Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Are The Gods Happy Yet?


Sometimes unhappily and with difficulty the old man tries to keep up with the rapidly increasing speed demanded by today’s technology. Thirty-five years ago before lumbering near-computers were in common office use and the Internet was unknown, I was still in business working long hours, doing my own bookkeeping by making handwritten entries in bulky journals and ledgers. I walked deposit books to the bank during the then still restricted hours. The manager and the teller both knew me by first name, not just by account number. And yet I had time to attend weekly Rotary Club lunches and otherwise take part in various social activities.

Today all those office chores are automated and bookkeeping can be done with a few key strokes or mouse clicks, banking can be done on the Internet with hardly any manual intervention. We should have nothing but leisure time to give profound thought to the business of improving ways of living, our relationships, of living more frugally, of requiring less money, of improving the troubled parts of our community and so on. Instead, the need and greed for money persists. Technologies are constantly changed, speeded up and otherwise “improved” to feed the bottom lines of those who sell the stuff.

The prospect of the cash-less society bankers talked about that many years ago has not become a reality, but instant transfer of data around the world is possible. We must worry about identity theft, theft of secret numbers, access to bank accounts and on and on. The old man is personally unknown at any of the institutions he deals with, and if he tries to speak on the telephone with a real person, he must first press various numbers, listen to lengthy explanations, and wait while listening to advertising or other sounds for the real person to appear and then to suffer other irritations.

Furthermore, technology operators and governments seem to give little thought to the health and social consequences of providing instant wireless communication, which is obviously quicker, easier and cheaper for the bottom line than any improvement of land lines, and although some independent scientists have warned that exposure to such radiation is the “largest human health experiment ever undertaken without informed consent”, the unwarranted and unnecessary communications revolution goes on apace without any serious study or regulation.

Although I am obviously past the age to have the desire or strength to tilt at windmills, I am reminded of a piece I wrote as sometime editor of our Rotary newsletter back in 1974. Being able to publish The Old Man’s Post in this way is wonderful and mysterious to me, but the total effect of the rapid changes on our communities makes me long for simpler and slower times. As a reminder that the gods are undoubtedly no happier today than they were at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, I offer you the following short commentary I made to my Rotary Club membership 35 years ago.

Our luncheon speaker last week was erudite and enlightening on the wonders of cash-less banking and other technological marvels. I did consider his subject matter and the reaction of Rotarians to the scientific wonders he revealed worthy of comment, and perhaps a little disturbing.

It seems that Rotarians can hardly wait for the twin goblins of coaxial cable and computer to shower their many benefits upon us.

Take heed then, of the words of John Ruskin, written in the youth of the Industrial Revolution:

There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell once upon a time, divine as the Vale of Tempe; you might have seen the gods there morning and evening—Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the Light—walking in fair procession on the lawns of it and to and fro among the pinnacles of the crags. YOU cared neither for gods nor grass, but for cash; you thought you could get it by what the Times calls Railroad Enterprise. You enterprised a railroad through the valley—you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the gods with it; and now every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange—you fools everywhere.
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I'm getting on in years, which is why this blog is called The Old Man's Post.