The list of dangers seems unending, each constantly at the back of our mind, each threatening to destroy humanity. Among them, AI, World War Three, Global Warming, and habitat destruction. Could these be showing that we’ve gone too far? Are we creating our own extinction in pursuit of a world conquered by man? Is the modern world truly an improvement to the souls of mankind, or just an addition to its stresses?
I think humanity has progressed too far, or at least incorrectly –potentially too quickly–; we should bring ourselves back to a more simple existence and cut down on the stress people suffer from now. Now, obviously, there are exceptions to what technology we should revert back from; certainly modern medicine, for example, is exempt from being considered a bane on society (although the methods we pay for it are). But there are other excesses we abuse to the detriment of ourselves, such as social media.
The question of the effect of modernization on society has been around for centuries. In the French Academy of Dijon in 1750, they released a prompt for an academic contest. The prompt was about the rediscovery of the classical writings following the fall of Greek Constantinople and the migration of their scholars and writings to Western Europe. The competition prompt was on “Whether the Restoration of the Science and the Arts Contributed to the Purification of Mores” (English has no word for Moeurs, which can be thought of as tastes, customs, and societal norms). The winning essay, the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts by Jean Jaques Rousseau, takes a position that had largely caused him to be thought of as a primitivist (which neither he nor I fully profess such ideals). However, Rousseau cites that more modernized thought has led to the new ways people have begun to talk to each other, and these new rules for the way people may speak to each other in order to please has created far too much uniformity and falseness.
“What a retinue of vices must attend this incertitude! No more sincere friendships, no more real esteem, no more well-founded confidence. Suspicions, offences, fears, coldness, reserve, hatred, betrayal will unceasingly hide under that uniform and deceitful veil of politeness under that much vaunted urbanity that we owe to the enlightenment of our century,” Rousseau wrote (as translated by Donald A. Cress). “Some excesses will be forbidden, some vices held in dishonour, but others will be adorned with the name of virtues. One must either have them or affect them.”
What this means is that in pursuit of politeness, false virtues will draw people apart; even to the extent that people will begin to mistake vices for virtues and virtues for excesses. That people will believe that either a person will have a vice seen as a virtue or be the cause of the vice. Later, he goes on to claim that the downfall of many formerly proud and strong countries followed the over-prioritization of the sciences.
How could this relate to the environment? It is through our modern thinking that we were able to create such things as the industrial revolution and, more recently, Language Learning Models, which while greatly enhancing our capability to make progress in science, also have corrupted the mores of our modern society. Consider the effect AI has had on students. Have they truly gotten smarter or more effective? Certainly not, they often fail to even consider how their inability to buckle down and commit to their studies could harm them in their future. The modern world we’ve built has been created in the hopes of doing hard work today to create an easier tomorrow, and while it creates a hopeful ideal it leaves the next generation more stupid than the last.
Not only does this world of instant gratification ruin our minds, it also affects the planet surrounding us. Plastics litter our oceans, Fisheries drain the living resources of them too. In fact, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, over 66% of our world’s oceans have been affected by human activities. They also claim that over 40% of the global population is adversely affected by land degradation.
As seen in recent history, as we improve our technology, the stakes of our wars continue to rise. The First World War, for example, in which hundreds of thousands of young men died in individual battles. In the second, massive-scale bombings of towns and cities (Like in the Blitz or the Firebombing of Tokyo) could level entire communities and the surrounding area, eventually ending with the usage of the Nuclear Bomb to destroy entire cities in a single strike. The Cold War was all about the rapidly improving technology behind the Nuclear Bomb, which was seen as a total annihilation of the human race, started at the press of a button, through thoughts of mutually assured destruction and weapons stockpiling.
With AI, especially, it seems we’re playing god. We are creating an artificial, unfeeling, amoral being and teaching it to be able to learn better and faster than humans, to be so convincing of itself that people are actively using it for advice. Not just ‘what should I eat tonight’ kinds of advice, but ‘plan a military operation’ and ‘help my mental health’ advice. We are increasingly reliant on this creation, while it gets smarter, more prevalent, and more free-thinking than us. Are we creating our replacements?
When do we say we’ve had enough? When do we stop trying to conquer nature and each other to instead focus on exploration of the cosmos and understanding our place in the universe? I would say that we are running out of time to change the course of society. There is a quote spoken at the end of a song by Avenged Sevenfold, and is by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, within it he describes the modern human condition.
“We have one collective hope: The Earth. And yet uncounted people remain hopeless. Famine and calamity abound. Sufferers hurl themselves into the arms of war. People kill and get killed in the name of someone else’s concept of God. Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us? Each fabricated conflict, self murdering bomb, vanished airplane, every fictionalized dictator, biased partisan, and wayward son parts the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers. When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity, I see beyond the plight of humans. I see a universe ever expanding with its galaxies embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time. However big our world is — in our hearts, our minds, in our out-sized atlases? The universe is even bigger. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on the world’s beaches. More stars in the universe than seconds that have passed since Earth formed. More stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived. The day we cease exploration of the cosmos is the day we threaten the continuance of our species. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their low contracted prejudices, and would have seen the last gasp of human enlightenment — Until the rise of a visionary new culture once again embraces the cosmic perspective; A perspective in which we are one, fitting neither above, nor below, but within.”
In our current trajectory, we live under climate change, nuclear war, and much, much more. Our society seems to focus on conquering and gaining power over others rather than power over oneself. This brings a mindset where we believe ourselves to be better–above the universe, the ones awake in a universe largely asleep. But consider the Fermi Paradox–the fact that the overwhelming size of the universe suggests that life must exist in other places, but also the fact that we have no conclusive evidence that there is life anywhere else. Assuming we are not alone in this grand universe we share, can we really place ourselves above the beasts? Are we exempt from being among nature and instead being there to conquer it? And what if we are alone, does that give us the right to conquer, kill, and ruin? In all, does our modernity truly help us? Or does it lead us to our own destruction?
