yesterday? It is utterly impossible for us to preserve the world as we know it, except in very small domains for very short periods of time. Every year another 80 million people - a new Germany or Egypt - are born. Even with a stable population the world would be changed irretrievably every second by human activity. This happens for big things like species extinctions as well as small things like digging a new garden. Change is literally the only constant, and the less energy we spend mourning the past or hoping for a particular future, the more energy we have for making ethical, altruistic, empathic decisions about what we're doing right now.

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Finally, I've noticed something interesting about human nature in the last few years. I used to write us off as a broken species because of the way our evolved brains and our culture shaped our behaviour in such irredeemably negative ways. However, when I look at individuals rather than large groups (or the species as a whole) I see a very different picture. On an individual basis and in small groups we are perfectly capable of far-sighted, altruistic, empathic behaviour. That realization has pointed me towards the path I'm now taking in the face of the unfolding catastrophe, of working with individuals to help them shift theior perspective on the world to a more holistic and connected level.