Monday, July 11, 2011
Marshall Berman talks about a “modern maelstrom” caused by technology, population movement, urbanization, growth of governmental and bureaucratic power, etc. Yes, things have changed a great deal. It used to take hundreds if not thousands of years for society, knowledge, and technology to change enough that a time traveler would notice striking differences. Now it feels like someone born in 1925 would have a hard time adjusting to the world of 2025.
We have complex machines, artificial materials, and vast energy sources. We have ideas about equality, democracy, and freedom that would be very foreign to anyone born a couple hundred years ago. Our ideas about the abilities, status, and role of women have changed, though only in some places and only imperfectly.
But there are many ways in which we are still living like cavemen.
1. The most obvious similarities are physical. Sure, we have much better diets than our ancestors and we live longer. Someone from 200 years ago would be astonished at our grocery stores–their size, the variety of foods available, and more than anything, the fact that poor people eat pretty much the same stuff as rich people. We can all buy vegetables, fruit, fancy dressings, and the like. (I am aware that there are plenty of places in the world where this is not true.)
Our bodies are generally healthier, better protected against disease, and able to live longer. But we do not have bionics to replace limbs. There are no radical longevity treatments–we live 20 or 30 extra years, not 500. There are no restrictive breeding programs or genetic engineering to improve the human stock. Our 5 senses are the same as ever. There are eyeglasses and hearing aids, but no artificial eyeballs or enhanced noses. Nobody’s personality has been downloaded into a computer; nobody has a brain carried around by a robot body.
2. Our government may be big, complex, and oppressive, but it does not control most of us most of the time. 99% of most people’s lives is a “government free zone” where nobody in authority knows where they are or what they are doing. I have pointed out elsewhere that “government,” “authority” and the like are artificial constructs we use to understand the world. When I say that the government is not paying attention to you, I mean that none of the individuals who understand themselves to be government employees is aware of you. You may have a file in Washington but nobody looks at it; you appear in government databases but nobody is singling you out. Of course this is not true of everyone, just of most of us, most of the time.
In the future we may have locator devices and AI nannies who keep track of where we are at all times. The purpose could be to keep us safe and help us live productive lives. The idea that most people simply did whatever they wanted most of the time with no supervision would strike us as strange and inefficient. Considering how much time many of us spend goofing off, going down wrong alleys, working to attain things that will not make us happy, etc. these ifps (imaginary future people) might have a point.
Black Hole Radiation 