Of course our development in the society we are today has seen some great achievements along the way. Of all these, technology is surely our most golden of children, we love it, we worship it, it is quite literally our way and our light.
Now the rapid rise of technology in some parts of the world has certainly served to insulate us even further from that common ground mentioned above. By removing the work and therefore the contact with the land and providing alternative ways to make a living, technology has allowed us to remove ourselves from nature like never before.
This rise of technology has indeed been rapid, in fact now that the evolution timescale of products and services is less than a human lifetime, we can actually see technology developing before our very eyes. The fact that technology can progress so rapidly brings us a great deal of convenience and luxury but also raises a problem of its own.
An interesting article in The Guardian some time ago considered how apparently common it was for people to escape serious injury when impaled on something. Basically, the human body has evolved a kind of slippery arrangement of organs meaning they are more likely to slide aside than be pierced. There have been sharp things, from animal's horns to other people's spears, around for a long time and we have apparently responded to that threat.
Now consider the damage that a car crash or a gunshot usually does to human body. These threats have simply not been around long enough for human evolution to respond. Another example of this is the explosion of media born from the advancement of technology. Television, for example, delivers a far greater volume information, far more quickly, than anything we've ever encountered.
Perhaps one of the reasons we have never considered the potential power and influence of ideas and information is because it's never been any kind of problem in the past, there's never been anything like this much available. We are all part of an everyday experiment, who knows how we'll react in the long run.
It has to be said that while, in moving away from 'primitive' lifestyles towards 'developed' ones we have lost a great deal of ability and understanding, we have also gained a great deal in terms of physical quality of life, although 'we' have tended to keep such improvements to ourselves.
We have bought the most wonderful tools at the expense of knowing what to do with them, but it does not have to be too late. The old ways are still there, their lessons waiting to be learned. I'm not suggesting for a moment that we throw away everything we've built, rather that if we can get back what we have lost, then the combination of that old knowledge with our new tools would be truly wonderful.
