" Addiction

to

 Technology

 is becoming

 one of the

the fastest

 growing

 epidemics

of the 21st

Century !"

   UNDERSTANDING THE PHILOSOPHY          

                                             of  Dr. Ronald Laura

                     Nourishing the Soul And Developing the Mind

There is a great deal that is good about the way in which we educate people, but I am now

convinced, after considerable reflection, that we spend too much time instructing the minds of young people and too little time nourishing their souls.

The very mention of the word 'soul' may make some readers uncomfortable, given the long historical association the word has enjoyed with magical, mystical, theological and a vast array of philosophical traditions.

My purpose here is not to tease out the sundry permutations which the word ‘soul’ has persevered, but rather to use the term to signify a dimension of meaning drawn from human experience which connects us to the world around us in ways which afford our lives value beyond the utilitarian value of the material things which fill our lives.

...........WE MULTIPLY OUR POSSESSIONS, BUT REDUCE OUR VALUES......................WE TALK TO MUCH, LOVE TO LITTLE AND LIE TO OFTEN........

The goal of education on my view, is thus not so much a matter of getting children to 'know things', as it is a matter of ensuring that they find value and purpose and sometimes, a sense of awe, in the things they know.

I have no wish to protract this discussion here, but a simple example may provide a small measure of insight into the distinction I seek.

A person may have been taught the height of Mount Everest and thus ‘know’ the distance in metres.

But if the same person awakes one morning to climb it, and is still wearing his shorts and hasn't packed a lunch, you can be sure that he hasn't understood how high it is.

Knowing, as we all too often pursue it educationally, is an intellectual exercise which can be quiet different from understanding.

This is one reason why knowledge cannot simply be equated with wisdom. To know the 'good' (ie the right thing to do) is a form of intellectual assent which may not be sufficient to motivate the knower to do what is right.

Appreciation of this point makes it easier to discern that an important part of what it means to 'nourish the soul' involves educating people to look outwards and inwards through critical self-reflection to understand the world in ways which emancipate them from ideological presumption and predudice.

Such a process may even go beyond intellectual understanding to find meaning and truth through meditation and prayer.

For some the soul will be nourished by such personal journeys of reflective experience that new and heightened moral sensibilities emerge from a sense of their connectedness to (depending in part upon their cultural persuasion) a cosmic force such as, ‘God, or Universal Consciousness' which binds together and sustains what might otherwise seem to be a world of chaos into rhythmed patterns of the living world.

This facet of the educative task cannot be reduced to an intellectual exercise; it is the substrate for the experimental transformations which give purpose to the journey of living an engaged life.

The Technologisation of Nature

Another way of formulating the distinction between developing intellects and educating souls can be found in western society's obsession with the quantification of all human experience.

To put the point more poignantly, a fundamental presumption of western society is that everything that exists and everything that is real, can be measured, statistically regimented, and mathematically coded in equations which will serve scientifically as laws of prediction.

Throughout much of my work, I use the phrase the ‘technologisation of nature' to refer to western society's preoccupation with the task of reducing the whole of the inanimate and animate world to structural and conceptual representations amenable to quantification and thus predictable control.

In the hope of redressing this in balance of perspective, I have argued that the reductionist reconstruction of the world achieves the goal of predictable control only by ignoring or gratuitously eliminating the qualitative elements of human experience from scientific discovery and the form of knowledge it enshrines.

In essence technological education thus encourages a primarily intellectual, left-brain and empiricist theory of knowledge in which the qualitative components of and particulatory consciousness and empathetic connectedness are systematically marginalised.

From this it follows that the more we instruct people to interact with the world technologically, and the more technological the world becomes, the less articulate and compassionate our culture becomes with respect to the matters of heart, self-purpose and love, without which the world of technology has little lasting meaning on value.

The technological mind-set may make us feel as if we are intellectual giants, but it also distracts us from recognising the truth that in so doing, we have become blinded giants. We become intellectual giants without vision of the value of life beyond the materialist and palpably commodified symbols to which we have reduced it.

The cultural mind-set of technology is inevitably mesmerised by its projected constructions and fabrications of nature in such a way that we disenfranchise ourselves from the natural world of which we are a part.

The culture of technology is seduced, and captured by the dreams of the kind of world we can ourselves recreate in such away that it is resolutely under our control.

Surviving the Technological Reconstruction of Nature

It is a central tenet of my philosophy that we have, in the West, selected one particular form of knowledge from a vast array of possible forms.

Far from being value-free, I argue that the form of knowledge we embrace is motivated by our insatiable appetite as a culture for power, dominance and predictable control over the world in which we live.

This being so, the use that we make of this form of knowledge will, by its very nature, propagate power and dominance as a covert value.

In as much as our technologies are applications of the form of knowledge which embeds power as its defining value, so too our technologies become intrinsically value-laden, independently of the good intentions we may have for of their deployment.

My view is thus diametrically opposed to the orthodox philosophical view of knowledge and technology which holds that neither knowledge nor technology is 'good' nor 'bad' in itself; it is only how they are used, so the argument goes, that makes them good or bad.

Against this, I am urging that because the conventional and covert rationale which drives technology is to manifest power over nature, its deployment will inevitably lead on the on hand to the degradation and exploitation of nature, while on the other to our alienation and increasing detachment from the world of nature and the earth which sustains all life.

One of the major reasons why our form of technological instruction in schools is so obsessed with reducing the things of the natural world into reconstructed forms or manufactured things is that the more chemicalised, decomposed and inert we can make the world, the easier it is for us to predict its behaviour and thus secure a modicum of power over it. Indeed, at first blush it does seem that we have succeeded in making the world predictable and thus more amenable to subjudgation by reducing and then redescribing the natural world in terms of the statistical and mathematical representations intended as a substitute for it.

Once the reduction is complete, we make this abstraction of the natural world more concretely predictable by reconfiguring our statistics in graphs, grids, and tables replete with abbreviations, acronyms, and even pseudonyms designed to give the illusion of life to our reconstructions of nature, whose technologised forms are actually increasingly synthetic, artificial, inert and unreal.

This being so, I believe that our technological transformations of nature lead, perhaps inadvertently, to the systematic violation of the natural world and thus eventually, in an important sense to the death of nature, and thus humanity itself. In essence the concept of the Megalopolis, for example, exemplified by the construction of huge cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Mexico City, Shanghai and Delhi, to name only a few, can be regraded as one of  the most glaring examples of the culmination of our technological transformations of nature.

Without a shred of conscience or shame at what we have done to nature, we simply denude the land of everything living, bulldoze or dynamite any traces of earth, hills or mountains in our way and simply concrete over nature, as if it had no value other than the utilitarian value it has in serving our own ends.

We landfill our swamplands, streams and tributaries as if they have no purpose external to the expropriative purpose we have for them.

We dam our rivers or flood our verdant valleys with impunity in the name of progress, often simply to make space for the cancer-like growth of cities, industrial areas, or even just to isolate dangerous technological sites (eg. Nuclear sites ) to provide more energy for them. It is within this framework of what I call the 'transformative subjugations' of nature that I introduce my critique of computechnology, the final of three stages of the technologisation of nature.

The first of these stages is pyrotechnology, namely, the use of fire to control nature by excelerating, the speed and scope of our transformative subjugations of the in animate world, as in the use of fire to melt base ores of the earth into metal or to combine various metals into alloys.

The culmination of this line in the development of pyrotechnological transformation is nuclear energy, the ultimate 'fire-power'.

The second stage of this transformational scheme is biotechnology, the use of genetic engineering to control nature by securing the technological power to manipulate the genetic destiny of every living thing on the planet.

The culmination of the biotechnological chain of development is, as Jeremy Rifkin has elsewhere persuasively shown, recombinant DNA technology, the ultimate genetic power to control the whole of the animate world through including the technological manipulation and crossing of the genetic boundaries which in nature distinguish the categorical boundaries which define all living species.

The transformative subjugations of biotechnology involve manipulating genes from entirely different living organisms to 'create' chimeras, thus bringing into existence what is tantamount to a whole new species.

Computechnology, I argue, is the third stage of transformative subjugation is multifaceted, but its culmination is to be found in the power it grants to transform the domain of the authenticity of our direct experiences of nature and of each other into the vicarious and artificial realm of virtual reality. In essence, the consequence is the desalinisation of the human mind on the one hand and our final alienation from nature on the other.

Computechnology will thus come to fabricate, commodify and control cultural experience and inevitably thus culture itself, much in the same way that pyrotechnology has transformed inanimate matter and biotechnology has been used to transform animate matter.

Although this discussion may seem to be highly abstract to some, its practical implications are to my mind extremely important. If the covert goal of contemporary science is the provision of a technology designed to dominate and control the world around us by transforming the things of nature into increasingly chemicalised, inert and deadened forms, we need to recognise that our technological reconstruction of the world is tantamount to a de-construction, if not an outright destruction of it. If we surround ourselves with, or have no choice but to live within the synthetic, artificial environments we create for ourselves, we can no longer afford to ignore that we have transformed much of the living world into an inert and dead one.

 ....................ALTHOUGH SCIENCE HAS TURNED US INTO GIANTS, IT HAS TURNED US INTO BLIND GIANTS...................THE SURVIVAL OF OUR PLANET AND OURSELVES DEPENDS ON THE REALISATION THAT WE ARE PART OF NATURE......

And if the things that we imbibe, breathe or let touch our skin are inert and deadened, not unlike so many of the television and other media images that fill our minds, should it be any surprise that we, ourselves, feel less alive, less vital, less purposive and less healthy?

 How can we expect to feel well in a world that is itself sick?

How can we expect to feel authentic in a world which we continue to recast as artificial. Surrounding ourselves with machines, we must also face the truth that we have slipped, almost imperceptibly, into treating our machines as if they were human, while depersonalising people as if they were machines.

(See my book,  Don’t Let Technology Steal your Soul).

 In so doing, we become more forgiving of the failings of our machines, while becoming less tolerant and forgiving of the shortcomings of others.

My work is to make clear that we have in essence recreated our world in ways that dehumanise us and make us physically and spiritually unwell.

My mission is to help change the world by educating people to see that progress is not always a matter of looking ahead at the technological panaceas our culture parades as real. It is a matter rather of soul-searching emphatically for new visions of purpose and wholeness, and even looking back to see that some of what we lost in the past is precisely what we need to reclaim and restore, if we are ever to find ourselves, our humanity and our way forward.

 Recommended reading.......

Don't Let Technology Steal Your Soul                Technology & Nature In Harmony

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