What the world needs more than ever are wise political leaders who can redirect technology to serve the common good.
By Dr. Walter G. Moss
Professer Emeritus of History
Eastern Michigan University
Government shutdowns. Brexit. Weird climate happenings. Dissolved arms agreements. Parents unable to control their teens’ smartphone apps. Super Bowl ads that reflect “technological dread.” It seems harder than ever to understand and manage life. What is real and what is not? Who knows? Our inability to distinguish between reality and fake Russian Internet postings helped elect Donald Trump. In his two subsequent presidential years he has constantly complained about “fake news,” but has himself fabricated more than 8,000 falsehoods.
The words the poet W. B. Yeats wrote a century ago seem strangely appropriate:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.…………………………………………….
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Also relevant are historian Daniel Boorstin’s 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America and novelist Milan Kundera words in Immortality (1990): “For contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often.”
If things are more out of control than previously, how did we get in such a mess? Main answer: Our inability to wisely manage accelerating technological changes.
During the 1930s, a distinguished Dutch historian, Jan Huizinga, noted the latest scientific and technological progress, and commented that “the masses are fed with a hitherto undreamt-of quantity of knowledge of all sorts.” But he added that there was “something wrong with its assimilation,” and that “undigested knowledge hampers judgment and stands in the way of wisdom.”
Later in the century, General Omar Bradley warned: “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.”
But wait a minute. Do we not have more control over our world than in earlier times? Some optimistic scholars like Steven Pinker, in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress would argue that we do. And it is true that we are less at the mercy of nature, diseases like the terrible Black Death, and political and religious authority than we were in medieval days. In many ways, reason and science, as Pinker argues, have made people “healthier, richer, safer, and freer, [and] more literate, knowledgeable, andsmarter.” Moreover, Nazism, communism, and colonial imperialism are not the scourges they once were.
Originally published by History News Network, 02.10..2019, reprinted with permission for educational, non-commercial purposes.