Disrespecting Modernity
 

As much as I like the idea of pulling a Jerimiah Johnson and disappearing into the wilderness with a good knife and a bag of salt, as a Dad I'm pretty cool with modernity. All that we have today, both good and bad, is a construction on the past. Kids worked in coal fields to get us to the point where we can poo poo innovation like the earth quake dampening ball in Taipei or high yield agriculture. I wonder if the contempt for now is at its root a lack of understanding of human history. We have great problems before us, but the tools we have to deal with them are way beyond using a honey covered stick to catch ants for dinner.

i think at the root the contempt for modern life is based in an unhappiness with how the individual is fairing in life. when life is stressful and hard and not what the person had dreamed about, it is easy to romanticize the past and believe things were better then. They gloss over the downside of life in that era and only remember the great.

have you ever worked with someone who complains about how things were better last year before the changes the new manager made? Now think about that person a year ago. they were probably saying the exact same thing because they are living in the past ever single day and not enjoying the positives of the new day. I think contempt for modern life is the same thing on a larger scale.

Make them all live with an outhouse for one year.

In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, there was a growth in cultural pessimism. I don't think this is any different to what we see today. Every age seemingly can look into its past and find a golden time when men were happier and more content. Close examination of the past rarely backs up that sentiment.


Two hundred years ago a common treatment for eczema was to rake the skin with wire brushes. Personally I thank modernity every time I pick up a prescription for cortico steroids :P

Modern dentistry is almost pain-free!

If you haven't seen HDTV, boy I tellya it's great! You're gonna love it!

If you want, you can get salad and spring water at McDonald's!

Awesome - I can wear a T-shirt to work!

With Teva sandals, who needs flip-flops -- or shoes for that matter?

Excellent microbrewery techniques have great-tasting beer in bottles at my local beverage outlet!

With a pill every month, my beloved dog is guaranteed free of heartworm.

Looky how I can put 20 albums of music on this device the size of a credit card, and hear it with awesome headphones, in 99.9% fidelity and the battery lasts like forever.

I am almost never bored for longer than five minutes. My phone has games on it!

That may be the problem. So many things are so automatic, easy, and cheap they are not even noticed. Do people think about the work behind what we have?

You wouldn't want HDTV without modern dentistry. ;)

The tree outside my house is simply awesome, better then HDTV!

The conversation I had with a friend today, in person, was enjoyable, thought provoking.

The quiet time I had with some meditation and contemplation today was simply amazing.

These things will NEVER change and will always be available.

All of these technological advances are really the background to my life, the warp and woof of my life is the relationships with the people in my family, friends, and co-workers.

And yea, the day I had 5 teeth pulled, I was very glad for modern dentistry. AND the day I survived a complex ambush with a quarter sized chunk of jagged metal in my arm, I was very glad for modern medicine.

Isn't a lot of today's technology about taking us away from the here and now? Listening to music on headphones while out on a run, talking on the phone when ot walking on holiday? Don't get me wrong - listening to music or chatting on the phone are great, but the trend is toward multitasking, distracting yourself from what you're doing. I'm not saying we should go back to the grow your own, kill your own lifestyle but perhaps a little more focus on now, a little more awareness of the present, wouldn't be a bad thing?

nostalgia is a favorite human pastime, which is never going to change. Whether you respect it or not, we live in the age we live in. Keep the best of the old and forge on with the new.

Very true. We do have a choice though. People have to figure out what's going to work for them. My main thought is that our baseline standard of life is so high we can lose sight of how good we have it. I couldn't be as connected as UT, that is too much input for me. My choices are more in line with regularjoe's. I believe we should choose carefully, but letting others choose for themselves is a value too.

Good point, how many actually choose, as opposed to keeping up with the Joneses, going along with the crowd? Competing with peers to have the latest, newest, biggest, unaware of the social costs.

Maybe the need for more and more distraction, is actually avoiding thinking.

Sometimes it is really hard to quiet the monkey mind so we drown it.

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. - Rush

Isn't the point that the monkey mind has always been there? Society has always been about keeping up with the neighbours. And I doubt if 200 years ago those who "had" had much of an idea of how much work others put in to make sure they had it.

Many wonders of the Industrial Age were created by men who had servants, a wife to rule them all and children who were confined to the nursery or boarding school. America's Founding Fathers probably couldn't have cooked their own meals.

Unless your ideal is basic subsistance, there isn't a golden age you can go back to and even then it wouldn't be one that created anything outside itself.

Honestly - I would love the chance to go back to a more basic way of living. Hard hard work, long hours, responding to nature and the pull of my own body. Might stop me thinking so much, living in my own emotions, sabotaging all my own best efforts and destroying my own dreams. But with a choice not to, it's not a valid option. I'm stuck with this life and the most honest thing is to live it or die trying. Or join a cult I suppose.

Sure but for most of human history there was a need to obsess for survival. Now when we obsess about stuff its often trivial. Quieting the mind helps us order our lives in the absence of a real threat of starvation etc...

Perhaps obsessing about stuff that's often trivial, is the result of setting personal goals too low?

To me, the question is whether we are living in a way that is compatible with our evolutionarily aquired psychological characteristics, i.e. our programming. Because that stuff isn't going to change.

Also, I feel that the idea of "modernity" is a farce, in that every person who ever lived was living in the most modern era up to that point.

That's true, but I can't think of a period when the world changed so much in one lifetime.

...and then God said, "Let there be light"...

What? we haven't had a good creationism thread in awhile. :bolt:

Quieting the mind has been around a lot longer then modern convenience. Paying attention to right now, not to the fantasy world in our mind has it's advantages. Especially when we might be eaten, or attacked.

I believe a large problem with modern society is that we've come to believe that we are separate, apart from, and somehow above the world. Because of this we have no need to seek the spiritual. We live in a false sense of reality where the trivial is now important.

Thanks for the perspective .joe. You've been places where survival is in the front of the mind. That gives you a much clearer view. The obsessive stuff was good for finding roots and berries but lose sight of your surroundings and you're kitty chow.

Flint- Do you have any favorite authors in evolutionary psych? This line of thought is useful to me personally and professionally.

That is an excellent argument against disrespecting modernity. As modern people we have more awareness of the present than ever before in history; I can keep tabs on my aunt in Washington state from South Carolina without waiting 6 months for a letter to *perhaps* come through. People accuse society of being "out of touch" with their common man, when they don't realise that not long ago you would have had to *walk* a few miles between farms just to talk!

If anything we could use people to be more oriented toward progress. Stop yammering about how much you love looking at trees, and find a way to fertilize bauxite-laden rain forest soil so people can farm it without slash and burn methods. Stop taking for granted technology, stop being comfortable with our current progress, and make things better!

Actually, I have to disagree on this point. One of the hallmarks of sentience is the ability to behave and react in a way not completely governed by evolutionary characteristics. Our intelligence in turn shapes our "programming" as we continue through life. Intelligence allows us to act against our natural instincts and get into a car; it would be lunacy to act in a way "compatible with our evolutionarily aquired psychological characteristics" and flee under a bush to gnaw on a twig or something.

Evolutionary programming changes over time (that is kinda the point), so we should instead make sure that our society is created in a manner beneficial to us in the evolutionary long run. Reward those who create progress, reward those who protect and aid us, and we can expect that 400 years from now those qualities will be in great supply.

This I agree with.
This I definitely don't.
The spiritual is a hangover from a superstitious past and doesn't aid us in any way apart from imposing random "rules" and the belief that something controls us and our actions. After all, if "everything happens for a reason" then we are not fully responsible for our actions. How can that possibly be a positive thing?

Now we blow by the neighbors farm at 50mph, windows up, climate control on, 250 watt sound system blocking ambient bird chirps and squirrel chatter, yammering on the phone with someone we saw 5 minutes ago or will see in 5 minutes, maybe noticing whether the neighbors car is in the yard. :lol:

That is what I mean be focussing on the here and now. I'm all in favour of the many advantages of new technology (I can do the fortnightly grocery shop for my mum even though I live 300 miles from her thanks to online supermarket shopping with delivery services), but when technology is used to remove you from where you are (i.e. listening to you ipod when out for a walk in the country) then I think it is worth asking the question "Why do I want to be removed from here?" ... I know multi-tasking is supposed to be where it's at, but sometimes it's good to do just the one thing, with all your attention. JMHO etc etc

Especially if that one thing you're doing, is paying attention to what's happening around you. :thumb:

The average modern American has the equivalent energy output of about two hundred manservants to help him live -- well -- day to day, every day. Past ages had servants, we got appliances. It took half an hour to hitch the team up to a carriage; it takes half a minute to start a car. It took the wife or the washerwoman all Monday to do the week's laundry; now it's set it and forget it with the washing machine.

Our evolutionary "programming" has rewarded us with the gift of being highly curious and adaptable; we quickly assimilate new information and thrive under previously unimaginable conditions. This doesn't constiture a departure from our evolutionary traits, rather it is a confirmation of exactly what they are--how we came to be so successful.

We are the same creature, the same design, in our modern culture, as what we have been for longer than it is possible for us to imagine. The lunacy is in assuming that our ancestors were frightened, stupid apes--and this is a dangerous lunacy, because it attributes to us a superiority that we haven't demonstrated and don't deserve.

Learning to speak Portugese, or play the Cello, or juggle chainsaws while riding a unicycle doesn't mean a person has "re-programmed" themself in an evolutionary sense; it means there are more culturally acquired, learned abilities that one has the opportunity to be exposed to.

Verbal, then written, and now electronic exchange of information has accumulated for us a massive stockpile of information that we now have access to, and are exposed to from birth. We aren't "genetically" superior to a primitive hunter gatherer just because he's never seen a TV before.

But it doesn't change over a lifetime, or a hundred lifetimes. Evolution s l o w l y grinds out changes over an unimaginably extended period of time.

And unfortunately, as successful as the process of natural selection has been in creating us, we no longer live under a set of circumstances where we are "evolving" towards loftier ambitions and more noble traits. Have you seen the movie Idiocracy?

This thread calls for a Dinosaur cartoon!

Sorry, I don't have any offhand. At some point I must've used an article in Scientific American as a launching point for my own musings on the subject.

Truer words have not been spoken on this subject.

Sundae, I really am not into convincing others that my spiritual life is the way for them. All I can tell you is that it is very positive for me.

I appreciate and respect your beliefs (really)

but

To me, using spirituality to feel connected to the world is like playing pop music to feel connected to Britney Spears.

The most spiritual people on the planet are in Saudi Arabia. They believe in predestination so deeply that the weathermen cannot tell you it will be a certain temperature tomorrow without adding "if God (Allah) wills it". Compared to other societies they have little to no understanding of the world. I'm sure they feel connected. But there is no connection. We are far more connected to the world than they are, because we have taken the time to work on it and understand it.

Well, here's the way I see it.

Life has always sucked. Life has always been glorious. It's all a matter of your personal perspective, how lucky you've been to start with, and how hard you've worked.

What's especially fabulous about living NOW is that we have a choice. We can live a totally modern, gadget-oriented, automated life, or we can leave it behind and do the rustic, primitive thing. Or any combo along that continuum.

I love learning about history, particularly early American, colonial through the Depression, that's my little niche. It's cool to do some things like early settlers did, just to see how it felt, but then I want to go home to my a/c and hot running water.

I've had friends in the SCA (society for creative anachronism...I think that's it) and my one friend described it as "re-enacting the past, with benefit of modern conveniences."

Kind of like those PBS shows, 1900's house, Pioneer House, or whatever...those families knew that when their month was up they could go back to their ordinary lives, what a relief.

If someone offered me a trip on a time machine, I'd politely decline.

Oh, I wouldn't. I would jump at the chance. And the first trip would be to Doggerland.

Whenever you mention Doggerland I think of those Jean Auel novels.

Clan of the Cave Bear?

TAKE ME WITH YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Wait, can I bring beer?)

;)

Ew. Isn't it sad that I know exactly what this refers to? :thepain:

Sad? Why sad? :confused:

EW? prehistoric man and the lack of soap?

I'm confused too.