Page 15 - Introducing The Gratitudes

■ The Paradox of Certainty 15
None of this futility and failure is our fault. When Galileo turned his telescope toward the heavens, and allowed Kepler to look as well, they found no enchantment or authorization in the stars, only geometric patterns and equations. God, it seemed, was less of a moral philosopher than a master mathematician to those guys. This discovery helped to give impetus to the development of phys- ics but did nothing but harm to theology. Before Galileo and Kepler, it was possible to believe that the Earth was the stable center of the universe, and that God took a special interest in our everyday affairs. Afterward, the Earth became a lonely wanderer in an obscure galaxy in a hidden corner of the universe, and we were left to wonder if God had any interest in us at all. The or- dered, comprehensible world of the Middle Ages began to unravel because people no longer saw in the stars the face of a beautiful, benign if demanding friend. The people who were charged with giving guidance were only capable of nostrums, and idols, and pla- cebos. They too, it seems, were struggling with the mitigation, if not lack, of certainty. We were set adrift in the newly discovered universe, without the benefit of hope that all was right, and would come out right. Certainty, suddenly, was no longer certain, and we no longer have a coherent, predictable, conception of our- selves, and our universe, and our relation to one another and our world. We may no longer can know, as the Middle Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going, or why.
We have directed all of our energies and intelligence to invent- ing machinery that does nothing but increase the supply of data and optical delusion, while at the same time reducing the supply of knowledge and wisdom. As a consequence, technology cannot answer any of the fundamental questions we need to address to make our lives more meaningful and humane. Unfortunately, as much as we may hope, technology cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth ask- ing. It cannot provide a means of understanding why we are here or why we fight each other or why decency eludes us so often, es- pecially when we need it the most. Technology can’t help us turn off the persistant confusion of desire and longing that undermines our higher natures. Technology is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most need to confront – spir- itual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, a usable and uplifting conception of the past, and hope for the future.
As things stand now, the geniuses of the technopolis - the in- sidious confluence of technology and advertising - give us artifi- cial intelligence, and tell us that this is the way to self-knowledge. They give us instantaneous global communication, and tell us this is the way to mutual understanding. They give us virtual reality and tell us this is the answer to spiritual poverty. They give us ge- netically engineered food and tell us there will be no more hun- ger. But that is only the way of the technician, the techno-junkie, and the technological idiot. What we know about most of the peo- ple, young and old, who till those arid fields, is that they present
INTRODUCING
THE GRATITUDES
Field Guides to Learning and Living Everyday Values