(the Roseannadanna solution)
About this so called ‘new renaissance,’ that I hear so much banter about, even though saying ‘new rebirth’ is clumsy, redundant, awkward, inept, and certainly not apt. We may just be speaking of something more like a revival in the tradition of Aimee Semple McPherson (though not nearly ‘Four Square’). Charlie Kirk has been assassinated and this may have sparked a revival of sorts among Christians, but based on past performance, that is more likely the kind of temporary mania you may have seen before with Beanie Babies and ‘pet rocks’. Not well thought out.
However, in other ways, we are speaking of something that is, in fact, brand new to the awareness of many. Not just a Christian revival in the face of a Muslim invasion, for instance, or a conservative resurgence against the continuing marxist onslaught. But still, something with some history to it. A conquest that is very real, and ongoing, and that is not new, at least to us as a society and culture, but also world-wide. There is even a disparaging term for those who have previously waged against it: Luddite.
We have built ourselves on the past. Necessarily. But we cannot reinvent ourselves every generation, any more than we can survive as an agrarian society in a digital age. Still, we must keep a grip on traditions and traditional values. So, in that way, I suppose, some kind of renaissance may be in order, given that the last outright Muslim invasion was 1683, all the way to the gates of Vienna, and that was actually in the very heart of an actual Renaissance. That was even before Saturday Night Live was funny.
In this particular instance of human history, I am really speaking more of ‘Western society.’ It is that tradition, to which I belong, and owe some allegiance, which is currently under the greatest and most obvious existential threat. But I believe that every human society is now under that same threat, not only those being physically attacked by Muslim jihadists across Asia, and Africa. Because this new threat is not religious and is easily accepted into most cultures for its obvious benefits—even more than a camel’s nose.
Though there are similarities, the current Muslim invasion is not our most serious danger. Not yet, anyway. Some would even say that the ‘woke’ mind virus is the greater risk. But I think that fever of feminist ideology has finally broken. It’s pretty easy to see the differences between men and women, with a light on, no matter the number of academic brainwashings. Even the blind can feel that much. And DEI only results in the mediocrity of any paint-by-the-numbers kit. While the recent appropriation of the word ‘gender’ may offer the advantages of some confusion, the sexes are clearly not equal—though I’m not yet ready to admit that women are superior to men.
No, it is the flagrant and uninhibited embrace of technology that is our more immediate worry. As human beings, how do we accommodate ourselves to using math to determine our aesthetics and values without reducing ourselves to digits.
Obviously, a digital human philosophy geared to machine efficiencies would not necessarily agree with the need, nor the necessity, of our finding some sort of analog salvation. But then there is a child of science fiction that is still in me, and all of those speculations that came with it, which say that a machine philosophy might somehow benefit us, given that the machine itself is a child of man. But I don’t fully agree with that either.
Given the danger that we all face, that mankind itself, Christian, Muslim, marxist or feminists, might be overwhelmed and then eliminated by the machine—a danger that is already being realized in our reliance on digital devices in every aspect of our lives—perhaps it is more worthwhile to focus just on that. And maybe that will be the key part of a more general malaise in our midst.
The machine is a child of man. What accommodation and good might be derived from this fact, similar to the salvation of a juvenile delinquent, should be hoped for and worked for. At this point we cannot eliminate the machine from our lives without wrenching the teeth of it out of our flesh like a medieval dentist. But the machine is at least a natural extension of the human mind based upon human needs and a functional awareness of our own deficiencies. We cannot return to a lifestyle without machines because we have already gone so far beyond such an existence in the making of tools for farming and weapons for hunting and more graphically, for defense.
And a wholesale return to slavery is impossible. But slavery was the common motif of the ancient world in the time before our wholesale dependence on the machine. Today, a population without John Deere will not eat.
The machine is not our flesh and bone but, to a large extent, it is of our mind. All of its qualities of efficiency, are derived from human values. The problem arises because its development has favored a few of those values in the place of many others. Machine efficiencies dictate that it be good for a limited chore. For instance, where speed might be valued in a human context, it is weighed against safety and purpose as well as other considerations including our sense of beauty and design.
Human beings always and necessarily have more than a single purpose. But a machine might have only one: speed. And, its own calculation of necessities might then include the need for fuel, and the availability of fuel, and thus a requirement for human work to make that fuel available, and thus by extension, a necessity to enslave an unwilling human population to the purpose of producing that fuel—say, in a cobalt mine—but it cannot value the needs of the human beings involved beyond what can be simply calculated by the math of its own needs, much less the benefits of some more nebulous concept, say, human freedom.
For many hundreds of thousands of years, lacking the machines to do otherwise, some human beings used other human beings for their own benefit. But it was this abuse, in itself, that was the very cause of the shaping of Western society. Our society and our culture are the result of trying to do away with the abuse of some human beings by other human beings. And to a large extent, the development of the machine is tied to that very same effort. Thus, the irony of the machine then enslaving mankind for its own purpose is too great to ignore.
This enslavement goes beyond the obviousness of children working in cobalt mines so that we can feel good about driving electric cars in order to save the planet. This problem is in the more subtle adjustments we all make to accommodate machines in our lives. We have already become dependent on the machine to survive. And to order takeout in time for the game.
The computer and its ancillaries are just such machines, and the progeny of the computer, artificial intelligence, is the product of the machine as much as it is the original human intelligence that created that. It has no other use beyond or outside of the machine. And by extension, the ‘cloud’ of awareness that represents the linking of computers into a group mind, like some ominous demon from an old pulp magazine, is the product of the machine as much or more than it is the human beings who created the machine in the first place.
Briefly put, this then is the dilemma: finding a means of survival in this technologic jungle is now our priority. We cannot eliminate the jungle. We need it to survive as well. But the wild beasts that thrive in that environment are not compatible with our own desires. The ‘Western’ society that we treasure for its individual liberties is not an automatic part of this problem. There are cultures today that still use human beings as slaves to serve the interest of other human beings. There are entire cultures built on the efficacy of that onerous premise. And those same societies may find some priorities of machines far more compatible than we do. Those societies may benefit from the symbiosis with machines even more than us.
I am not alluding here only to Muslim culture and its social abuse of women, for instance. Socialism as a reductionist political philosophy to guide the government of mankind is just as bad, or worse. A Muslim-socialist such as the new mayor of New York makes perfect sense in that regard, at least. But in the end, when it runs out of other people’s money, socialism doesn’t work, even in theory, and that particular combination of religion and politics is more likely to ruin Muslim culture as much as it has already damaged Western society. Perhaps socialism will even eliminate the Muslim onslaught from the current bundle of worries, completely. Though, being originally from New York myself, I cannot avoid the pang of loss.
Slavery, the involuntary use (i.e. abuse) of one human being by another, was accepted in Western society (as it was in all others) until very recently—about two hundred years ago, depending on place. Where it is still practiced now, it is not condoned (so long as your shirts are cheap). But it cannot be ignored when recognized, or else we are all in danger.
This then is the premise of our society: the benefits of freedom. It is at the very heart of our Western culture. In that slavery was a common practice for millennia before the use of the machine developed to ease our labors, (at least a few hundred thousand years), rejecting slavery was not easy. In this country it required the ultimate sacrifice of several hundred thousand lives. But it was done. And our rejection of that evil did not happen by accident
But then, the benefits of doing away with slavery were and are beyond calculation. As a consequence of that change, the human spirit released by that one cultural act has lifted a suffocating social burden and permitted the greater human mind to soar. The very realization of our life, liberty, and the pursuit of our individual happiness is a consequence.
A renaissance derived from a cross-breeding of Western values and technological design (not for efficiency but purpose) may be an answer. Finding our breath in the midst of so many battles might seem impossible, but that is the Roseanne Roseannadanna solution because it’s always something. Whatever the circumstantial difficulties, we must find an accommodation between the machine and human prosperity that does not sacrifice the values that it took us so long to find and cherish.