We are bipedal animals coming from a fight-or-flight evolutionary process. A relevant question these days is how technology and our contemporary, saturated lifestyle will affect the evolution to come. Technology is already so integrated on basically all levels that kids have no chance to escape even if they wanted to. And how could they want something they never knew was there in the first place?
We no longer walk for hours on end, we use vehicles. When the need arises to train our bodies, we don’t exercise using the body itself but rather allow machines and technology that privilege too. In so many ways, we have already gone from being anthropocentric to technocentric. Homo Roboticus.
I have moaned about these things and developments in many different places (for the most recent offering, please have a look at my book Reasonances from Scarlet Imprint). However, as with many strong sentiments bordering on idealistic naïveté, perhaps it’s best to withdraw into healthy egoism and just try be content in the hope that one’s determination can perhaps inspire others?
Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 have already come and gone, and we’re more knee-deep in technological slavery and politically correct double-speak than ever before. The best possible resistance is to think clear thoughts without any programmed PC filters but with plenty of honest logical deductions – an heretical act in itself, but invisible – and to partake of nature in as pristine forms as possible (truly a challenge today).
Walking in nature sets your mind free of the negative filters more or less immediately. How a country or region treats its sensitive eco-system is a sign of its health. On strictly human levels, the equivalent yard-stick is how libraries are treated. Because libraries are concrete and symbolic at the same time, just like nature. If you don’t know how to read a book, you’re lost. If you don’t know how to behave in nature, ditto.
We are living in a culture attempting to coerce humans to play dead and succumb, because that’s what we think hurts the least. But if the tolerance of pain in general is lowered to obesely comfortable levels, we are unprepared to meet disaster and havoc. Technology can’t save us from either chaos or pain, but only from disturbances within our own created order. Thereby it’s A) a-historical (perhaps even anti-historical?) and B) hubristic – perfect descriptions of Homo Roboticus too.
Luckily we still have two feet. They make me wonder. They also make me wander.
(The photographs in this post are from a recent wandering visit to Madeira, truly an enchanted island.)
