Early
on in writing my articles, I discussed how modern technology had so changed the
nature of human lives, that it was necessary to create some fundamental new
ideas and attitudes in human morality.
After having written this column for a while, I feel it’s time to
revisit this notion. Traditionally,
morality referred to rules of conduct that prevented our human sense of self
from sliding into more savage animalistic tendencies. However, modern technology has so changed the
situations of our lives that the very nature of morality has to shift as
well. So when I discuss morality, I am
referring to rules of conduct that not only prevent our human sense of self
from sliding into more savage animalistic tendencies, but also that prevent our
sense of self from sliding into more android robotic tendencies. And given the accelerating takeover by modern
technology of our modern living environment, it is the android robotic
tendencies with which I am most concerned for today’s human beings.
Ultimately,
none of us at present can erase the modern technological living environment and
the sensory distortion which it brings.
But there are areas of our life in which we can control our interaction
with it. We can voluntarily choose
either to have more primary experience or to have more experiences mediated by
technological devices during our free time.
As it is, more and more of our time in work and study consists of
situations where sophisticated machines, computers or robots control the
principal activity in the situation.
There is less and less opportunity for face time with other people or
surface time with tools, raw materials and books made out of paper. Machines are very important in manufacturing,
in transportation, in farming, in mining, and in making buildings and
roads. Computers are essential today in
offices, education, and research. But
your recreational time is you own. You
can be master or mistress of this time.
And this means you are not obligated to spend your free time in front of
a television, a video game, a computer or a smartphone.
You
can directly engage a forest preserve, a sea shore, a jungle or a
mountain. You can directly connect to a
friend, a lover, your family or a group of people. You can directly immerse yourself in a work
of traditional architecture, a painting or a sculpture. Books have elements of both primary and
mediated experiences but are certainly important components of a well-lived
life.
Sometimes,
primary experiences relate more to the style of one’s participation in a
situation rather than to the content.
Yes, communing with people, with nature, with traditional architecture
and with art are very important ways of receiving the organic blendable
continual stimuli that are so important for giving a person organic cohesion in
our modern technological living environments.
But we can also generate these organic blendable continual stimuli in
ourselves by the way we do things in our everyday lives. I am talking about the importance of breaking
away from routine as much as possible, particularly in our free time. Machines shape their actions in predictable
patterns. To the extent that we fill our
lives with routine and ritual actions, we are, in today’s world, approximating
ourselves to machines. As has been
previously stated, we have little control over the penetrations of machines and
machine patterns of behavior in our work and in our education. This is how these aspects of our lives are
increasingly organized.
But
we do have control over our free time, over our recreational time. And during this time, we can exercise our
capacities for creativity, for spontaneity, for receptivity to randomness, and
for immediacy. When we constantly find
different ways of doing things, we are stimulating organic blendable continual
stimuli in ourselves as a result of engaging the variations in the flow of
experience. When we respond suddenly to
new opportunities for engaging in novel interactions, we are stimulating
organic blendable continual stimuli in ourselves from the novelties in the
experiences. When we are open to
unforeseen situations impacting us, we are stimulating organic blendable
continual stimuli in ourselves as a result of the surprise elements in the
experiences. And when we allow ourselves
to get close to the phenomena with which we are interacting in our daily life
situations, we are stimulating organic blendable continual stimuli in ourselves
as a result of the bonding aspects of such close encounters.
So
the way we use our time away from work and study takes on a new moral
dimension. In the pre-industrial times,
people cherished work routine as well as religious routine in the form of
ritual as a vehicle for focus and for defining themselves, so that they could
rise above the constantly transforming creation and the spontaneity and the
randomness and the enveloping immediacy of more organic environments. People rose above being merely animals
through the cerebral detachment gained through the patterned actions in their
lives. Routine and ritual brought a formal
order to people’s lives and definition to their senses of self. In this way, they were able to balance off
the large amount of organic blendable continual stimuli in their organic living
environments with some bracing defining discrete stimuli.
But
the needs of more traditional people are very different from the needs of
modern technological people. People
today have too much exposure to defined discrete stimuli in the structured
processes of high-level machines and the mediated experiences with computers. And this is why people have to behave
differently from the past in order to maintain their humanity. Strong rigid moral rules will only reinforce
the tendencies toward robotization created as a result of interactions with all
the new modern technology. Rather than
focusing on rigid prescribed determinate moral actions, people today should
create blendable continual guides to experience within which to have creative,
spontaneous, random and immediate experiences.
Rather than focusing on the one right moral answer to a situation,
people today need to acknowledge the varied different possibilities to respond
to a situation, depending on the grounded moral contexts created by the technological
living environments they are living in.
In other words, creativity, spontaneity, randomness and immediacy become
important moral components of human actions in the need today to fight against
sensory distortion and robotization.
This
new orientation can be adequate for dealing with creating an appropriate style
of living for everyday life today. But
it still does not deal with confronting a particular problem situation in human
life. In a situation like this, should
one not try to recur to the application of standard moral principles – strong
free-floating moral figures that exist in the eternity of human vacuum mental space? The problem is that the contexts of meaning
in human relationships today are so different from those of the pre-industrial
past as a result of the sensory distortion created by modern technological
living environments and the tendency to become robotized from the ongoing
interaction of humans with consumer technology devices. And, in addition, the world of experience is
changing so fast as a result of ongoing change in technology from the
proliferation of new apps and new devices.
Traditional
moral principles taken by themselves tend to make a person even more robotic today
than he is from his interaction with modern technology. To make moral decisions today, we have to
focus on uncovering the psychological grounding of a particular problem
situation. This means emphasizing that
situations can be complex and that sometimes there are special circumstances
for overruling or directly modifying a moral principle considered appropriate
for application in a particular situation.
If there is not grounding in the physical aspects of a particular human
situation, we have to focus on uncovering the grounding in the mental aspects
of a particular human situation. This
makes for a much more flexible moral approach. But, at a time when people feel
alienated from traditional religion and traditional morality, because they make
a person feel psychologically boxed in and ultimately robotized, a more
flexible situational approach will help to restore the humanity to a particular
moral situation.
This
doesn’t mean that traditional moral principles have to be thrown out. It just means that one can take the
traditional moral principles as figure starting points that can be embedded and
submerged and modified by the complex grounded context of a particular human
situation in our modern technological living environment.
And
the truth is that modern technology has set the occasion for the development of
many human situations that have little to do with life situations from the
pre-industrial past. Many of them have
to do with breaking traditional moral principles as a means to combat sensory
distortion. Free love, drugs, drinking
and many different potentially dangerous risk-taking activities have to do with
desperate attempts to restore sensory balance and balance to one’s sense of
self. Traditional so-called immoral
activities have to be viewed and judged within the contexts of these modern
sensory backgrounds.
In
dealing with moral questions regarding a human’s interactions with another
human, one always has to take in consideration the template of the living
environment that allows two or more humans to interact. For a long time, people have made the
assumption that abstract virtues like love, trust, courage, accountability and
respect can be implemented in a patterned way independent of the living
environment in which they are expressed.
This assumption was easier to hold during the thousands of years before
the industrial revolution when living environments evolved relatively slowly
and when moral systems were created that were implicitly connected to these
traditional living environments. But now
living environments are evolving fast and this change is directly affecting the
way humans connect to each other. Both
the nature of this evolving and the rate of this evolving have to be taken into
consideration, if we are to develop moral attitudes that allow us to maintain
our human balance during these extraordinary times.
© 2013 Laurence Mesirow
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