An irony of our technological advancement is that it has created a society that is in many ways scientifically more naïve than the preindustrial world, in which no citizen who learned physics through backbreaking work and understood climate through subsistence agriculture would have assumed that he or she was exempt from the laws of nature. The “modern” kind of magical thinking is characterized by the belief that repeating falsehoods like incantations can transform them into scientific truth. It is also yoked to a quasi-mystical faith in the free market, which, according to the prophets, will somehow allow us to live beyond our means indefinitely.
The problem, in essence, is that rates of technological progress far outstrip the rate at which human wisdom matures (in the same way that environmental changes outpace evolutionary adaptation in mass extinction events). Critic and author Leon Wieseltier contends that “every technology is used before it is completely understood. There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences.” The rapid obsolescence of digital technologies and the cultural flotsam they deliver corrodes our respect for what lasts (“That was so five minutes ago”). And just as reliance on GPS navigation systems causes our capacity for spatial visualization to atrophy, the frictionless, atemporal instantaneity of digital communications weakens our grasp on the structure of time. Our “modern” idea that only Now is real is arguably delusional, while the medieval concept of “wyrd” [the power of the past upon the present] seems positively enlightened. And our blindness to the presence of the past in fact imperils our future.
(Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey, 2018, p. 164)
well, this passage certainly is pertinent, isn't it?!
ReplyDeleteif only we could get our more obdurate fellow citizens and our money-grubbing corporations and the governments they have corrupted to understand...
these two little paragraphs encapsulate so much of what has gone wrong with industrial and post-industrial cultures. i want to read the whole book...
The book was fascinating. It really made it clear to me that without the geological life of the planet (plate tectonics, rock formation and erosion) there would be no biological life. Geology has an impact on biology and the atmosphere, and of course it's all connected and dancing together. Also, it's clear that the human world we have constructed is merely a temporary edifice. It will all be swallowed up by the earth eventually, and there is some hope in that.
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