On Technology and a Progressive Vision

For the modern world there was no more seminal event than the Italian Renaissance. With the recovery of Greek and Roman thought, humans in their natural world became the focus of thought. Perhaps the most important element in the spread of the Renaissance was the invention and implementation of printing. Had the Renaissance occurred in an era of manuscripts its spread, if any, would have been most probably limited to the scholars of the period. With printing the discoveries of antiquity, the latest thoughts concerning those discoveries and their application to existing institutions and practices were accomplished much faster than ever before and for a much wider audience. While Charlemagne, living in a feudal world, could not read. The princes and public of the Renaissance read a continual and voluminous flow of thought and discovery. I suggest that one reason for the cultural explosion of the Renaissance was that printing released a thousand years of pent up human thirst for understanding in a very brief period of time. Additionally, it was found that this knowledge could be built upon thus eventuating in science thereby enabling the volume of learning and discovery to continue increasing.

Another seminal invention that represents as paradigmatic a breakthrough as printing has been the use of the computer and the voluminous capacity to communicate it has provided. However, when we look at the impact of this technology we do not see a burst of culture and understanding. To the contrary almost every one of these associated inventions has eventuated in the trivial, the mundane and the entertaining. In short, cultural banality. Nor is this outcome trivial in itself. Hannah Arendt famously declared the “banality of evil” in her report on the Eichmann trial. I suggest that this is a two way street, i.e. the evil of banality. Banality is evidence that the human mind has not come to grips with the complexity of the real world and, in consequence, we get the results that the religious right, corporate greed and G. W. Bush are having on the people of this planet. “Blinded by banality” might function as a description of our time.

I suggest that this failure to realize the potential of computer-based technology is due in part to there being no long term socially repressed knowledge to be released. Print had done its job well. Thus while we can communicate at lightening speed and while we can elaborately simulate human activities we have, in effect, nothing to say of culture-shaking importance. Progressives, if they would meaningfully lead in the future, must find, if it exists, what it is in human nature that will foster growth in human potential and seek ways to release it. In this regard I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson’s belief that education is the foundation of democracy and that those who refused to avail themselves of a free education should be disenfranchised. The question is, of course, whether every human being wants to expend the effort to realize her/his potential. Human history would indicate they do not. Do we have the genius to find ways to make this self realization a social function of fundamental importance to people, and to their democracy, which can be no better than they are?

Bob Newhard