In Classical Philosophy, we discussed the myth of progress as seen through the lens of philosophy. Ever abiding questions still haunt philosophical discourse age after age. What is the nature of reality? What is Good? How do we know what we know? Etc... Well, this summer during my British Literature class, I was reading a brief essay in the introduction to the anthology, and I was struck with a queer thought. The essay was discussing the overarching effect societal discontent had on literature. (I searched for the actual citation, but to no avail.) Point being, the century in question (14th-15th-ish)was predominated by thoughts of societal decline. Today, like in ages before us, we teeter on the precipice of uncertainty, and the same apocalyptic rhetoric gaining in popularity today was all the rage hundreds of years ago. Will we pass into the annals of history's paranoids, or will the anxieties of mankind finally come to fruition?
So, here is my perplexity...If progress is a myth and decline is a myth, where does that leave mankind? Are we stuck in a mental quagmire? Do we fail to move at all? Are we at the same point where we started millenniums ago, only differentiated from our ancestors by the quirks of our technologies? Are we going "nowhere" fast? One might be tempted to clap one's hands in exclamation for the fact that we are no worse off than we ever have been or for the many ways we seem better. However, I think this would be a fool-hearted error.
I am disturbed by the possibility of a lack of human motion. To be motionless seems much like what it is to be dead. Einstein's words regarding a "snuffed out candle" come to mind...One giant human invalid, bedridden by its ignorance and self-loathing. Surely, this cannot be the case.
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Everything is in vain..... We are so advanced that we don't need a community unit in order to survive. We can do it all ourselves. We talk with more of our family, but through the computer. Motionless... I think we are all trained that way.... Sitting in School all day...sitting in class all day.... sitting at work all day.... that's all we really know how to do. and then we go to the gym in order to get our physical needs met. We aren't really doing anything productive, pushing papers and working out when we chould have a physical results (besides muscle tone) physical labor will save you!! Some of us must be the drones, I suppose we can't all be genius',( I believe that is the first time I have written "genius'"), what would that be like? What can we do?
ReplyDeleteWhat do you mean by physical results? Do you mean like building a house or something where at the end of the project you have actually produced something useful? I don't think we have advanced so far that we no longer need our community. The nature of the human being has not changed so much as to eradicate our need for a social network. The difference today, I think, is that we have convinced ourselves, wrongly, that we no longer need each other. Honestly, as it gets harder and harder to make it in our culture, I think people will have to go back to relying more heavily on each other. To quote Hill Dawg (a.k.a. Hillary Clinton)"It takes a village."
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