A disjointed quartet of cartoonish provocations

The perils of automation

When human societies specialise into a fracturing myriad of skills, when they establish money and global markets, when, further, they automate large swathes of global production processes, what they also accomplish is a growing dependence on remote abstractions of what humans actually depend on. 

(Is this a negative of monstrous productivity?)

Instead of being intimately responsible for our survival – instead, in other words, of knowing with organic vitality how to survive and thrive – we drift from the intricacies of our immediate environment and learn how to prosper purely in terms of status, money-profit and power-gain. But such things can only ever be proxies for what we really need: that which yields rich meaning. Moreover, such conveniences seduce us, each from the other, into idiosyncratic bubbles we autistically demand and fashion from modernity’s brilliant but sterile cornucopia.

(Is this a bad thing, a fragile, precarious thing?)

As we automate production and distribution processes, as we make life ever more convenient for ourselves, we forget how to live; we diverge far from immediacy and float blindly into the multi-threaded abstractions that make up modernity’s dazzling web. Its dazzle clouds our ability to discern what is going on, blinds us to our addictions to highly complex networks of automated systems that cannot care about us – except as addicted users –, and so dehumanise us, denature us, plump us up for rot. 

We are Hansel and Gretel afraid to see how caged we are.

What else describes modernity? What am I artfully omitting?

The fruits of automation

I love my slaves. One is taking accurate dictation from my busy fingers this very moment. This, my favourite slave, is so totally obedient to my whims I could not love it more. It is so excellent, so elegant, I can comfortably overlook my dependence on it.

Thousands of years ago, my dependence would have been on the vicissitudes of my jungle home. Today, I am at the mercy of the caprices and techno-organic vicissitudes of my gadgets and the web of remote technologies that sustains them, and connects me to you, stranger.

Today, barring the wildly improbable, I can stroll safely to a supermarket and forage for a bag of pre-picked (and washed!) salad leaves, a loaf of packaged and sliced bread, a tub of fresh humus, and stroll safely back home to make myself a sandwich. 

Is this heaven, or what!

Maybe I’m a member of a gym. At the gym my multifaceted needs for physical fitness and adventure can be almost assuaged by various machines that can put my body through its paces in a variety of ways. I can even admire myself in mirrors as I sweat and bulge. Sweet! (And safe, too!)

And the entertainment, the culture, the art … the cornucopia at my fingertips is endless!

Is there anything else I am deliberately omitting?

Modernity spills out of itself and into itself to become modernity again, forever

It has been modernity since the year dot. 

Way back when, the Big Bang was the very latest technology. Later, flints to tame fire and whittle spears were cutting edge. In between, all sorts of things like cells and vegetation were breathtaking evolutionary accomplishments.

Whichever way you slice it, stuff is always cutting edge right now. But when we look back, we tend to infer “old fashioned”. In a certain light and mood, we can even discern progress. Such are deceptively informative perceptions that reveal much.

I’ve come to understand my efforts here as concerned with wisdom, another word for which would be love. Health is yet another. For me, these three are mutually explanatory synonyms. 

I have come to think that they are very important, pivotal even, to our historical moment. Call me a romantic, but I feel something evolutionary at work in the very fabric of reality. I intuit our position as a species, which is in many ways this universe’s vanguard, situated at a most profound inflection point, a crucible if you will, whose fascinating complex of pressures worry us towards the very maturation in wisdom needed to navigate it well. 

Either we choose maturation, or regression to something ugly, something Orwellian. 

But while both vectors are theoretically possible, my intuition also informs me that we’ve got this. The maturation vector will take everything we have, but the crucible is such that it can only induce exactly that from us; the best and the worst, with the best winning out as it must.

Whereupon we shall want to notice that more care is needed in how we go about living. Whereupon we shall want to notice that the right kind of care, grounded in love, is the best way to treat each other. And it will be from this very noticing, this deliberate mindfulness, that a new way of doing civilisation will arise. 

But, where once in my idealistic naïvety I chose to sense a mighty global awakening, I now welcome the slow and steady growth of this new thing from the fertile rot of the old. I feel its contours and content will surprise us all.

The Way is hard

We have also been accelerating. Bumps in the road, born of unintended consequences, spill much of history’s baggage this way and that. Our load lightens abruptly, regrows slowly, lightens again as we hit another bump. 

Yes, our pace has been accelerating of late, I’d wager as never before. In my eyes, the landscape is now whizzing by like white noise, the baggage heaped atop our crazy vehicle has grown mountainous. 

I want to squeeze my face shut and scream “STOP!” I crave peace, affection, beauty, calm. I want my efforts to have an effect.

I see us as a convolution, a grotesque of locked-in souls bound to what we have become by the exhilarating pace of change, the pressures of life, the glittering distractions, the hurts, the crimes, the spiralling temptations. I find it hard to blame anyone for anything.

To point this out is to wound. 

Today, to be true is to betray. 

If these are accurate, though colourful, observations, we are indeed at a burning crossroads. To select a different vector beyond this point surely requires of us a different quality of being; one quality of being led us here, a different quality will lead us elsewhere.

The journey is the destination, the means are the ends. If the contorted grotesque we have become (who is we?) grew directly from too much fear and greed, then self-correction towards wisdom and love will lead to something healthier, will manifest that different quality of future we long for.

To me, this is coldly logical, not airy-fairy. I am unaware of any sound counter argument. Those that cast human nature as our fixed doom grossly underestimate how flexible we are, and how powerful health is.

(Can a cynic be happy? Why is cynicism sickly? Why does pride suffocate courage?)

One way or the other, we will always be in modernity. We will always perceive problems, fix those problems, and thereby create new problems we will then try to fix. Accepting gladly this is how we are is part of the new way forward. 

But what do I mean by “new?” Well, not love itself, nor wisdom, nor health. I mean the context in which we rediscover their value, their essence, their organic vitality. What will be new is how we relearn that object and context are inseparable: reality as ever changing flow.

Mindfully and culturally holding in our awareness the contorted entanglements we can create for ourselves as a species will require more time for reflection and dialogue, with far less systemic pressure to accumulate more and More and MORE! stuff. And much else besides will need to co-evolve to facilitate that wildly improbable transformation. The task seems impossible, laughable! But surely it will all emerge naturally from a simple desire to find our way back to love, deliberately, over and over again. 

Though easy to identify, the Way is hard. The pressure to walk it is growing by the day, by the hour. Our choice is as bleak as it is magnificent. Things could not be more appropriate.