Terrorism as a Reaction to Modern Technology

    In my last article, I wrote about a form of behavior that has become a significant vehicle for resistance to the technological transformation of living environments.  Corruption, which was used since the beginning of human history as a vehicle for making intense though disruptive imprints on human fields of experience, is particularly useful for people in more traditional cultures who find that the necessary interaction with modern machines and technological environments in today’s world enforces strictures and rigid patterning on their behavior that they find impossible to tolerate.  Rigidity in behavioral rules imposed by technology compels these people to use moral rules as an area where they can create greater freedom for their behavioral expression.  By bending and breaking moral rules, these particular people who live in more traditional cultures can feel vibrantly alive in the imprints that they make and receive in the situations that they create.  These people have a particularly difficult time dealing with a scarcity of organic surfaces on which to make, preserve, and receive imprints.  Again, I want to emphasize that being technology-resistant in terms of not letting technology model or mirror behavior for them does not mean that technology is not used in the service of corruption.  Certainly it is used a great deal in weapons, as well as on the Internet.  However, it is my thought that the presence of a lot of modern technology in the environment pushes some more traditional people to want to stand apart from being robotized by participating even more in the intense disruptive imprints of corruption.  And as I have pointed out, these traditional people do tend to cluster in certain cultures where corruption today is particularly rampant.

    However, there is a paradox here.  Although corrupt behavior can have very destructive effects on the society in which it exists, it cannot totally destroy the society, or there would be no core moral base against which to measure its deviation from the norm.  Also, corrupt behavior is parasitical on its host society, and no parasite has any desire to kill off its host entirely.  Corrupt people in traditional societies would kill themselves off, if they killed off the society in which they lived.  Such people require victims for their misbehavior.

    This is very different from another group of non-conforming traditional people.  In some traditional societies, there are people who want to totally destroy the modern societies that create the technology that is, in the eyes of these people, overly constricting and patterning of their behavior and that diminishes the number of available organic surfaces for making, receiving, and preserving imprints. Rather than feeling alive by feeding off of and juxtaposing themselves next to an orderly social base of people in a modern technological society, this second kind  of traditional outsider feels alive by attempting to totally destroy the people in the orderly social base.  This second group of traditionalists consists of people that the citizens of modern technological society designate as terrorists.  These terrorists are, in turn, divided into two groups.  There are those terrorists who see themselves as soldiers who carry out ongoing attacks on modern technological societies and thus feel alive through a series of intense highly destructive imprints.  These terrorists are able to temporarily tolerate receiving the imprints from modern technological society as they attempt to destroy it.

    Then there are those terrorists who literally cannot tolerate what they experience as horrible sensory distortion from modern technological society.  These terrorists are uncomfortable with the rigidity and over-patterning of behavior created by the necessity of involvement with modern technological processes, with the lack of of organic surfaces on which to make, preserve and receive imprints, and with the moral freedom demonstrated by many citizens of modern technological society in areas like sex, alcohol and drugs.  As has been discussed before, this morally free behavior of mainstream citizens in technological society with regard to these recreational activities is, in turn, the reaction of these people to sensory distortion. Meanwhile, the influence, both direct and indirect, of this behavior on the second group of terrorists makes living for them even in the same world as this modern social environment intolerable.  Suicide bombers are people who make and preserve one significant imprint on their field of experience in the process of taking their own lives.  They prepare meticulously for death with a powerful surrogate immortality - the suicidal destruction of many other people- and then they die.

    Many people focus on the well-developed afterlife that acts as a significant motivation for Islamic suicide bombers.  But I would like to suggest that the notion of leaving a significant imprint on this world is also important.  This is a period of history when the suicide bombers perceive that modern technology, through its major agent Western society, has contaminated everything and made it impossible for them, the bombers, to leave any other kind of imprint.  Even though Islamic terrorists use modern technology as a means for carrying out their terrorist acts, their dream reverts back to a restoration of medieval Islamic rule.  The dream is a reconfiguration of a pre-modern-technology past.  A past that gives them greater behavioral freedom away from the rigid behavioral obligations of modern machine operation and greater behavioral control in the area of everyday social interaction.  Also, a greater opportunity to leave the kind of intense organic imprints that they are accustomed to leave.

    Granted that suicide bombing is also used as a vehicle of war in the conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims that is going on in the Middle East today.  It is primarily used by the Sunnis against the Shiites.  I would, nevertheless, say that this is a conflict that is intended to decide who is going to be the dominant theological group in creating the medieval Islamic theocracy that will end up ruling over the “decadent” modern technological West.  The war over theological dominance is still influenced by the question of who will be best suited to conquer the West..

    The interpretation I have made in the last two articles on these more extreme discontents of modern technological society has some significant consequences.  There are very large groups of people in this world who are not accommodating themselves very well to technological sensory distortion and the loss of organic surfaces for making, preserving and receiving new organic imprints.  Not only are they not accommodating themselves, but the sensory distortion makes these groups more predisposed to performing acts that are highly destructive to societies in which they live.  It is true that people who fall into the corrupt category are not directly out to destroy their host societies.  But they do enfeeble these societies and even to some extent paralyze them.  Ordinary citizens are afraid to go out at night as a result of crime.  Although they do not directly destroy a society, corrupt people damage the spirit of their society.

    If one major reason for the growth in corruption and/or terrorism in certain societies today relates to rapid technological change, then conventional attempts to get rid of these problems with police and military methods may not work completely.  Rather than simply a criminal conflict or a religious war, what we are dealing with today is an experiential war, a war about who has the right to determine the way we experience and engage the world around us.

    Both the corrupt people and the terrorists represent values on the surface that civilized people cannot permit to take over in their fields of experience.  And yet underneath these values, on one level, there exist unusually strong sensitivities to harmful situations that are affecting the living environments in which all of us dwell.  Both of these groups come from more traditional societies that, to a greater or lesser extent, are outside of the mainstream of technological innovation that is taking over the world.  However, in the case of corrupt drug traffickers, they are intimately intertwined with those people in modern technological societies that are consumers of drugs.  I have previously discussed how the use of drugs is a vehicle for dealing with sensory distortion.

    And perhaps we have become strangely intertwined with the terrorists as well.  In our ongoing war with the terrorists, which is not fought like a conventional war and doesn’t seem to have the possibility to end like a conventional war, we have found a form of deadly corrosive overstimulation to pull us out of the numbness of our vacuum experiential base.  Articles in the newspapers and searches in public buildings and at airports keep us extremely alert and abrasively alive.

    In my opinion, if we want to rid ourselves of both of these groups, we have to develop a new way of assessing what they truly represent.  If I am right, some of their underlying sensitivities and concerns are simply more extreme versions of things that more mainstream people are experiencing as well.  Maybe only by dealing with the deeper problems do we have any chance of dealing effectively with corruption and terrorism.

© 2012 Laurence Mesirow

The Effects of Modern Technology on Corruption in Developing Countries

Cause and effect relationships can sometimes be difficult to establish with certainty. This is particularly true when a particular effect has several causes that converge to produce it. On the other hand, in this series of articles, I have been focused on the different effects produced by one pair of connected causes: modern technology and modern technological environments. And I have focused on these causes as if they were the only major causes producing all the different effects being discussed. In fact, each different effect I discuss would have a different bundle of causes - some short-term, some long-term, some immediate and some remote. To try and enumerate all the causes for each effect would lead to diluting the focus I am trying to create on how modern technology and modern technological environments can have a major influence on so many disparate situations within the human field of experience.

I bring all this up now, because I am about to suggest some connections between modern technology and other displays of human behavior that, on the suface, may not appear obvious at all. In the cases under discussion, I do not presume that modern technology is the initial cause of the behavior, but rather that it exacerbates a pre-existing pattern of behavior that is somehow accepted by the culture in which it appears, even if not formally approved.

Corruption is a problem that has been surging over the last few decades in many developing countries. The people involved deal with a whole range of different activities. Among these are shady business deals involving bribes and kickbacks; the production, transport and marketing of drugs; kidnapping; and human trafficking. With regard to human trafficking, people who believe that slavery has been pretty much eliminated in our modern enlightened world should think again.

I want to explore corruption within the context of my theories on imprints. Over the years, one interesting idea that has been suggested is a correlation between creativity and corruption. Although one might think that these are two very different phenomena, both deal with reconfiguring established realities. Creativity focuses on reconfiguring and recombining the components of the sensory and cognitive realities, while corruption focuses on reconfiguring and recombining the components of the moral reality - the established moral rules of a society.

A creative approach to the world deals, to a great extent, with continual stimuli and with merging and blending grounded phenomena . This is very different from the more mechanistic approach of modern technology, which focuses principally on discrete stimuli and on well-delineated figures. Modern technology is more in sync with traditional moral rules which were means by which people gave themselves self-definition in the more undifferentiating traditional organic living environments in which they used to dwell. I have previously discussed how strict applications of traditional moralities in modern technological environments tend to make people more robotic. What I haven’t explored is the possibility that some cultures mold people in such a way that they are more resistant and antagonistic to robotizing influences.

There are cultures where most people like to recreate their world every day of their lives. These people love primary experiences, love the opportunity to make and receive new imprints to feel alive, and see excessive routine and order as an obstacle to these purposes. These people may include innovators in the humanities, but they do not tend to be innovators in the creation of technological devices that take away their opportunities to be innovative in their daily flow of life activity. Although they utilize the technology provided them as members of the 21^st century, these people continue with their strong community and family relationships and their strong direct engagement with the external world in general. So there is an implicit conflict between the increasing mediation of human experience provided by advances in technology on the one hand, and the desire of these people for a more traditional organic involvement with their fields of experience on the other hand. In other words, people from these more traditional cultures tend to be more disconnected from the modern technological environments that have been given them.

One reaction particular to them is to reinforce their creative approach to life in as many different ways as possible. And here I am not talking about creating art or literature or music necessarily. A lot of people aren’t artistic in this sense. However, technological processes implicitly enforce certain more rigid patterns on human behavior, as people become more and more involved with modern machines. Many people from more traditional societies rebel against these increasing behavioral restraints from technology by finding other opportunities for more open behavior that are not so rigidly controlled by established rules. In public society, this can involve breaking and bending legal rules through corrupt interactions between people both in the government and in the private sector. Corrupt practices like bribes, kickbacks and illegal businesses not only allow people to make easy money, but they also allow them to reinforce their human essence by operating outside of established rigid legal rules that seem to mimic the rigid patterns for conduct of machines, computers and robots. In a certain way, corruption becomes a vehicle for liberation from what some of these more traditional people perceive as an overly rigid constraining mechanical order.

Corruption also creates the opportunity for making and receiving meaningful imprints on the organic surfaces of other people. At a time when modern technological environments provide few available organic experiential surfaces on which to make, preserve and receive meaningful organic imprints, corrupt practices allow for doing this through disruptive damaging imprints. Corruption is an imprint that can be left in spite of technological sensory distortion.

Certainly corruption has been around in human culture since way before the industrial revolution, let alone the computer revolution. Corruption has been a means for people to make and receive very intense although disruptive and damaging imprints long before the development of modern technology. For these people, the ability to bend and break established social and legal rules with impunity gave them an intense charge from the risk involved as well as a high from the sense of entitlement involved.

But now there is the added dimension that modern technology creates a social and physical environment where the opportunities for freer more creative behavior, for a rich vibrant life, and for meaningful imprints are greatly diminished in comparison with pre-industrial society. For people in more traditional societies, corruption takes on a greater importance as one of the few outlets available to live a more organic life.

Some of my readers may interpret this analysis as a form of support for corrupt behavior, a form of approval for immoral behavior. I would like to assure people that I do not approve of corrupt behavior, and that I would rather that people involve themselves in more moral forms of vibrant creative behavior like constructive interactions with other people in dates, encounters, celebrations and parties and like participation in the humanities. Or simply try to infuse creativity and vibrance in everyday life by constantly finding ways to do routine activities in different ways. That being said, I do accept the fact that corruption has played an integral role since the beginning of human society for the reasons I have stated and that it has a special role for more traditional societies living in modern technological environments.

Obviously, the effects of the corruption of these traditional cultures spill over into cultures that have fully embraced modern technology and propelled them forward. The freedom obtained by drug production and marketing in more traditional societies is a freedom that helps people in modern technological societies defend themselves against technological sensory distortion through the destructive consumption of drugs (although drug consumption has spread through drug producing cultures as well, providing another means to help these cultures deal with their own technological sensory distortion). But to the extent that a concerted effort is made to diminish drug consumption both in developed and developing countries, there will also have to be a focus on some of these more subtle causes behind the rise of the illegal drug business. And there will have to be a greater understanding of the role corruption, in general, plays today in more traditional societies.

© 2012 Laurence Mesirow

Losing One’s True Path with a Global Positioning System

I have written a lot recently about the form that moral rules have to take in contemporary technological society in order to help people maintain their human essence.  I have also written about two ways that moral living environments can be created, in order to protect people from the dangers of technologically-based sensory distortion: through grounded social groups and through grounded mental organic entities like the humanities.  And although some content for what to morally avoid to protect our human essence has been implied by my discussions of the consequences of the use of modern technology, there has been relatively little direct discussion of the ways in which people should limit certain activities in order to maintain an organic human sense of self.

Now that we know that the use of modern technology does have some negative long-term consequences, it is time for individuals to reflect on their own personal uses of modern technology and to minimize use wherever possible.  I don’t have a formula for when to use and when not to use modern technology. I don’t have a formula for which  programs and which apps one should use on one’s computer or smart phone.  I do know that people should stop thinking about always using every available labor-saving device and should stop thinking about always using every major device to create more frictionless mediated communication with other human beings.  And people should start finding ways to make their own life narratives more rich and vibrant with more primary experience, rather than to sit like vegetables in front of movie screens, television screens or computer screens and watch the life narratives of other people.

Labor-saving devices have been created in order to free people from everything from supposedly exhausting back-breaking work to supposedly boring routine chores.  The problem is that traditional work outlets have been an important way we have connected with the external world to make and preserve imprints.  As more and more traditional work outlets have been defined as either exhausting or boring, there have been fewer and fewer channels to make and preserve meaningful imprints on the surfaces of our fields of experience and so to feel fully alive and to prepare for death.  Supposedly labor-saving devices free up time, energy, and state of mind to use in more meaningful work and more meaningful leisure activities.  And yet, for most people, modern technology not only frees up their time, energy and state of mind, but then it superimposes alternate technology-based worlds where people have vegetative mind-numbing work and vegetative spectator leisure activities.  Technology increasingly not only frees people from supposedly exhausting back-breaking work and supposedly boring routine chores, but from all meaningful engagement with the external world.

Modern technology creates effortless communication from a distance through computer e-mails, cell phone calls, texting, Skype, Yahoo Messenger, etc.  And yet the more people are seduced by modern technology to communicate at a distance, the less likely they are to have meaningful primary experiences that connect them to the external world through bonded human relationships.  It is just not the same to engage in a conversation through text messages as it is through face-to-face conversations.  But as people engage in more and more technological processes through all of their different technological devices, they gradually lose their capacity to feel as stimulated by organic continual stimuli.  People become primed to receive more and more technological discrete stimuli.

In order to retain their human essence, people have got to gradually find the self-discipline to start turning off their televisions, their computers and their smartphones, and to start   using all of these modern technological devices less and less.  People have to stop being more passive spectators of life and have to find ways to engage the world directly.  This means making a point of making time for direct social interaction with people after school and after work.  Ideally, it would mean finding ways of introducing more “face time” into the modern office, so that people don’t have to spend all their time sitting in front of a computer.

And people have to stop finding ways to use more and more apps that put order and predictability in their lives.  With more and more apps, people lose more and more the flavor and the adventure that comes with a more friction-filled life narrative.  Apps remove people from primary experience.  They remove people from the opportunities created by chance or luck.  One app that people love is the Global Positioning System.  With this app, people always know where they are in a geographic sense, and they never have to experience getting lost.  But what is wrong with getting lost?  Then one has to grapple with the problem in the external world.  One has to look at his surroundings and figure out where he is in relation to street signs and landmarks on his route.  Or one can ask directions and perhaps strike up a conversation with some interesting people who can tell him where there is a good restaurant in the neighborhood.  Such experiences leave a meaningful imprint on a person and make his life more rich and vibrant.  Do we always want to make life more simple and streamlined?

If everything is organized for us and done for us by computer programs and by apps, where is the opportunity to receive imprints directly from the external world with its random occurrences that require our spontaneous responses?  How do we get to involve ourselves in situations that allow us to receive and to make the imprints that allow us to feel fully alive?  How do we get to engage our fields of experience in such a way that we can preserve the imprints that we make?

The Global Positioning System gives people predictable security at the price of a loss of adventure, a loss of engagement with the world, and a loss of an opportunity to feel more richly alive.  For those people for whom such losses would be meaningful, now is the time to minimize the use of modern technology to what is necessary for functioning within modern society.  It may not be easy to withdraw from dependencies that have developed, because people have become reconfigured to feel stimulated primarily from the discrete stimuli of technology.  It is like trying to break an addiction.  Modern technology has become, to a great extent, like a drug.  However, unlike a drug, people today are only going to be able to partially withdraw from technology, unless they go and live on a desert island far away from contemporary society.  Modern technology is too much a part of all of our lives.  This partial withdrawal that I am discussing will be difficult.  Nevertheless, the rewards of feeling more fully alive and more fully human will make the painful transition worth it.

© 2012 Laurence Mesirow

Helping to Keep Our Lives Together with Concerts, Plays, and Art Exhibits

As the pressure to be successful in different sectors of technological research and development builds in the United States and other modern industrial countries, the emphasis on producing more and more scientists and engineers becomes an increasingly large factor in the educational strategies of these countries.  More and more money is given to science and engineering  programs in universities, and students are encouraged to enter these programs with the knowledge that lucrative salaries await them upon the termination of their studies.  In the United States, foreign students who finish these programs are frequently encouraged to stay in the States as a result of the good jobs that they are offered.  To those countries that can create large sectors based on new cutting-edge technologies go the economic rewards that come from being able to monetize these creations. And monetizing is the result of being able to legally protect and control these new technologies through patents.  In other words, many strong economies today are, to a significant degree, based on intellectual property and technological know-how.

Yes, there are many countries that are also doing well economically from raw materials.  Particularly oil-producing countries.  But countries can run out of oil.  And  raw materials in general can fluctuate in price considerably, so that plans for economic development can be undermined by falling prices for the raw materials being marketed.

Also, there are other Third World countries that are doing well from cheap manufacturing.  The problem here is that countries compete against one another to see who can offer multinational companies the cheapest wages and the fewest environmental controls.  So workers get paid poorly and the living environment gets poisoned.  And multinationals can suddenly leave one country to go to another country that offers still cheaper wages.  Workers in these situations are extremely vulnerable to market forces.

So an important paradigm for economic strength and stability today in modern societies is high tech.  Modern industrial societies know this and honor those people in the educational community who can advance the aims of modern technology.  Obviously, the people who can utilize the technology for practical economic purposes can potentially reap the greatest rewards.  In general, technological expertise plays an increasingly important role in modern economies.

As a result of this growing emphasis, math and science are being promoted in modern education, while other subjects are diminishing in importance.  American public schools are dropping courses in music and art as a result of the financial crisis.  Universities are cutting classes in various fields of the humanities.  Fewer students do graduate work in the humanities, because there are fewer teaching positions in which to find work after graduation.  There is a general feeling that students should focus on practical professions.  It is these professions that will meet the needs of an economy in serious trouble and that will stimulate the economy back to life.  And although many university students go into business, science and engineering students are the people who can give a country the edge in new profitable industries.

It is not just the educational system where the humanities are in trouble.  Many fine cultural institutions like art museums and symphony orchestras are finding it difficult to survive in the United States, at a time when people are more interested in techno-pop culture than traditional cultural forms.  Sensory distortion has created more and more people who have lost their sensitivity to traditional cultural production in the humanities.  Lower attendance at cultural events means a need for higher ticket prices and greater subsidies.  But many symphony orchestras have disappeared and many art museums have become so expensive they are beyond the reach of many middle class people.  And many people in American government feel that government should have the right to cut funding to those groups in the humanities that don’t reflect their views.

Yet it is precisely when modern industrial countries like the United States are going through so much turmoil as a result of technological change, that some people have to continue to support the humanities as a defense against being robotized.  It is interesting, because the humanities used to represent a refinement of human cultural production that led to a transcendence over being swallowed up by the organic fields of experience in traditional tribal and peasant cultures.  An explosion of production in the humanities was part of the Renaissance that brought Europe out of the Middle Ages.  At that point, the humanities were necessary to help create self-definition in the individual.  Today the humanities are necessary as a surrogate mental organic entity to give people psychological cohesion and organic grounding in an environment of technological sensory distortion.  In particular, we need to preserve the cultural production of people who created, when there was still grounding in more organic living environments.

To a great extent, I have focused in most of my articles on diagnosing the effects of technology on modern living environments and human behavior by breaking down many of the problems I perceive into component parts.  A lot of philosophy as well as social science deals with perceiving phenomena in terms of their analyzed components.

But in order to try and find some solutions today to the problems created by modern technology, we have to fortify and cultivate synthesized organic mental wholes that have been developed in the past, and that today can be used for new purposes in order to keep the human essence alive in humans.  The humanities as a tradition are definitely one of those synthesized organic mental entities that can serve to fortify and cultivate a balanced human essence in people, at a time when there are so many elements in society that are causing us to crumble as organic humans and to become reconstituted as robots or androids.  It is truly ironic that one of the main smartphones today is called an Android.  In our interaction with it, it becomes a vehicle by which we are subly molded to think in sharply discrete robotic categories of thought.

At any rate, many solutions to our problems with technological influence today will come from complex synthetic wholes as opposed to basic analyzed components.  These complex synthetic wholes are not really complete solutions to the fundamental problems today.  They do not actually eliminate the sensory distortion that most people today have to live with in the modern technological environments that predominate as living environments.  But for those people who are stuck in modern technological living environments, creating surrogate living environments for our mental world, that can at least partly occupy our time, energy and state of mind, can act as a means to partly maintain our human balance in the face of so many harmful influences.

So even though modern technological societies de-emphasize the humanities, because the humanities don’t seem relevant to the race for technological and ultimately economic and political dominance, the humanities are, nevertheless, extremely important for psychological survival.  Listening to the present wisdom about what is a more desirable education, which means excluding any significant psychological balance that comes from the humanities, will only put people on the road to robotic transformation.  It is very important that students today be taught to appreciate the art, music, literature, theater, history and philosophy of those times when people were still somewhat more organically grounded in their living environments.  Students can be stimulated by the organic complexity of the synthesized wholes of these works in the humanities, and in so doing, be helped to maintain their own psychological human coherence.

I will continue in this column to analyze the problems that I perceive in today’s modern technological environment, but I am also interested in focusing on what could be designated as surrogate organic solutions to the sensory distortion with which people have to live today.  I am interested in the ways that people can resynthesize a more organic living environment, if nothing else, at least in their minds.  By being able to dwell partly in mental organic grounding, they will be able to survive as balanced humans and continue to be able to make, preserve and receive organic imprints in at least one area of their lives.

c 2012 Laurence Mesirow

A Morality for Humans in a Field of Robots

Recently, I have discussed the need for developing a morality based on more contextual blendable rules.  Such rules would reflect the need to act in a more organic way as a defense against all the technologically-caused sensory distortion in our living environment and the rapid change over time of our living environment as a result of rapid technological change.  The rapid technological change creates constantly evolving life situations with constantly evolving sensory distortion and a need for constantly evolving postures and rules to deal with these experiences.   The nature of the boundaries of our moral rules and actions are as important as the content.  Today we need more fuzzy boundaries for many of our rules to deal with these evolving life situations in a more flexible way.  These fuzzy boundaries of rules reflect the more fuzzy blendable boundaries we want to promote in ourselves to survive the evolving sensory distortion.  As more fuzzy organic beings, our sense of self is not defined as much by a very specific rigid discrete self-definition, but rather by a more flowing continual self-coherence.  Through our words, our actions, our beings, we need to will a more organic presence for ourselves.  Although we still need some basic well-defined moral rules, too many rigid, discrete, moral rules will cause us to become like all the angular technological machinery that surrounds us with its choppy discrete rhythms and processes.  Within the context of our modern technological living environments, these rigid moral rules would contribute to making us robots.  Again, I want to emphasize that the use of contextual blendable rules does not mean bending or breaking rules in an opportunistic immoral way.  It means the ability to be flexible and to adjust rules to survive rapidly changing and potentially harmful environmental circumstances.

        We need a morality that supports our organic coherence.  This means supporting those situations that create an experiential organic grounding within ourselves.  This means creating more continual blendable situations in our external environment, situations that can exist in spite of all the technological sensory distortion.  Such situations include strong family relationships,  committed sexual relationships, and committed community interactions and activities.  We need people holding together their human essence through continual explorations in all the categories of the humanities, a mental area of creation and intellectual exploration with an emphasis on more intuitive truths that help people to bond with others.


Modern technology puts a wedge between people.  Many of you will ask how that is possible with all the new forms of communication available through technology: e-mails, texting, teleconferencing, Facebook, Skype, Yahoo Messenger……..the list just goes on and on.  But all of these are mediated attenuated forms of communication that displace the kind of face-to-face interaction that leads to meaningful organic bonding.  If anything, technological communication reinforces our sense of isolation.  It reinforces the sharp discrete boundaries in us of robots.

So if technology reinforces robotic isolation, we must make moral decisions to reinforce our humanity with surrogate organic grounding.  If the boat of humanity is tipping over to one side as a result of excessive immersion in technological experience, we must make a moral commitment to put weight on the side of the boat where we can get more organic experience in order to keep the boat afloat.

If we can’t have as much organic stimulation in our external physical living environment as we would like, then we must dwell in the organic stimulation we generate amongst ourselves and in the complex mental entities in which we dwell in our heads.  This is a time when most industrial countries are pushing science and engineering as vehicles for giving them power.  Science and engineering are the intellectual careers that are given honor.  There are fewer and fewer courses in the humanities, as careers in the humanities are increasingly considered impractical and irrelevant.  Who has time to read great classics reflectively and to think anymore, when there is so much seductive technological activity at our fingertips.  But the humanities get us in touch with deeper human truths that allow us to connect more deeply with the people around us.  The humanities, which include artistic and philosophical works created in more traditional organic times, are a surrogate mental traditional organic world that can help us to survive sensory distortion from technological living environments.  It becomes a moral decision, in order to maintain our humanity, to spend meaningful time reading serious fiction and essays, looking at and reflecting on serious works of art, and listening to serious music.  This activity creates a protection against the crumbling apart of our sense of self and our consciousness from the isolation we experience as a result of all the technological media that surround us.  Movies, television, computers, smart phones, video games, all put us in a vacuum where we become numb to ourselves.

And when we become numb to our senses of self, we become vulnerable to technological control by other people.  I am afraid that at some point, people in their technological isolation and their robot-like mentalities will lose their independence as organic entities.  Many corporations today treat their workers like robots who have little down time and are on call 24/7.  Where is the moral outcry from traditional sources of moral protection?

In previous articles, I have discussed the concept of a surrogate immortality as a means to have something live on from us, after we die.  The surrogate immortality consists of all the meaningful imprints we have both made and preserved on the surfaces of the field of experience around us: children, businesses, works of art, trees we have planted, buildings we have erected, sporting titles we have won, all the memories we have left in other people’s minds.  Just as we need a surrogate immortality to prepare for death, so we now need surrogate mental organic  entities to create mental living environments where we can feel fully alive as organic human beings.  Yes, some of us live close to patches of nature, and that is wonderful.  However, few people today have intense interactions with organic environments.  Few people feel a part of an organic ecosystem that in turn stimulates them to feel at one with themselves.

So it is my belief that people today have to work at staying organic mammalian human beings and this involves focusing on organic grounded interactions with other people and organic grounded mental interactions with themselves.  The world of the humanities creates a surrogate mental grounded organic entity for us that allows us to stimulate the organic aspects of ourself through the imprints we receive from already created works, through the imprints we can make from the comments we can make on these works in conversations with others and through the works that we are stimulated to create by ourselves.  Immersion in the mental activity generated by the humanities is like doing exercise for the organic aspects of our senses of self.  It is a way of pushing out all the vacuum and static stimuli from our modern technological living environments that increasingly are making people more and more robotized.

The humanities are one very important way of keeping people in a mental state that allows them to defend themselves against their gradual transformation into robots.  The humanities are not a sharply defined place of existence and they involve many different kinds of phenomena.  They are complex, but we need complex mental organic entities to create surrogate mental organic fields of experience for us. These fields of experience can act as surrogate organic grounding and help us fight the effects of sensory distortion in our modern technological living environments.

c 2012 Laurence Mesirow

The Moral Consequences of Television, Video Games and Smartphones

In my last article, I started to explore a little the changes in the approach to morality that may have to take place today in order for people to maintain their human essence in the face of modern technological living environments filled with rapid technological change.  There is a basic kind of change that we should consider in order to develop appropriate moral postures for today.  Just as the content in our living environments is dramatically different from the periods of history when most modern religions were created, so we may need some different content in our moral rules today.  There are not too many fully developed analogies from traditional living environments that we can use for developing proper moral postures in order to maintain our humanity in sensorily distorted technological living environments.  There are no fully developed analogies from traditional living environments that we can use for developing proper moral postures to movies, television, radio, computers, smart phones and robots as technological entities.  The revelations from traditional religions proclaim eternal application, but the living environment is the template for human interaction, and different living environments trigger very different kinds of behavior.  Some of the kinds of behavior generated from technological environments have uniquely destructive aspects.  There is a moral dimension to sitting hour after hour in front of a television, if it results in a person’s loss of capacity to be with himself and to develop a rich interior life.  There is a moral dimension to a child sitting hour after hour with a video game, if it means the child never develops an appreciation for reading books and means that the child never develops the capacity for critical thinking.  There is a moral dimension to the extensive use of a smartphone by a teenager, if it results in his loss of capacity to properly develop and maintain face-to-face social relationships.

Modern technology has created life situations that the founders of traditional religions could never have imagined.  Not only do technological environments trigger kinds of behavior, as a result of sensory distortion, that traditional environments never did, but computers, smartphones and robots generate human interactions with them, as a result of unique configurations of stimuli, that are very different from human interactions with other animals, with plants and with geological and climatological phenomena.  And yet we continue to expand the technological environment and to fill it with more and more complex technological entites that are supposed to serve the greater human need.

What are some of the categories of human needs within the greater human need that technology is supposed to serve?  One is to make human life easier, more frictionless, as a part of a greater sense of transcendent control over the living environment.  This means diminishing hard physical work, diminishing drudge housework, and diminishing drudge paper work in an office.  But as more and more categories of human work get taken over by machines, there is less and less experiential connection between people and their living environments.  People end up floating in an experiential vacuum along with all the complex technological entities.  They become numb from the vacuum and jaded from knocking into all the clusters of other free-floating figures in the vacuum.  To survive, they become hardened like a robot.  And that means losing something of their human essence.

So in certain ways, to make life easier is actually to make life as a balanced human more difficult.  And people have to develop moral postures to help them in dealing in small ways with the threats to their humanity.

One category of human needs relates to creating alternate worlds that appear eternal, because they are free from organic perishability.  This includes all the modern consumer technology that gives people a sense of control over their living environment by creating shrunken alternate worlds.  Immersing oneself in the fields of experience created by these technological entities gives one a true sense of being able to live for eternity.  But in living in these alternate worlds, one has less and less time to make and preserve imprints on the surfaces of the primary experience world and so to prepare for death with a proper surrogate immortality.  One lives deluded in a false experiential world of eternity, until one is about to die and he realizes that he has left a minimum of meaningful imprints as a realistic and solid preparation for death.

So in certain ways, to make life seemingly more eternal, actualy makes it more vulnerably mortal.  The eternity on a movie screen, a tv screen, a computer screen and a smartphone screen is an illusion.

Another category of human needs relates to creating medicines through modern technology as well as machines that prolong human life.  This includes medicines that help to keep people alive from chronic health problems like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, cancer, AIDS, Parkinson’s disease, ALS and Alzheimer’s.  It includes machines to keep people alive and functioning like dialysis machines, breathing machines and prosthetic limbs.

This is a very noble category of technology that would appear to have only positive consequences.  However, two concerns must be noted.  Keeping more and more people alive longer and longer means contributing to the overpopulation on our planet that not only puts our planet at risk as a living environment, because of pollution and diminishing non-renewable resources, but that also creates increasing sensory distortion, which reduces the quality of our lives.  Sensory distortion makes it more difficult to make and receive the imprints that help us feel alive as well as to preserve the imprints that help us prepare for death.  It is not only the physical damage to our planet that could make it unlivable.  It is also very much the sensory distortion.

We are in a moral bind.  Certainly doctors and scientists are going to continue to do everything that they can to lengthen human life and to increase the biological quality of human life.  This is based on our fundamental belief in most of the world  in the dignity of each human life.  And yet there is a question of what does it mean to live longer and with continued high functionality, while at the same time living with diminished quality of experience.  And here I am not talking about the diminished quality of experience that comes from limitations imposed by a health problem.  I am talking about the limitations imposed by the diminished quality of experience imposed by the external environment.  When it gets too bad, the sensory distortion can contribute to impoverishing life experience.

This leads us to the possibilities created by the next category of human needs.  There is one category of creating an alternate “eternal” world that would appear to be almost completely positive.  This is the category of space travel both to explore other galaxies and solar systems and perhaps to find other planets to which to move, should the planet earth become too physically damaged, too overpopulated and/or too sensorily distorted.  Space travel could be the key to preserving the human imprint, if not for eternity, at least for as long as our universe exists.

If keeping the human essence alive can be considered an important moral principle, at a time when the destruction of human grounding on the present planet which humans inhabit is a real possibility, then space exploration and travel must be considered a moral use of technology.

However, even within space travel, humans must examine different aspects in order to develop appropriate moral postures.  All this is new.  Analogies from the examples given in traditional religious texts may hold in some cases, but, in other cases, they will be tenuous at best.

It is so important that humans drop their uncritical acceptance of every new technological device or application that comes on the market and start developing new moral criteria for dealing with them.  If anything, some serious critical thinking has to be done on an ongoing basis to deal with the accelerating pace of technological development.  We need people who can understand the nuances and consequences of different technological developments, and who can form appropriate judgments as to the circumstances for the use of a given development in technology, if at all.

c 2012 Laurence Mesirow

Maintaining Our Humanity In A Technological World

I have seen my role in writing this column as someone who is trying to push back a little against an overwhelming tide of transformation of the human living environment  and of the people inhabiting that living environment.  In order to push back, I have made stark contrasts between the more natural organic living environments in which traditional cultures flourished and the modern technological environments, which I perceive as creating terrible sensory distortion.  This sensory distortion has significant ramifications in terms of diffuse discomfort in the fields of experience in which we live and in terms of our own capacity to make meaningful imprints to feel alive and to prepare for death.  It affects our capacity to form a coherent sense of self and to find surfaces in our field of experience on which we can leave imprints.

So I try to push back a little against this rush of change and indirectly hold up a more purely natural life style as a way for people to defend themselves against the harmful effects of this change.  In truth, I know that there were and there are many harmful aspects of living this more natural or traditional life.  If not, why would people have tried to evolve out of it?  I have spoken often of the vulnerability to perishability in such natural environments.  However, because nature is not the major problem today, I have focused more on the dangers of modern technology, particularly because most people take modern technology for granted and look on it anyway as something that is unquestionably positive.

In trying to push back, I have glossed over the fact that we have gradually evolved from more traditional  living environments to modern technological living environments over a long period of time.  I have had discussions with some people who are attuned to my way of  thinking, about whether perhaps there has been a point in time along the flow of technological evolution in different countries when there was a proper or, at least, adequate balance between nature and technology.  A point in time that could be considered an appropriate model for people to look to today as a period when the living environment could have been considered very desirable.

Many Americans consider the 1950’s in the United States to have been such a time of balance.  It was a time when the industrial revolution had reached a point in development where most American lives were made comfortable and secure by technology.  And yet the technology had not so taken over the living environment through the computer revolution as to create an imperfect substitute reality for individuals.  Yes there was radio and television, but there were only a few channels for television.  Popular programs like “I Love Lucy” were almost communal experiences, because everybody watched them at the same time.  The next day, after the airing of a program, people would talk about it, as if they had attended a play together.  Apart from this electronic programming, people lived pretty much in the external sensory world.  They read real hard-copy newspapers and books instead of computer screens or e-books, wrote by hand and by typewriter, and actually talked to each other, rather than on their cell phones, when they were juxtaposed next to each other.

Nevertheless, there was a dark side to the U.S. in the fifties.  Factory work was well-paid, but it required using robotic repetitive motions and breathing the polluted air from waste products and listening to constant loud noises.  Air quality in big cities was bad from automobile exhaust and industrial waste, and some cities like Pittsburgh were under grey skies a lot from this pollution.  Furthermore, all Americans lived under an ongoing threat of nuclear annihilation from the Soviet Union, and there were bomb shelters everywhere.  School classrooms had drills for what should be done if a nuclear attack should occur.  So technology and the technological living environment impinged strongly on human life even in the fifties.

I am not sure if a perfect balance between a traditional natural living environment and a modern technological environment can ever be found.  I do know that living environments automatically trigger parts of our behavior as a result of our direct responses to configurations of stimuli and as a result of unconscious mirroring and modeling responses based on human reaction to other significant complex phenomena. These other significant complex phenomena include other animals as well as plants, geological and climatological phenomena and modern machines, computers and robots.  And because these configurations of stimuli and significant complex phenomena threaten to create imbalances in us that diminish our humanity, it is up to us as humans to espouse behavior and attitudes that go against the flow of these behavioral triggers sometimes, in order to reassert a balance within us.

In a more traditional organic environment dominated by continual blendable stimuli, humans must espouse a moral code with some strong discrete rules and discrete rituals.  Rules and rituals that are fairly unbending and even absolute in order to give people strong moral definition.  Rules like the Ten Commandments that influence three major religions.

Our modern technological environment is filled with the continuous stimuli from the vacuum base as well as  the discrete stimuli from all the floating disjunctive figure phenomena like modern buildings, all the different manufactured goods and all the technological devices.  All of these together create alternately vacuum and static realities - the understimulation and the overstimulation.  To survive these realities effectively, we must develop a moral code that has more blendable contextual rules.  There are so many new kinds of life situations today that lead to sensory distortion.  Blendable contextual rules give people the opportunity to develop moral postures that allow them to deal with these new life situations, that are constantly evolving as a result of technological change.  These new rules can give people the opportunity to feel a strong moral coherence, a strong moral grounding, in spite of the lack of real grounding and roots in their external world.  Strice discrete rules give definition, but by themselves they don’t support a strong moral human and humane essence.  Too many strict discrete rules in the wrong environment turn people into robots.

And people today are experiencing situations that have never been experienced in human history as a result of technological change.  They are inevitably going to have reactions that seem to break from traditional norms.  Sensory distortion is a powerful force that has not received the attention it deserves.

It is particularly intense because, not only is there the distortion that comes from a technological environment  with configurations of stimuli to which the human nervous system is not accustomed, but there is the distortion that comes simply from the accelerating rate of technological change.  New forms of technology bring new configurations of stimuli, so that humans today constantly have to readjust themselves psychologically in order to be appropriately receptive to the new configurations.  As the situations evolve, so should the reactions.  Constantly new situations create moral questions to which old moral rules are only partly or not at all applicable.

Certainly for survival in a vacuum and static environment,  people have to push back against all the stimuli that trigger reactions of an inflexible robot nature by means of expressing behavior of a more fundamentally organic mammalian nature.  And this means more continual flexible blendable rules that allow for the difficulty of maintaining psychological balance and coherence in such evolving technological environments.  But by talking about continual flexible blendable rules, I am not talking about corrupt rules that allow for selfish exploitative responses.  I am talking about maintaining moral responses in dramatically shifting external circumstances.

And yes the living environment is always a third party in moral questions involving the interactions between two human beings or between two groups of human beings or between a human being and a group of human beings.  This, of course, goes against the whole notion of human transcendence that has been a part of traditional moral systems based on traditional religious beliefs.  With the goal of human transcendence comes the notion that humans are who they are independent of the environments in which they live. It is becoming increasingly clear that technology and technological environments, both directly and indirectly, are creating all kinds of variations on old moral dilemmas as well as totally new moral dilemmas that the traditional moral systems cannot address effectively.  This is why it is important that people start acknowledging that the technology and technological environments that they have created are not simply controllable extensions of them any longer.  Rather, this technology and these technological environments are increasingly independent agents that require appropriate and effective responses on the part of people in order to maintain their psychological survival.

c 2012 Laurence Mesirow