Don’t Panic!

            I have had a saying for many years, now: ‘Our technology is a hundred years ahead of us and accelerating, our social, governmental and educational systems are a hundred years behind and slowing down, the Church still pines for the Dark Ages, and our bodies are stuck in the caves. Is it any wonder we’re confused?’ The more I read and think about these things, however, the more I realize that my statement doesn’t go far enough.

            Our technology is not an out of control beast that runs our lives. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The tech we want is the tech that survives. The tech we dislike has no chance, no matter how advanced or how much backing it has. Market forces are the sole determinant of whether or not a technology takes hold. VCRs were once a thing, now they’re gone. MySpace was replaced by Facebook. But computers and computer technology has been so successful that it’s now nearly ubiquitous. Much like cars. And aircraft. We can no longer imagine our life without them. And in fact, so much of our economy is built directly on technologies that we have adopted, that to remove them is to doom the world economy to collapse and billions of people to starvation and worse. We cannot return to the world that was, and most of us are smart enough not to want to. The pace of our lives sets the pace for our technologies, which in turn accelerate the pace of our lives. And the adoption of new technologies makes not only the old ones redundant and pointless, but destroys the need for the systems that supported them. So, change advances on all fronts at an ever-increasing pace.

            On the other hand, governments and the social systems they support (including, but not limited to: education, health care, building codes and standards, etc) are dedicated to the concept of ‘maintaining the status quo’. They were put in place specifically to advance and defend the established standards of our society. The trouble is, the standard they adhere to is no longer valid. Many, if not all, of our social systems were cemented in place during the Industrial Age. This was a time of striving for ever higher profits, which demanded extremely conservative and strictly defined social norms. Every man and woman had a job to do, and we were trained to believe that the world would crumble if we tried to escape our cubicles. Freedom was traded for security. But we no longer live in the Industrial Age – what was secure, is no longer. Companies come and go without warning, and without apparently affecting the economy in any substantive way, except to leave a lot of people confused and scrambling to find a new job, with a more ‘stable’ company – only to discover that no such company exists. Indeed, even the largest companies, the so-called ‘blue chip’ stocks, are no longer certain to be there tomorrow. And it’s not just the companies that suffer – the people who have worked and trained for years to fill a particular role can suddenly find themselves marginalized and unemployed. The education which was supposed to have been their ticket to a long and ever increasing financial future – useless.

            The educational system that came about during the Industrial Age was designed to supply the ever-hungry mills, factories and executive hierarchies with fresh talent as fast as possible. It replaced the old apprenticeship/classical educational system of the Agricultural Age with one designed to give everyone the same basic education, to be augmented and specialized to train the best and brightest to fill the scientific, engineering and management positions. But with the end of the old world, the current system is again woefully inadequate, training youth for positions that no longer exist, using a paradigm that no longer applies. Again, returning to the old ways is impossible, and applying one more fix to a tottering system will only make it collapse faster. The youth of this nation know, intuitively, that the education they are being offered is worthless. Things were bad when I was young – I knew, without being able to express it, that most of what I was being taught was pointless and outmoded – but the situation is now unrecoverable. Children are taught how to take tests, not how to think. There are computers in every classroom, but the kids are kept from experimenting with them, instead having the same old facts and dates rammed down their throats – just with GIFs and icons, now. There can be no further thought of repairing our educational system. It must simply be replaced, entirely. But this will not be the worst fight in our future. Social systems are far easier to eradicate and replace than religious beliefs.

            The Catholic Church is understandably in love with the Fourteenth Century – they were in absolute control up until Martin Luther started making waves, and every nation and king in Europe, and many in the Middle East, recognized them as the absolute last word between man and God. With the rapid proliferation of reformist, revisionist and reactionary Protestant churches, their power base was eroded until it’s now a shadow of its old self. Now the Protestant churches find themselves in a similar pickle. During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, the Church embraced the Scientific Revolution, believing that any new knowledge about the Creation could only help strengthen their position. But now science seems to have more answers than they do, and it makes them nervous. So like the Catholic priests before them, they declare war on science, either openly or in secret, not understanding that science can be their greatest ally, if they’ll only bend a little. But religions don’t bend. They see only one interpretation to anything written in the Bible or the Quran, and damnation to anyone who says differently. Over the last few decades, the situation has grown worse. Believing themselves under attack, the various denominations have taken different roads to try to hang on to the faithful. Some few have tried to incorporate new insights and theories into their dogma, but a great many have backtracked into fundamentalism, and ossified their beliefs. Religious leaders in the Middle East are raising armies of fanatical believers and arming them, sending them out to cleanse the world of unbelief. It’s only a matter of time before Christian fundamentalist groups do the same in America and throughout Europe. In fact, it’s already begun. This cannot be allowed to continue. There are increasing numbers of people throughout the world, mostly young people, who have legitimate questions about faith and God, and quite frankly they don’t accept the old, pat answers. They will not long put up with being forced to believe any particular dogma. Add to that the recent strides that have been made in normalizing relations between the races, and even including groups that were, until very recently, considered irredeemable sinners and outcasts, and we get a truly explosive mixture. Violent conflict appears inevitable.

            Finally, what do we do about these silly bodies we find ourselves stuck in? Unable to handle extremes of temperature, humidity or pressure, limited in senses, strength and speed, easily killed, prone to illness, and largely stupid – humans are fairly pathetic when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. But in the coming centuries, our species will face challenges we can barely imagine. From climate change to First Contact, our children, grandchildren and even we, ourselves, will be thrown headlong into situations for which we have no close analogy. We’re just not ready. Our unchecked appetites have made us fat, our unrestrained greed is threatening the very planet we live on, and our hubris has led us to the point where we are willing to destroy ourselves to prove that we were right all along. Our bodies cannot process many of the things we feed them. We still think tribally, even while we’re being forced to live in a global community. We create technologies and economic systems, then get frightened or suspicious of them, as if we were still wearing grass skirts or bear skins. We require new horizons, new sources of information and raw materials in order to keep expanding, but we shy away from every frontier and mumble incantations against dragons and demons. We are not only physically incapable of handling the next frontier without technological aid, we are mentally and emotionally unprepared.

            Or are we? Have we actually been preparing ourselves for the Next Big Thing, all the while not noticing it? There has been a paradigm shift in our arts and literature, but no one seems to realize what it means. From the turn of the last century, right up to and including the 1950’s, art and literature (and even popular culture) got progressively dark and gloomy. It started in Europe, where the ravages of the Industrial Revolution did the earliest damage. People were living in fear of the machines they were creating, and this fear was coming out in the arts. Witness Edvard Munch’s The Scream, or The Jungle by Sinclair. With the advent of the atom bomb, the fear reached a fever pitch. The possibility of species annihilation became very real and immediate to most people. However, all but unnoticed, a shift in thinking was taking place. A new optimism was cropping up in a very unusual place – in pulp science fiction. While much of what was being written and sketched involved post-catastrophic survival, a few voices were trumpeting the possibilities of the new frontier. We were being introduced to strange vistas, new races, and different ways of defining what it is to be human. The visual media have been slower to catch up (I’m sorry, but Star Trek and Star Wars are science-fantasy, not science-fiction), but there have been a few worthy efforts over the past few decades. Dune and Ender’s Game are standouts in fiction, 2001, A Space Odyssey and Interstellar in film. Even Trek and Wars have had their effect on our thinking. I am not the only person, nor even the first, to point out that many items in our current technological grab-bag were first proposed by Gene Roddenberry in his gung-ho space opera. But the best of the best of the early pioneers of science fiction have yet to be clearly understood. Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke and Bradbury foresaw a world that was vast and strange, littered with technology we can barely imagine, admittedly with the occasional alien, but most often just humans being what they are: twisted and bent at times, upright and heroic at others. They tried to show us that people will remain people no matter what situation we find ourselves in. That rather than fight the breakneck pace of evolution we have imposed on ourselves, we need to ride it, flow with it, harness it. But in order to do that, we will need to change a lot of other things that we assume are unchangeable, and see things that are truly unchanging in a new light. That, and that alone, is the challenge of our times.

TGC