The Technological Man

We live in an unprecedented & utterly astounding period of human history: the Age of Technology. Yet, the amazing opportunities for man to discover, learn, & understand the mind-blowing workings of natural world reveals something about himself & his own limitations, as each new shuttle launch results in a collective yawn from public & each new image from the Hubble space telescope elicits a response of, “Is that all you got?”

For some, the passion of research in the natural sciences burns strong. Whether etymologically correct or not, I’ve always liked the German word for researcher, forscher, which sounds like forging one’s way into the unknown. The Latin word for research is investigatio, but could also be inquiro or inquisitio, which have at their root the versatile interrogative qui, meaning “what, how, why, …” We get our English word question from the Latin words quaero &/or quaero, meaning “to seek or search, to find out," even "to beg.” In Latin, these roots also yield quaestio as being a scientific inquiry into some matter. But, being ever-so-practical, the Romans took these quaes- words & appropriated them for many practical uses, i.e., quaestor, “a financial official,” & quaestus, “business profits.” Meaning, I suppose, that they (& us) believed that research exists to yield things useful & profitable.

What should we think today of value of questioning for its own sake & of learning new things just to learn them? It seems to barely tolerated & frequently dismissed as a wasteful & almost childish pursuit when the practical & profitable end isn’t clearly in sight. When the politics of paying for scientific research is involved, I’m sure most people would prefer to have the money in their pocket than to have it spent on little wheeled robots analyzing soil samples on Mars, or crashing a probe into a comet just to see what happens, or to launch new space telescopes to learn more about the nature of (suspected) dark matter. Yet, there have always arisen those individuals who, despite any apparent practical considerations, are committed to seeking out the truths of our universe, rejoicing simply in the knowledge that they have taken a step closer to the truth.

So, despite a compelling need of mankind to question & inquire, there also seems to be a compelling need to dismiss these flights of fancy & just get down to business. How are these to be reconciled? Could it be that while both individuals & whole societies can have a mindset of pure pragmatism, it is only really possible for individuals to posses the inquiring mind, thus setting up this conflict or paradox? Perhaps it’s a false conflict, because it took the great space exploration project of the 60’s & 70’s to make satellite communications so ubiquitous as to make a cell phone in every pocket as common as lint. We often gladly take the ever-more wondrous fruit, even while resisting the minds & the mindset that plants the seeds in the first place.

Perhaps we should also question for what good we use all this amazing technology? Is it uplifting man toward some higher realm of prosperity, longevity, dignity, & truth? It seems that it has largely anesthetized modern man, giving his loads of mindless & even destructive distractions that have kept him from being able to see what is true, good, & beautiful, & to marshal himself toward it. Rather than raising up all mankind, it also seems to only profit those who have the means to pay for them, often at the expense of others who have the least of hope of benefiting from it.

I’m sure Chesterton would be amused at today’s Technological Man, who sees himself as the pinnacle of knowledge & power, but when asked how his electronic device de jour unit works, says, “Well, I just turn it on & it works (assuming that the batteries aren’t dead & that you have reception)” It’s magic! I don’t think G.K. would see a whole lot of difference between this approach & that of the natives who toss the virgin into the volcano to ensure that the crops will sprout up this year. In this regard, the scientist or researcher has really become a kind of popular witch doctor & medicine man who communes with & channels the unseen forces that drive our modern lives. We might conclude that man, fundamentally remaining the same, cannot really cope with the technological & electronic landscape which he has created for himself & in which he now inextricably inhabits. We seem to become slaves, rather, to those things which we created to serve us. So, where technology has often been heralded as man’s savior, it seems rather to present him with more problems & ethical & moral dilemmas faster than he can consider & address them. In this scheme, only that which is new is good, leaving man increasingly disassociated with the good that came before, leaving him in a rootless Now, which is really just a fleeting expression of the perpetually tentative What Is To Come. Unfortunately, man cannot live in the future, but one can live fully in the Now when it is grounded in & flows from What Has Been.

The questions remain, then: What is the relationship of man to his world in the context of scientific inquiry? Is it possible for man to deal with scientific advances in such a manner that they build him up & work toward his good instead of destroying him?

All of this comes about as a lead-in for an upcoming book review - The Heavens Proclaim; Astronomy & the Vatican.

Photos from http://www.nasa.gov/.