The Ethics Of Life And Sex In A Technological Environment

            One of the most common things one hears from older people is how they are concerned about the decline of moral principles in society.  Perhaps this is something one hears in every generation as society evolves and customary behavior changes.  Today, however, this is not simply a casual concern of older people in their conversations, but of many other groups of people as well.  Groups of more conservative-oriented people stake out strong moral principles as a defense against what they perceive as the onslaught of dangerous moral change.  A moral decay that they perceive in the behavior of so many of the people they see around them.  These supposedly fallen people include everyone from teenagers to politicians to Wall Street businesspeople to ordinary everyday people.  There is the sense that something is different this time when people proclaim the decline of morals in society.  This is because customary behavior appears to be so disconnected in so many areas of life from what traditional moral principles teach us. 

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            I know that I have discussed moral behavior in modern technological society in several of my previous articles, but it is something which I feel the need to continue to explore.  It has been much easier for me to diagnose the problems of modern life than to find easy solutions to these problems.

            I was at a philosophy conference a few weeks ago at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.  The focus of the conference was teaching morals in modern education.  In other words, there was a focus on how to teach moral virtues in modern schools in order to combat the perceived decline in moral behavior among students.  The presenters and the audience at this conference were not particularly oriented towards morality in a religious way.  As a matter of fact, they focused on the moral principles of the Greek philosopher Aristotle.  After all, this conference was sponsored, at least in part, by the philosophy department of Northwestern.  For many people at the conference, the perceived moral problems of young people today would diminish considerably, if only they could absorb the virtues taught by Aristotle.  Socrates and Plato were brought into the mix as well.

            All three of these philosophers are wonderful thinkers and among the foundational thinkers of our Western Civilization.  But times have changed significantly since these three were alive.  When Aristotle and Plato wrote, there was a great emphasis on principle-based morality (as there was with the prophets and moral teachers of Western religion).  Moral philosophy was based on the need to develop strongly defined figure principles as a way of psychologically transcending above the organic perishability that surrounded people in traditional living environments.  These principles were an attempt to prevent people from giving in to their lusts and degenerating into animals.

            But in a living environment that is enveloped by a modern technology that is evolving at an accelerated pace, people are becoming increasingly detached from any natural living environments that would threaten organic perishability.  Today the degeneration of the human nature in a person could be in a different direction,  Today, the influences in the living environment lead to a person becoming robotized.  As a result, a very different approach to morality is needed.

            Rather than concentrating on strongly defined transcendent figure moral principles, the focus today should be on establishing a strong contextual grounding for dealing with the larger circumstances in which human actions are carried out in modern technological living environments.  Context-based morality is the use of strong contextual understanding to keep people moral within the sensory distortion from the vacuum and the free-floating figures in the vacuum that are being experienced today.  Technologically-based sensory distortion influences people to behave in ways that they wouldn’t otherwise behave.

            If technological figures are constantly evolving, new reactions from people are constantly being elicited.  Sometimes, these reactions constitute behavior suitable to being judged from a moral dimension.  The context of the reaction becomes as important, if not more important, than the abstract principle by itself.  There is a need to judge the reaction within the new specific situation.

            Yes we still need principles.  But in the old days, the application of principles could shape how we mentally configured our perception of the contexts of life situations.  Now we first really have to see and experience life situations as much as possible free from the judgments of standard moral principles.  And then we have to let the actual problems created by our life situations shape not only the applications of moral principles but even new basic moral principles.  This latter concept is going to appear radical.  Religions as well as the judges in our legal system have always tried to fit applications of standard fixed principles to new situations.  But modern technology has ripple effects throughout human life and human society today, and it is generating so many situations for which there are simply no good precedents.  Not only is it creating new situations, but with the rapid evolution of technology today, it is creating constantly new unprecedented situations.  This is why rigid discrete figure principles are not adequate anymore for arriving at many moral decisions.  Blind application of abstract figure principles in today’s world leads to a person degenerating into a robot.  And the one constant today to all of our specific potential moral choices should be that they keep us bonded to our animal natures and receptive to organic blendable continual stimuli.  Both of these are important for maintain a strong coherent sense of self in a human being and preventing him from becoming a robot.

            Sex may be a perfect area of life to use in order to understand the importance of contextual understanding to making moral decisions.  I have shifted a little bit in my comparative interpretation of sex outside of marriage in traditional societies vs. sex outside of marriage in modern technological societies.  I used to focus on unmarried sex in preliterate societies as a way of reinforcing community bonding and creating a collective imprint from a particular generation. This was in distinction to unmarried sex in modern technological society, which is a way of getting a variety of organic blendable continual stimuli from different bodies as a way of compensating for the lack of variety of organic stimuli in modern living environments.  In most so-called civilized societies, sex was primarily supposed to be reserved for marriage, where one could leave a strong personal imprint with one partner and where one could leave a strong personal imprint with the children one had.  Sex outside of marriage was considered immoral, because it blurred one’s capacity to make and preserve personal imprints, and more important, because a person became less fully human in a transcendent sense, by giving in to animal lusts.

           
            Sex in modern technological society serves a different purpose.  People today aren’t so concerned with being able to preserve imprints in the face of organic perishability.  Today people are concerned with being able to even have the opportunity to make organic imprints in the face of a field of experience that is lacking in organic surfaces.  And people today experience sex not so much as a giving into animal lusts, but rather as a desperate attempt to fight numbness and to use the organic stimuli from sex to fight degenerating into becoming robots.

            This context of sex today is totally different from when Western religious principles were first formulated.  Young people feel a need for sex, at least partly because of sensory distortion, way before they are in a position to be economically independent adults.  And having sex with different bodies gives them the variety of organic stimulation they no longer get in traditional living environments.  Unfortunately, with more casual sex, young people diminish the opportunity to create deeper bonds, to preserve organic imprints with their partners.  But the deeper enemy today is robotization, and the priority is actions to maintain a human balance within today’s living situation.  What should be discussed at some point is if there is a way to put some formal boundaries to casual sex, so that young people can get the opportunity to create some deeper bonds within sexual diversity.  Before the sexual revolution came into full force, adolescents used to go steady.  Perhaps such steady relationships with mature sex can be institutionalized – sort of like early trial marriages.  The one thing for sure is that the traditional purposes of sex are clashing with newly developed modern purposes for sex, and some way has to be developed to reconcile these different needs.

            In today’s world, sensory distortion from modern technology has been undermining the very foundations of our patterns of life, our rhythms of life.  It has created new human life situations and new configurations of human life situations which require radically new responses from people in order that they may survive psychologically.  And with regard to morality, a moral solution to a human life situation cannot be developed today without first taking into account how modern technology has directly or indirectly affected the situation.  Modern technology is so incredibly pervasive in its effects on all aspects of human life.

© 2013 Laurence Mesirow

           

When Machines Displace Humans In Factories and Offices

            I have begun to reevaluate my concept of human organic imprints.  Initially I was focusing too much on pure organic imprints, on those life situations where a person created something or did something unique.  But particularly when one thinks in terms of value added to any work task, the unique style that a person adds to even routine basic tasks should be focused on as an organic imprint component.  This style is intrinsically tied up with a particular work task that the person completes in order to give him work value for his effort.  The basic work task that a person completes leads to the completion of an organic imprint.  The work task of the person is not the same as the total work process which also includes the contribution of tools and machines. 

            To the extent that a human being contributes individual value to a work process, it can be attributed to the amount of the work process that is his unique organic imprint component.  This is in addition to the general human effort the person puts in so he can complete a task according to certain prescribed rules.  Both of these together make up the organic imprint.  Part of what determines the specific parameters of a task has to do with the nature of the tools and machines that help a person to complete a task.  In preliterate and other traditional societies, when people would use basic tools to complete tasks, the amount of value in a given task that could be attributed to human style and effort was considerable.  If a person made his own tools, then his organic imprints accounted for his whole work process.  If, as in many advanced traditional societies, tools were purchased, the amount of a human task that could be attributed to a worker’s organic imprints was still considerable.  A knife, a hoe, a rake, a hammer, an anvil, a saw, and a needle all require the strategy and skill of a human to be effective in the tasks for which they were created.  The tool’s markings are in the service of the human’s organic imprints.

            With the dawn of the industrial revolution, machines were created that increased the quantity and sometimes the quality in the production of a product, that performed tasks that required a strength and endurance that humans were incapable of, and that performed tasks that increased human mobility over longer and longer distances and over shorter and shorter periods of time.  Although the contribution of these machines, that ran more on fossil fuels rather than direct human force, was a lot greater within the total work process than more basic tools that were like appendages to humans, humans were still required to fill in steps that the machines couldn’t do as well as guide the machines in their work operation.  Guiding the machines could take a lot of skill, and man and advanced machine could produce a larger and more complex work output than man and more basic tools.  So factory workers, once unions were created to protect worker value in capitalist societies, could earn good wages that would give them and their families a good life.  The workers were still indispensable, even if the percentage of the work process that was their organic imprint was smaller.

            And then along came more advance machines, computers, robots, and automation.  Work processes required fewer and fewer people to perform smaller and smaller tasks.  Machines started pretty much to work by themselves.  Yes, there was still a need for people to make the machines and to program the machines, although far fewer of the former than in traditional factories where the human component was still so important.  Granted there are still a lot of traditional factories, but automation is the direction of the future.  Automation saves stock holders and management in terms of wages, pension plans and health insurance.  The fact that many workers lose their jobs is irrelevant to the owners and the people in charge.  For the time being, there are still jobs in the service sector like flipping hamburgers at MacDonald’s.  But because such jobs require no special expertise – no strategizing, no craft skills, no risk-taking – that would allow a person to leave some kind of meaningful organic imprint, the salaries are low.

            For many business owners, eliminating jobs to save money is a number one priority.  But apart from eliminating the sources of income for millions of workers, there is also the elimination of an organic grounded community of workers to which a worker can go and find support.  Many workers can’t even find low-paying jobs and end up a part of the permanently unemployed.  So there develops a vacuum of income and a vacuum of communal life experience.

            And then there are robots, some of which have already been created to replicate themselves.  As these robots become more and more sophisticated, not only factory jobs, but many office jobs, could be eliminated.  Humans will appear to management as less efficient and as an obstacle to profits.  And this is true, even though I believe that robots, being non-organic, will never have a fully coherent, grounded sense of self capable of making complex contextual grounded decisions.  Robots, running on discrete stimuli and oriented toward linear figure goals, will never be able to replace humans, although they will be able to displace humans.  This is true of androids, which give the appearance of displaying and dealing with feelings and emotions.  And cyborgs will never have the fully coherent, grounded sense of self of beings that are fully human. 

            Nevertheless, as computers and robots get more and more complex and more capable of doing more and more complex tasks, owners of companies will be able to attempt to replace people higher and higher up the ladder of employment in the company.  Conceivably, we could have a society where the vast majority of people live outside of the main flow of economic activity within their communities.  Where the vast majority of people lack the opportunity to leave their organic imprints directly for economic purposes and where they lack the opportunity to even leave imprints guiding the usage of machines that make the mechanical markings to create products and services for a society.  In a situation like this, an important question arises.  How will the economic benefits created by these advanced computers and robots be distributed to the people who have been left outside the main flow of economic activity?  The fact is that if much of the economic activity in most modern technological societies continues to be in private hands, will these owners of private companies be at all motivated to distribute some of their wealth to people who are structurally prevented from making a living?

            And the fundamental concern is that when people are unable to find outlets for leaving organic imprints in some form through their work, how is a value base to be created for determining what a person is worth and therefore to what kind of economic remuneration the person is to be entitled?  Granted taxes could be raised significantly on big corporations and wealthy individuals, and the government could take over the redistribution of wealth.  But this is socialism, and corporations and wealthy individuals would fight this in every way they could.  And anyway, this still leaves open the question of how to determine the economic worth of an unemployable person.  It is possible that without a framework for work for a large proportion of people, it could simply throw a society into chaos.  Without a structure for remuneration, people will be floating in an economic vacuum where there will be no method to ascribe economic worth to them.  The unemployment of an economic vacuum combined with the sensory distortion of an experiential vacuum would be a dangerous mix.  As people start to grow more and more numb from their multiple disconnections, the situation could lead to a growth in what I have called in the past process-oriented violence.  This is the use of violence as a form of overstimulation to jolt the perpetrator out of a deep sense of numbness.  As can be found in the growing number of mass murderers in the United States.

            Throughout the history of modern humans, there has been a great deal of positive value placed on technological innovation to increase economic prosperity as well as existential protection from organic perishability.  But now technological development has reached a point where it threatens to create economic impoverishment as well as a new kind of existential insecurity created by sensory distortion. 

            If this is where modern technological societies are headed, then we have to start reconsidering fast the fundamental relationship between humans and machines.  People who are creating this displacement technology or buying up this displacement technology are thinking ultimately only of the bottom line – the economic health of a business as an abstract entity – an economic process floating in a vacuum and pretty much divorced from the grounding of human purpose and need.  Machines ideally are created to promote economic prosperity for communities of people and not just small select groups of owners and managers.  When computers, robots and machines begin to displace almost everybody, how will human society configure itself?  This is a nightmare we have to start thinking about now, before it is too late.

© 2013 Laurence Mesirow

How To Act Moral Around Robots

            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

                                                                        

Beyond The Craving For Things

            What is it that spurs the growth of our consumer society more than anything else?  What is it that pushes people in modern technological society to constantly search for new goods to accumulate and new services to experience?  The logical answer would be that as societies develop their industrial base, a certain level of prosperity is generated among significant numbers of people, such that they have the purchasing power to buy a lot of what they need and want.  In other words,  prosperity gives people the opportunity to make themselves economically comfortable.  In addition, advertising stimulates appetites among people so that they will buy many goods and services they might not have thought of purchasing on their own.

            Although this sounds like a reasonable explanation, perhaps there is another less obvious force working here.  It gets back to a less obvious theme that I have explored throughout my column.  As modern industrial societies develop, they fill our fields of experience with overstimulation and with understimulation. The vacuum of understimulation is actually what people seek to attain.  People want to become transcendent figures that use technologically-created environments to rise above the organic perishability of nature and to live a seemingly eternal life in an experiential vacuum.  The tension pockets of overstimulation are created as a result of all the different waste products – noise, crowding, air pollution, soil pollution - that are produced in trying to create a safe vacuum environment.  Also, some tension-pocket stimulation is used to create the kicks that jolt a person out of the numbness that is experienced in a supposedly safe vacuum environment.  Experiences like modern pop music, drugs, motorcycles, free love.

            In our living environment of sensory distortion, people become numb from exposure to vacuums and jaded or emotionally hardened from exposure to tension-pockets.  Neither one of these can be considered a comfortable state of mind.  And yet, unfortunately, they are an intrinsic part of life in a modern technological living environment.  This is where our consumerism comes in.  We purchase goods and services to give us sensory balance in a sensorily distorted world.  If we are experiencing too much numbness from the vacuum, we can purchase kicks services or experiences of overstimulation to jolt us out of our numbness. We can purchase peace services or experiences of understimulation to help us to retreat from the tension pockets of modern technological society waste products.  Services like yoga classes, experiences like vacation retreats.  Or we can purchase pleasurable consumer items of whatever kind in order to use the accumulation of figures as a sort of surrogate grounding.  Things can’t be a real grounding the way a more traditional living environment or natural environment can be.  Our modern manufactured products are just free-floating figures in our modern technological living environment.  But the accumulation of enough of these figures, a collection of these figures, can give a person the illusion of grounding.  Of course, the illusion is stimulated again by each new purchase, but because it is an illusion and not reality, it doesn’t last.  And so another purchase has to be made to keep the illusion alive.  And another.  And another.

            During the course of industrialization, people worked so hard to create a transcendent reality of an eternal vaccum that would help them rise above organic grounding and the dangers of organic perishability. And then, now that they have created such a living environment in modern technological society, they have started to experience the dangerous effects of living too long in a vacuum environment.  The numbness that people experience is a symptom of something much deeper.  In a vacuum, all matter is subject to entropy – the random distribution of atoms throughout the space of the vacuum.  However, entropy operates on a psychological level as well.  People psychologically tend to pull apart, to fall apart mentally, if they stay too long in a vacuum.  And that is why people today are looking for phenomena in which they can find some of the benefits of organic grounding.  Phenomena that are readily available in their fields of experience. An ongoing accumulation of discrete figures can equal a continual flow of organic grounding in the minds of these people.

            But things can only create a temporary illusion of connection and grounding.  Things are inanimate entities that can’t commune with people or provide them with organic grounding.  And all the services that money can buy cannot properly calibrate the mental state of contentment, stimulation and security that a person can get from a connection to organic grounding.  A person can purchase kicks experiences to jolt him out of numbness, or he can buy certain more temporary organic experiences like a good meal, a good massage or a good trip to a seaside beach resort to have a temporary experience of grounding.  But it doesn’t last, and then the person starts to experience the effects of entropy again in the vacuum that he had always thought was the ideal desirable living environment.  There is no doubt that the current epidemic of obesity is caused by a need to find the stimulation and rootedness of grounding in whatever phenomena are available.  Food does not provide a variety of touch stimulation the way a variety of bodies does in free love.  But perhaps we can say that the mouth and the stomach become internal surfaces that people use today for touching elements of the organic world.

            Because a lot of the food that people enjoy eating today is rich in sugar, carbohydrates and fat, people get obese.  So inappropriate eating is not a good solution for people looking for grounding in our sensorily distorted modern technological living environment.  Nor is the general obsession today for purchasing more and more new goods and services.  Consumerism is not the answer to the deep need of people today to find organic grounding for security and stimulation.  The question is what is there left today that can give a person real grounding.

            The answer is that there are still pieces left of traditional living environments and natural environments that are available for our everyday lives.  There are still neighborhoods with older homes as well as forest preserves, national  parks, and other isolated pieces of nature relatively close to home.  These are good places for people to spend time communing with organic grounding.  Filling one’s home with pieces of more traditional traditional furniture in which there is more intricate carving or intricate traditional designs can be a help.  As can plenty of art and wall-hangings.  Grounding can be found in bonding with people in deeper relationships: lovers, family, friends, members of a group or community.  It isn’t as easy to form and maintain such relationships without the template of a traditional living environment, but people have to work at it.  And as I have discussed in previous articles, there is the experiencing of the humanities: the art, music, literature and philosophy of our collective past and present.  Particularly works created in previous eras when people were still more connected to organic grounding.  Such works allow us to mentally enter a different time when people were not floating in an experiential vacuum.  There are also the artistic creations and the oral traditions of those more traditional tribal cultures that still exist.  These cultural expressions show the organic grounding provided within tribal societies.

            All of these can help to act as an antidote to the unsatisfying addiction created by modern consumerism.  I am not trying to imply that nice things and enjoyable services should never be considered an important component of a good life.  However, one has to keep in mind that most of these things and services today are produced by technological processes that are part of the modern technological living environment that creates the loss of organic grounding that pushes people into consumer addictions.  One most always keep sight of what is being lost as a result of the consequences of modern technological production processes and make an effort to connect with whatever sources of organic grounding that remain.  One does not need to become an ascetic in order to fight off consumerism and its effects.  But one does have to try and make sure that the products and services that he obtains and uses truly add to and enrich his life and don’t simply feed an endless unsatisfiable need to fill a void and to minimize sensory distortion.

(c) 2013 Laurence Mesirow