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The Forum > Article Comments > Will only hitting the bottom stop the slide downwards? > Comments

Will only hitting the bottom stop the slide downwards? : Comments

By Brian Holden, published 24/2/2011

For over 48 years it has been obvious that 'progress' has been 'regress' - when will we notice?

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Well, Matt, I would counter by asking how a generation who use social networking technology so avidly are 'disconnected'? Even an old fart like me uses Facebook to maintain social relationships with people who I otherwise haven't seen in decades. Other friends I have made through social media and blogging I have never met IRL (In Real Life), but some of them are just as meaningful friends as people I grew up with.

Sure, the technophobe will grump that it's not 'real' communication, but I'm sure there were those who grumbled that telephones were no replacement for letters written with a feather quill. The human instinct to interact, gossip and chat hasn't changed, just the means of doing so. Arthur C. Clarke was never more perspicacious than when he wrote, in '1984: Spring', 'the world will become one vast, chattering village'.

As for suicide rates and child abuse statistics, I'm not sure what the official rates are, but there is good reason to argue that for many years, due to cultural and religious pressures, the problems were largely hidden. They were certainly there, though. Try reading some old newspapers, as I did when researching family history: the accounts of death by violence and suicide are quite shocking. Jack Marx has written an excellent article on this: http://tinyurl.com/46fteww .

As for marriage breakdown, again, cultural pressures may have acted against divorce in the past, but all that meant was that millions of people - mostly women - lived trapped in miserable and often brutal relationships, unable to leave because of the social stigma and economic impossibility of being a single mother.

As my mother always says, 'no-one had sex outside marriage in our day - funny how the orphanages were full to bursting, though.'

Lifestyle related diseases? To put it frankly, we're lucky enough that we're living long enough to get sick with heart disease, instead of dying from tuberculosis, cholera, influenza, smallpox, polio, diptheria, malaria, dysentery ... I think you get the picture. In many ways, though, we're actually healthier than ever: cancer rates, for instance, have fallen steadily.
Posted by Clownfish, Thursday, 24 February 2011 10:08:11 AM
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One set of reactions to Brian’s article speaks of material blessing ‘progress’ has achieved. Yet within that material advantage the Existentialist and Nihilists’ view of life seems victorious - we are no more than an accident existing on the 3rd rock from a sun in a solar system somewhere on the outer edges of a spiral galaxy amongst many galaxies.

What makes life meaningful? Isn’t this the question Brian wants us to ponder?

Materially we may be blessed, spiritually we seem increasingly bankrupt. Our lives are full of things yet we seem less at peace with existing.

If God does not exist then all things are permissible and we are left forlorn for all is temporary, we have nothing to rely on. The hollowness of creating a priori values and beliefs which are no more than what we imagine deludes no one, emptiness will always remain.

Isn’t Brian suggesting the increasing clutter we use to avoid the existential drama is a delusion that must be questioned? Reacting to the article by pointing to some benefit from progress ignores the challenge of living empty lives by saying we live longer ones.
Posted by Cronus, Thursday, 24 February 2011 10:29:48 AM
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I see where Brian is coming from: Most of our economy is based on quite unnecessary things...but I don't think he realises that without them very few could take part in the economy at all! Machines do much of the work that humans used to have to do, and we haven't worked out how to distribute wealth without work. (humans are very easily spoiled, and do not like sharing!)
I do think that we need to tax industries according to their inherent value and also reward the wealth creators, not the wealth collectors.
Folks over a certain age don't get computing, games and the internet at all, so I expect the "spending hours on internet *instead of* socialising" rant. "Playing with friends" in the modern context just isn't understood! They are also very scared that kids can learn from a local newspaper in the middle east as easily as the carefully sanitised western version...pretty radical stuff!
Posted by Ozandy, Thursday, 24 February 2011 10:48:03 AM
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'We are no more than an accident existing on the 3rd rock from a sun in a solar system somewhere on the outer edges of a spiral galaxy amongst many galaxies' - this is not an observation exclusive to Existentialists or Nihilists. It is, in fact, a plain statement of the facts as borne out by evidence.

What's so bad about that? To me, it's one of the most humbling discoveries ever made. Taking our telescope into the backyard and peer into the night sky, I am overwhelmed by the sheer wonder of the universe. Watching Jupiter's moons disappear behind its disc, and realising that this was just what Gallileo saw, and which bolstered his case against the Ptolemaic, geocentric cosmology of Church dogma.

But you make the common Theist's mistake of assuming that a life without God is empty. Nothing could be further from the truth. Personally, I find the truths demonstrated by science to be far more awe-inspiring, beautiful and thought-provoking than the petty jealousies and tribal obsessions of the God/s of the world's religions.

To quote physicist Brian Greene, 'the more than 100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds, are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky. To me, this realization is one of the greatest wonders of the modern scientific age.'

You also fall into the classic Theist's fallacy of believing that, without God, there is no morality ('if God does not exist then all things are permissible'). As philosopher Stephen Law has pointed out, deriving morality from God makes morality entirely arbitrary. Good and evil are so, purely on the whim of a deity. If God had decided that, say, incest and murder were moral, then on the Theist's logic they necessarily must be.

Indeed, you undermine your own argument by deriding 'the hollowness of creating a priori values and beliefs which are no more than what we imagine'. Which is exactly what religion does, without the benefit of logic or reason. 'This is what is true and correct because our holy book says so; no debate can be entered into'.
Posted by Clownfish, Thursday, 24 February 2011 11:11:58 AM
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Thanks Brian Holden:

...For another reflective article. The word to describe the fall from simplicity of living is “aspirational”. Interestingly, you describe a time in the 1940’s with a national focus on the war effort in Europe and the Pacific. This was a desperate time for Australia and Australians which stripped the nation of any “spare change”; life was spare and bare.

...A childhood reflection of the era is wistful though. It was a period of course many adults wanted desperately to escape, and did: Into bigger better and faster.

...Poverty is the brake to "progress": The one escape mechanism well known for its reductionism; remember!
Posted by diver dan, Thursday, 24 February 2011 11:52:13 AM
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Interesting enough when I was at school in the 70's we were told by the 'experts' that computers were going to reduce the working week to 22 hours with the need of only one income. The problem was going to be what to do with all that leisure time. The other night I sat with a couple of other guys who were still working at 11pm with their laptops. Brian certainly has a point when we see the need for 2 people to be working long hours in order to pay the mortgage and wants of so many. It has been very detrimental to family life.
Posted by runner, Thursday, 24 February 2011 12:37:25 PM
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