One popular superstition of our day is to confuse technological change with a change in the basic nature of Man, which is essentially unchanged since Adam and Eve.
Thought For The Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
The biggest lie we have told ourselves regarding technology is how much we can “multitask”. Divided attention means nothing gets done well or completely.
The Lord may have been originally talking about money when he said “no man can serve two masters” but it is just as applicable to nearly anything that requires full attention at any given moment. Technology has allowed too many of us to believe we can serve multiple masters.
Agreed, and that goes along with the common conceit that Chesterton called “Presentism”, the idea that we of today are, almost by definition, smarter and wiser and just better than all those people who preceded us.
Some medicine for presentism.
* Go try to read a novel from the first half of the 1800s
* Pick a daily skill needed by your great grandfather. (When you find you can’t do that or don’t have to do that, you’ll find the answer is that you actually pay someone else to do it.)
* Take this 1912 Exam for 8th graders. Ask yourself if the 12 year olds you know could do well on it. https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam1912.html
I read all the time from liberal environmentalists who have suddenly become pro-nuclear because of climate change fears that humanity can do anything. But not a one of these people has spent a single day working in a commercial nuclear power plant. Not one has driven through a blizzard in the dark at 2 am to get to the plant in order to fix the plant process computer so that we can raise reactor power to 100%. Not one has fixed core exit thermocouples on the top of the reactor vessel pressure head in 99% humidity and 100 F heat. Not one has gone home, sat down to eat dinner with family, and then get called back into work because the radiation monitoring computer has lost its mind. Not one has worked 13 hour nights, six days a week, for a two-month refueling and maintenance outage. So I really don’t want to hear about how freaking great technological change is. Starry eyed idealists never have to do the grunt work.
[…] J.D.Follow Big Pulpit & the Editor-in-Chief on X – Robert “Tito” EdwardsTradition is the Voice of Time. . . – Donald R. McClarey, J.D., at the American […]