The Machine Pauses
hedgehogreview.com
hedgehogreview.com
In the spirit of this I would encourage you to read the original 1909 E.M. Forster piece first before reading this piece of commentary or the replies in this thread: https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machi...
1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
— Genesis 11:1–9[6]
— Sister Miriam Godwinson, “But for the Grace of God”Is this how you see your god?
In your example, if that happened to you (monsoon knocked down trees, your houses and a couple of your children) - then you would for sure have an emotional reaction, and those emotional reactions would absolutely not see monsoons as "pressure differentials with no choice". (Well unless you block all your emotions, which many people do of course.).
You would need to figure out an emotional reaction to that situation. That might be anger/grief unto the monsoon (as an extension of god), or if you processed it and grew spiritually from it, you might see it as god (through monsoons) trying to teach you something, and then everything there in between. However, you would still not in any of those cases see monsoon as pressure differentials. At the very least your emotional intelligence wouldn't. (Then there is a question of whether you listen to it or try to block everything and live like a robot, which some people opt to do, but that only works for a while.)
But until life makes you actually interact with those situations, then it's easy to ignore the emotional reality and see the world (or any part of it like a monsoon) as dead mechanical force with no consciousness.
IME the Christian god serves more as a means to an end for controlling and/or dilluted rulers. Being an abusive, often absent, manipulative, and bigoted father that god is unlikely to help anyone emotionally.
God is nothing. God is not the Supreme Being because God isn't a being. To exist is to be conditioned, so God does not exist. These aren't wild, heterodox statements except to our current modern strains of fundamentalist religious thought which try to pin down God as a phenomenon we can observe and study. They are statements that have been made by theologians of all sorts of traditions including the Abrahamic ones throughout history.
My take on this question is that regardless of "why" this is an objective historical phenomenon—look at the USA today, clearly the hearts of Trump supporters (and the Resistance) have been hardened. Any account of God has to take the observed world as a datum, and the data say that before destruction, the leaders of a nation are stricken with hardness of heart.
Similarly, God suffers monsoons to blow and so forth and so on. That's the data. Today we are again we see that God destroys Towers of Babel. So it goes.
Compare to the older stories of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, made mankind less dependent upon the gods, and was thus consigned to eternal torture.
Tyrants hate collectivism more than anything.
Accidental or not the implications long term are of a cycle of overthrow and self fulfilling prophecy.
Regardless of "belief" in Christinity, it is clear to me at least that any such simplistic interpretation as "god was just a dick", is at the very least, missing the point of the stories. There is a much more deep and logical meaning in many of those stories, which becomes very obvious when you get presented to it, and that's before you even start tapping into the spiritual/existential/metaphysical content of the stories. It makes much more sense even as simple life wisdom.
To present an overly simplified answer, I will say that typically (and this is a typical occurrence in the stories, where god does something painful or creates an obstruction), when something like that happens, the phrase "god did it", does not refer so much to the fact that christinaity tries to make up this god character and give him some lines to make him look a certain way, in order to tell some message.
Instead, "god did it this way" refers to god being everything, the universe, including the human societies: god is not something above human world as a guy in the sky (in fact bible never presents that image, it's more something from monty python), god is the personfification of the world and everything that happens in it.
And what happens in it is that sometimes people feel pain, do stupid things, sometimes tragical (appearing so) events happen. That's just the fact of life. Christianity does not triumphantly claim that "god did it" as any form of justification, it simply describes that since those thing do obviously happen, that means the universe, the world, the society - the god (all those things combined) make those things happen. And then the rest of the story is presented in such a way as to understand how humans can act in relationship to those underelying realities. How they can respond to and understand what is happening in the world.
"I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have any strange gods before Me."
From this statement it is very clear to me who God is and that is not the Universe, society nor the father of time.
I disagree that this is how the Bible presents God, but I wholeheartedly agree that interpreting some stories in the Bible while treating God as you have describes has value in the lessons that they teach.
"What has efficency done for us?" is a real straight line, a question that is a set up for a gag the length of an essay that makes "Who is John Galt" look terse.
Forget the aquaducts of the romans. Aside from allowing specialization to give increased benefits like advanced medicine, education, a rising standard of living for a growing population with a small minority engaged in agriculture, and reducded environmental impact what has efficency done for us?
It’s the difference between focusing on biology of a tree and not ecology of a forest
Not systems efficiency in general, specific efficiencies we’re chasing by describing how much time we put into them relative to other time and resource efficiencies we can look for
There’s no efficiency to be found in launching a new phone every couple years? In any context?
Maybe your take is what’s “terse”?
Where did you get this impression from? No such thing is mentioned in the article, not that I saw at least.
After getting all excited about it early on in Wealth if Nations, he later changed his tune in the book.
Later he went on about it being a monstrous thing that would make people as stupid as they can be
It’s a Brave New World out there
I am not a Luddite. Nor do I believe a minority of the human population who can afford these things are owed them at great expense to the planet all humans have to live on
It’s authoritarian to force a future mess on others. That they’d have to chose to clean up & stabilize instead of explore
But the west of course is a bunch of nihilists at heart. Too busy ogling the machine itself to be distracted from the idea their impact could possibly be harmful to ourselves or the species
That makes me sound like a crazy prepper, but if the water shuts off and the supermarkets don't get resupplied I'll probably be dead within a week.
EM Forster was brought to the future, filed a single support ticket, and was sent back to report to his own age
― Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955)
“Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is "no exit"; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology again to find the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years. . . . In our cities there is no more day or night or heat or cold. But there is overpopulation, thralldom to press and television, total absence of purpose. All men are constrained by means external to them to ends equally external. The further the technical mechanism develops that allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1954)
“What is more, the whole apparatus of life has become so complex and the processes of production, distribution, and consumption have become so specialized and subdivided, that the individual person loses confidence in his own unaided capacities: he is increasingly subject to commands he does not understand, at the mercy of forces over which he exercises no effective control, moving to a destination he has not chosen. Unlike the taboo-ridden savage, who is often childishly over-confident in the powers of his shaman or magician to control formidable natural forces, however inimical, the machine-conditioned individual feels lost and helpless as day by day he metaphorically punches his time-card, takes his place on the assembly line, and at the end draws a pay check that proves worthless for obtaining any of the genuine goods of life.
This lack of close personal involvement in the daily routine brings a general loss of contact with reality: instead of continuous interplay between the inner and the outer world, with constant feedback or readjustment and with stimulus to fresh creativity, only the outer world-and mainly the collectively organized outer world of the power system-exercises authority: even private dreams must be channeled through television, film, and disc, in order to become acceptable.
With this feeling of alienation goes the typical psychological problem of our time, characterized in classic terms by Erik Erikson as the 'Identity Crisis.' In a world of transitory family nurture, transitory human contacts, transitory jobs and places of residence, transitory sexual and family relations, the basic conditions for maintaining continuity and establishing personal equilibrium disappear. The individual suddenly awakens, as Tolstoi did in a famous crisis in his own life at Arzamas, to find himself in a strange, dark room, far from home, threatened by obscure hostile forces, unable to discover where he is or who he is, appalled by the prospect of a meaningless death at the end of a meaningless life.”
― Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power (1964)
"On all sides man was continually made to feel the natural limitations of earthly well-being. The efficient ministering of the technical, hygienic and sanitary appliances with which man has surrounded himself is spoiling him. He is losing the good-humored resignation in the daily imperfections of human well-being which formed the disciple of earlier generations.
But at the same time he runs the risk of losing the natural ability to take human happiness as it offers itself, as well. Life is made too easy. Mankind’s moral fiber is giving way under the softening influence of luxury. In earlier civilizations, whether Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or any other, there was always this in contrast: in principle the value of earthly happiness is deprecated relatively to celestial bliss or union with the All. As all these religions, however, do recognize a relative worth of early pleasures, and consider them as God-given, denial of the value of life meant ingratitude. It was the very realization of the precariousness of every moment of human well-being which caused it to be appreciated at its true value.
In the present there is a contrast also, but it is a very different one. The increase of security, of comfort, and of the possibilities of want-gratification, in short the greater ease of living has had two results: On the one hand, it has prepared the soil for all forms of renunciation of life: philosophical denial of its value, purely emotive spleen or aversion from life; on the other, it has installed the belief in the right to happiness. It has made people expect things from life. Related to this there is another contrast. The ambivalent attitude which wavers between the renunciation and the enjoyment of life is peculiar to the individual alone. The community, however, without hesitation and with more conviction than ever before, accepts earthly life as the object of all striving and action. It is indeed a true worship of life.
Now it is a question for serious consideration whether any advanced culture can survive without a certain measure of orientation to Death. The great civilizations of the past have all had it. There are signs that the philosophical thought of today is also coming to it. It seems only logical, more over, that a philosophy which rates “living” above “knowing” should also include the end of life in its vision."
― Johan Huizinga, In the Shadow of Tomorrow (1936)