Since the industrial age, at least, there are solid grounds for saying that all technology makes human beings worse. More 'me-focused' and more exteriorised in their consciousness in that the outer world becomes more real to them and the inner world correspondingly less so. If ever one doubted this to be the case the computer age has surely confirmed it. You only have to see the addicted state of people to their mobile phones to perceive this. You might say that in the past the people who stare at their phones all the time on the train (for example) would have been reading books, and some might be doing that on their phone. But most aren't. They're doing trivial stuff, and their phones have just facilitated and encouraged the unfortunate human desire to distract itself with baubles and be constantly entertained. Reading a book requires a much deeper level of engagement. Now, people live more and more on the surface, separated at several removes from reality and are increasingly unable to engage with life at a deeper level. Of course, this is not all down to mobile phones but they have enabled a weakness that in the past would not have been so easily indulged.
That's one example but it's just the most obvious. There are others. Take cars. They seem a universal good to most people (as long as one ignores the noise, pollution and disfigurement of the land). But they can subtly change character. All that power seems to be an extension of me and gives me an inflated sense of myself. Then I feel that it is my right to have this ease of transport instead of it being a gift and a privilege. If I can pay for it then it is mine. Again, more me. This attitude is the reverse of the spiritual approach that sees everything as coming from God. Obviously, it's not restricted to cars but the point is that technological advances encourage it because they take us further away from the natural and the simple. Unless we are very alive to the dangers they pose, they can easily corrupt us.
Communities like the Amish are aware of this but I don't believe they are the answer. Technology is a fact of life and one we have to engage with if we are born at a time when it exists in a certain form. But, if we should not cut ourselves off from it, nor should we give it our full allegiance. We should use it while being aware of its spiritual dangers, and therefore use it sparingly.
Early humanity had no technology as such. Then we invented tools and set off down the path which has brought us to where we are now, completely in thrall to it, its master but also its servant. I have a theory that as we progress, if we progress in the way God intends, we will gradually strip ourselves of technological dependence and revert to something like the old hunter gatherers. But with this critical difference. We will acquire the ability to mentally engage with our environment. I believe the environment itself will become more pliable as we become more spiritually attuned. It is the hardening of our consciousness that has aided and abetted in the hardening of the environment. The reverse process is possible, indeed desirable. Jesus told us we would be able to do what he did. That is what he meant. But note that unlike magicians, many of whom are still amongst us, Jesus worked through God, making himself the vessel of his Father. That is what we have to learn to do to overcome our technological addiction without falling into magic which always separates its practitioner from God. For all magic is black magic.
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Yes - I agree. We were not meant to focus on such things, but we have done to for about 250 years, and increasingly. By adopting materialism we focused on first technology, then politics - as religion waned, these grew.
But my feeling is that we are now so deely enmeshed in technology (and bureaucracy and trade) that any 'sensible' attitude has become impossible; and a collapse back to very simple technology is inevitable. I just don't know whether this will start tomorrow or in some decades or where between - but once it starts I don't think it will be stoppable, bue to the degree of interconnection - failure in one area will trigger failure in other domains.
I used to think we would revert to a medieval farming level of civilisation - nowadays I think it more likely to be nomadic foraging, hunting and gathering. So the world population would go down to a fe hundred thousand (after the capital is used up).
However, since this is under God's control, maybe collapse would signal the end of this phase of man's development, and the earth would be wound-up as a place for Men?
I feel that everything is being given its head now to bring it all out and that eventually there will be a great cleansing after which only those souls who are spiritually oriented will be born. As a result the world will become a better reflection of what it should be, probably a more spiritualised environment as I speculate in the post. i agree that a reversion to a simple way of being with fewer people is likely.
But it is also possible that, as you suggest, the situation will get so out of hand that the earth will cease to be a viable world for human beings. The earlier cataclysm was caused by water. The next is supposed to be the result of fire.
I think there are some paradoxes going on reflecting different layers to the problem. On a social level we have become exteriorised, and from a spiritual pov we are simultaneously locked inside this spinning social bubble. For example, the private sphere is now gone, everything and everyone has become a public affair or objects of surveillance. The state is now able to control our behavior on a micro level. This is directly reflective of the feminisation of political order. Women act as objects with a subjective, public consciousness, while men act as subjects with a private, objective consciousness, thus possess integrity of mind. So unfortunately this social exteriorisation process (on behalf of mandom) is exactly what prevents communication with the gods, so to speak.
As J. Krishnamurti said, there is a fundamental split between subject and object in modern society, which is also why the sexes are disconnected. There is nothing wrong with the climate, the pollution is entirely in our minds. Technology gives man an inferiority complex about himself. But if man could develop her spiritual qualities as much as her technology, we might already have had spiritual technologies such as clairvoyance, telepathy, intuition etc more fully developed. And in such a situation, even phones would be redundant, because we would be able to truly think together as an integrative organism. But we can only begin fully trusting ourselves when we realise we are divine beings. As Goethe said, the human being is the most exact scientific instrument.
There was a time of the early internet, I actually thought technology could be manifesting Teilhard de chardin's concept of the noosphere. A short 20 years later, I so don't believe this to be the case. Just the opposite as we devolve through outsourcing more and more to apps. I am now romanticizing that communities like this may be the way to go. (I know, very Amish of me.)
Speculation can take us in many directions and it may be an idle, although interesting, pastime. If we accept that everything material is a manifestation of the spiritual, then the world is seen more nearly for what it is: a field of combat between higher and lower beings whose contend for our souls. C.S. Lewis presented devils as somehow feeding upon their human victims. There seems to be a powerful attraction to whatever manifests as electricity. A power outage is now among the most dreaded of occurences because it cuts us off from our colored screens and their parade of pictures, to which we have become addicted. But now that we know something about electricity and how it works, we cannot put the genie back into the bottle but must learn how to use it for spiritual growth. I don't think we can return to a simpler mode of life, such as hunter-gatherer (albeit with a greater degree of spiritual self-consciousness). We are in the stream of time, which flows forward, not backward. The solution to preoccupation with electronic media, which is soul-destroying, can only be individual self-awareness of its effects and a resolve to resist its harmful influence. Bruce wrote an excellent book about it, in which he acknowledged how difficult this is to do in our circumstances. It can to make us somewhat like the Amish, in that separating our selves from the general degeneracy will necessarily make us appear eccentric. But God's wisdom is always foolishness in the eyes of men.
I have to say I always thought the Internet was a materialistic parody of spiritual consciousness and would actually take us further from it rather than closer to it. Technology is the very antithesis of spirituality because it replaces inner with outer and mind with machine.
Just clicked on your link ted. A bit of synchronicity there as a colleague at work just visited a Bruderhof community to write an article about them in the light of an upcoming BBC tv programme. He was very impressed and he's no believer as far as I know.
I wasn't thinking of a return to the past Edwin. Time certainly does go forward but does it go in a straight line or a spiral? We started in a garden. Revelation says we will end up in the new Jerusalem, a heavenly city and there's no reason we cannot have the best of both worlds. I think that eventually this will all be mind created though and directly not through technology. Some way off of course.
William: I misunderstood you. If Steiner is right, then the purpose of human evolution - which is spiritual - is for us to grow into creative beings and not remain creatures, not forever subject to the given. But if this is to happen, it will require that we grow in Christ, that is, into our potential as Logos beings, capable of bringing forth a world made in love and wisdom.
@edwin - Your comments on electricity make me think you would be fascinated by Jeremy Naydler's recent book I review here - https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2018/10/review-of-jeremy-naydlers-in-shadow-of.html - which has some truly remarkable perspectives on the fundamental nature of electricity.
“We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.”
Hildegard of Bingen
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