Technology: The Modern Pied Piper

[coberst]

Technology: The Modern Pied Piper

The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a story by Robert Browning detailing a legend regarding the abduction of children from the village of Hamelin in 1284.

The town of Hamelin was rat infested and the citizens hired a man, who described himself as a rat catcher, to rid them of their rats. The man accepted their offer and used a musical pipe to lure the rats into following him. He led them into the river where they drowned. Despite his success the town reneged and refused to pay him.

The man later returned to town one Sunday morning; while the citizens were in church he used the musical pipe to lure the town’s children into following him out of town. The children were never seen again.

Technology is our modern day version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Technology has enchanted the Global village, especially the young, with hand-held gadgets and various kinds of digital technology to the extent that reading and intellectual growth has become seriously hindered.

Sapiens seek titillation and seem to find it foremost in trivial pursuits; technology facilitates those pursuits while simultaneously facilitating a more comfortable standard of living.

Our lives are filled with clusters of goals to be achieved and means devised to reach those goals. We have proximate goals and ultimate goals that we try to make coherent throughout our lives.

When we focus our mental prowess on goals and the means for achieving those goals we come face to face with the fact that we spend great quantities of our intellectual energy on means and very little intellectual energy on long range ultimate goals.

Economics dominates our thought processes in matters of defining goals. We give insufficient intellectual energy toward moral values that will help us set useful long range goals.

When we examine the matter of means and ends we discover that we have become enchanted with technology as our Idol, it becomes the means to achieve whatever goals we might decide in the future. Technology, however, provides little help in establishing goals that can alleviate our most stressful problems.

[mikeinie]

That is so true, constant bombardment of information, media and noise. Keep the people distracted, that way they do not care about what is happening around them. Fill their minds with useless media garbage about celebrities lives, weight loss, boob jobs and who is gay and call it ‘news’ and people won’t care about what is really going on in the world.

We are all victims of it, not just our young. Isn’t it us, the parent that run out and buy them all this up-to-date modern technology? Kids wear cell phone as fashion accessories, and we continuously meet their ‘demands’.

[Clodhopper]

Isn't it a long running debate, about the balance between technology and morals?

The scientist complains that she has the answers and if given the chance can create paradise on earth, but the scientist lacks the moral grounding to know how and when to use her knowledge; whereas the theologian/philosopher has ideas about the circumstances where technology might or might not help, but lacks the practical know-how to do it. We have never really managed to match up the two.

The debate on human stem cell research or genetically modified food might be examples of what I mean.

[coberst]

I think that our very serious problem is one of morality. In my view morality is about the relationship between humans. We have in the last century spent very little intellectual energy toward moral problems; at least it is minor compared to the energy expended in pursuing technology.

Because we have not learned to live together and because we have developed the technical means to easily destroy both our species and perhaps even our planet we cannot any longer enjoy the luxury of apathy regarding morality.

The only solution I see is that we must develop a much greater degree of intellectual sophistication so that we can comprehend our problem and perhaps also find solutions.

This requires that adults quickly become learners. We have little time to waste. We adults must become self-actualizing self-learners. We must develop a hobby that might be called ‘getting an intellectual life’. Adults can no longer store their intellects, with their year book, in the attic when their formal education ends.

[Clodhopper]

Agreed. Mind you, you are largely preaching to the converted in this matter on this site, and in the cases where you are not, the problem is, if anything, an excess of morality!

[coberst]

Clodhopper;850663 wrote: Agreed. Mind you, you are largely preaching to the converted in this matter on this site, and in the cases where you are not, the problem is, if anything, an excess of morality!


It is evident by history that the moral values we have created are about to kill us. Either we create values different from those that we now live by or we will become toast.

[along-for-the-ride]

coberst;851179 wrote: It is evident by history that the moral values we have created are about to kill us. Either we create values different from those that we now live by or we will become toast.


Elaborate, please, coberst.

[coberst]

along-for-the-ride;851296 wrote: Elaborate, please, coberst.


The wars of the last century. The wars of this century. The technology that corrupts the planet and makes it possible for a few determined people to destroy great cities. A population so out of touch with reality as to be unable to recognize our problems let alone deal with them.