It's a pattern as old as the technology and civilization dependent on it:
1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
— Genesis 11:1–9[6]
Replace the brick for silicon and slime for oil and here we are, dwelling up high in the sky, each in our own filter bubble, unable to discuss the important issues that build society, but managing to unravel it every time we try to fix it with more technological solutions.
“Some would ask, how could a perfect God create a universe filled with so much that is evil. They have missed a greater conundrum: why would a perfect God create a universe at all?”
— Sister Miriam Godwinson, “But for the Grace of God”
Understanding god is hard unless you use your emotional intelligence instead of logical intelligence, because that's what the concept of god is used for. To guide humans in their emotional life, not in their logical pursuits.
In your example, if that happened to you (monsoon knocked down trees, your houses and a couple of your children) - then you would for sure have an emotional reaction, and those emotional reactions would absolutely not see monsoons as "pressure differentials with no choice". (Well unless you block all your emotions, which many people do of course.).
You would need to figure out an emotional reaction to that situation. That might be anger/grief unto the monsoon (as an extension of god), or if you processed it and grew spiritually from it, you might see it as god (through monsoons) trying to teach you something, and then everything there in between. However, you would still not in any of those cases see monsoon as pressure differentials. At the very least your emotional intelligence wouldn't. (Then there is a question of whether you listen to it or try to block everything and live like a robot, which some people opt to do, but that only works for a while.)
But until life makes you actually interact with those situations, then it's easy to ignore the emotional reality and see the world (or any part of it like a monsoon) as dead mechanical force with no consciousness.
> Understanding god is hard unless you use your emotional intelligence instead of logical intelligence, because that's what the concept of god is used for. To guide humans in their emotional life, not in their logical pursuits.
IME the Christian god serves more as a means to an end for controlling and/or dilluted rulers. Being an abusive, often absent, manipulative, and bigoted father that god is unlikely to help anyone emotionally.
I think the point is that religious people may be quicker to move through grief to acceptance in disaster situations such as monsoons. I don’t know if there’s any evidence of this but it’s an interesting hypothesis to test.
They don't follow warm air and pressure differentials, they are warm air and pressure differentials. A monsoon knocks down trees because a monsoon knocks down trees. Whatever God is, if it is to be God, it must be utterly transcendent and unconditioned on circumstance, unlike any natural phenomena. Treating God like a human being, or really any being or phenomenon can only be a flawed metaphor.
God is nothing. God is not the Supreme Being because God isn't a being. To exist is to be conditioned, so God does not exist. These aren't wild, heterodox statements except to our current modern strains of fundamentalist religious thought which try to pin down God as a phenomenon we can observe and study. They are statements that have been made by theologians of all sorts of traditions including the Abrahamic ones throughout history.
At the Passover seder, one topic my relative get hung up on many years is "Why did God 'harden Pharaoh's heart'?"
My take on this question is that regardless of "why" this is an objective historical phenomenon—look at the USA today, clearly the hearts of Trump supporters (and the Resistance) have been hardened. Any account of God has to take the observed world as a datum, and the data say that before destruction, the leaders of a nation are stricken with hardness of heart.
Similarly, God suffers monsoons to blow and so forth and so on. That's the data. Today we are again we see that God destroys Towers of Babel. So it goes.
The point of the story is that the humans should know their place. Aspiring to accomplish great things through cooperation, rather than prayer to god, is presented as hubris.
Compare to the older stories of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, made mankind less dependent upon the gods, and was thus consigned to eternal torture.
Reminds me of the implied echo in Greek Mythology. The Titans created the Gods. They tyranized them out of fear and were later near entirety overthrown except for the collaborators or most merciful among them. The Titans shaped man and the Gods breathed life into Man. The Gods tyranized man out of fear of them....
Accidental or not the implications long term are of a cycle of overthrow and self fulfilling prophecy.
I highly recommend watching Jordan Peterson's lectures on youtube called "Biblical Series". They (attempt to) explain this and similar questions from Christianity to people who are typically smart and approach the world intellectually, who will usually have trouble with these concepts and the meaning of the stories.
Regardless of "belief" in Christinity, it is clear to me at least that any such simplistic interpretation as "god was just a dick", is at the very least, missing the point of the stories. There is a much more deep and logical meaning in many of those stories, which becomes very obvious when you get presented to it, and that's before you even start tapping into the spiritual/existential/metaphysical content of the stories. It makes much more sense even as simple life wisdom.
To present an overly simplified answer, I will say that typically (and this is a typical occurrence in the stories, where god does something painful or creates an obstruction), when something like that happens, the phrase "god did it", does not refer so much to the fact that christinaity tries to make up this god character and give him some lines to make him look a certain way, in order to tell some message.
Instead, "god did it this way" refers to god being everything, the universe, including the human societies: god is not something above human world as a guy in the sky (in fact bible never presents that image, it's more something from monty python), god is the personfification of the world and everything that happens in it.
And what happens in it is that sometimes people feel pain, do stupid things, sometimes tragical (appearing so) events happen. That's just the fact of life. Christianity does not triumphantly claim that "god did it" as any form of justification, it simply describes that since those thing do obviously happen, that means the universe, the world, the society - the god (all those things combined) make those things happen. And then the rest of the story is presented in such a way as to understand how humans can act in relationship to those underelying realities. How they can respond to and understand what is happening in the world.
Than you really have to stretch the principle of charity beyond what it reasonable. Just read the first of the ten commandments and there is a very jealous undertone about other gods.
"I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have any strange gods before Me."
From this statement it is very clear to me who God is and that is not the Universe, society nor the father of time.
Ah, but this jealousy makes perfect sense if God is indeed the ‘father of everything’. It is common in contemporary Christian parlance to refer to idols as things that distract us from God. This is a very useful concept that is born directly out of that commandment. And why no idols? Because any construct of the mind that interferes with seeing true reality is probably going to end badly- like someone in a blindfold walking off a pier.
As the other comment pointed out, it simply means to see that everyting is in unity, everything is part of the same universe, same god. To not get only one part of the world (like fame or material possessions, or a single other person, or affiliation with a political party) and make it your idol god, because that will ultimately lead to disaster. There is nothing "jealous" about this.
> Instead, "god did it this way" refers to god being everything, the universe, including the human societies: god is not something above human world as a guy in the sky (in fact bible never presents that image, it's more something from monty python), god is the personfification of the world and everything that happens in it.
I disagree that this is how the Bible presents God, but I wholeheartedly agree that interpreting some stories in the Bible while treating God as you have describes has value in the lessons that they teach.
Reads like pantheism or similar, which AFAIK it’s fair to say is not considered orthodox by the overwhelming majority of Christian and Jewish religious philosophies or denominations.
I read this story as a patterned warning against what happens when Humanity becomes too rallied around one particular creative act, so in agreement that they lose sight of the rest of reality and bring about their own downfall. This happens often imo.
Sooner or later this is bound to happen and I think the problem is that are too used to things working smoothly and not considering an interruption. Also, time and time again we seem to find it easier to recover from a crisis than to prevent it. It's really strange...
I used to worry about people not considering interruptions, but I think recent events have convinced me I was being too pessimistic. Almost everything I use, from chairs to obscure condiments to imported canned coffee, can apparently make it to store shelves or my doorstep during an interruption of everything with no precedent in living memory.
In the large scale, the current crisis is a joke. Do you want water? Your tap still works. Hungry? Put on a mask, drive to the supermarket, and wow, they still have food...
That makes me sound like a crazy prepper, but if the water shuts off and the supermarkets don't get resupplied I'll probably be dead within a week.
I can't help but think of the author as spoiled and out of touch while worshipping a utopia that never was and forgetting both the brutality of the past and the fringes of today who lack much of the benefits.
"What has efficency done for us?" is a real straight line, a question that is a set up for a gag the length of an essay that makes "Who is John Galt" look terse.
Forget the aquaducts of the romans. Aside from allowing specialization to give increased benefits like advanced medicine, education, a rising standard of living for a growing population with a small minority engaged in agriculture, and reducded environmental impact what has efficency done for us?
He’s talking specifically about disposable consumer tech, cranking out machinery that sits and rots when reality throws a pandemic at us. Chasing new literal machines for the sake of chasing new literal machines
It’s the difference between focusing on biology of a tree and not ecology of a forest
Not systems efficiency in general, specific efficiencies we’re chasing by describing how much time we put into them relative to other time and resource efficiencies we can look for
There’s no efficiency to be found in launching a new phone every couple years? In any context?
This mirrors Adam Smith’s later opinions on division of labor
After getting all excited about it early on in Wealth if Nations, he later changed his tune in the book.
Later he went on about it being a monstrous thing that would make people as stupid as they can be
It’s a Brave New World out there
I am not a Luddite. Nor do I believe a minority of the human population who can afford these things are owed them at great expense to the planet all humans have to live on
It’s authoritarian to force a future mess on others. That they’d have to chose to clean up & stabilize instead of explore
But the west of course is a bunch of nihilists at heart. Too busy ogling the machine itself to be distracted from the idea their impact could possibly be harmful to ourselves or the species
> When the mechanical system eventually begins to break down (starting with the music-streaming service, then the beds), the people have no choice but to take further recourse in the Machine. Complaints are lodged with the Committee of the Mending Apparatus, but the Mending Apparatus itself turns out to be broken.
EM Forster was brought to the future, filed a single support ticket, and was sent back to report to his own age
“Mental health cannot be defined in terms of the "adjustment" of the individual to his society, but, on the other hand, that it must be defined in terms of the society to the needs of man, of its role in furthering or hindering the development of mental health. Whether or not the individual is healthy, is primarily not an individual matter, but depends on the structure of his society.”
― Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955)
“Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is "no exit"; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology again to find the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years. . . . In our cities there is no more day or night or heat or cold. But there is overpopulation, thralldom to press and television, total absence of purpose. All men are constrained by means external to them to ends equally external. The further the technical mechanism develops that allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1954)
“What is more, the whole apparatus of life has become so complex and the processes of production, distribution, and consumption have become so specialized and subdivided, that the individual person loses confidence in his own unaided capacities: he is increasingly subject to commands he does not understand, at the mercy of forces over which he exercises no effective control, moving to a destination he has not chosen. Unlike the taboo-ridden savage, who is often childishly over-confident in the powers of his shaman or magician to control formidable natural forces, however inimical, the machine-conditioned individual feels lost and helpless as day by day he metaphorically punches his time-card, takes his place on the assembly line, and at the end draws a pay check that proves worthless for obtaining any of the genuine goods of life.
This lack of close personal involvement in the daily routine brings a general loss of contact with reality: instead of continuous interplay between the inner and the outer world, with constant feedback or readjustment and with stimulus to fresh creativity, only the outer world-and mainly the collectively organized outer world of the power system-exercises authority: even private dreams must be channeled through television, film, and disc, in order to become acceptable.
With this feeling of alienation goes the typical psychological problem of our time, characterized in classic terms by Erik Erikson as the 'Identity Crisis.' In a world of transitory family nurture, transitory human contacts, transitory jobs and places of residence, transitory sexual and family relations, the basic conditions for maintaining continuity and establishing personal equilibrium disappear. The individual suddenly awakens, as Tolstoi did in a famous crisis in his own life at Arzamas, to find himself in a strange, dark room, far from home, threatened by obscure hostile forces, unable to discover where he is or who he is, appalled by the prospect of a meaningless death at the end of a meaningless life.”
― Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power (1964)
"On all sides man was continually made to feel the natural limitations of earthly well-being. The efficient ministering of the technical, hygienic and sanitary appliances with which man has surrounded himself is spoiling him. He is losing the good-humored resignation in the daily imperfections of human well-being which formed the disciple of earlier generations.
But at the same time he runs the risk of losing the natural ability to take human happiness as it offers itself, as well. Life is made too easy. Mankind’s moral fiber is giving way under the softening influence of luxury. In earlier civilizations, whether Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or any other, there was always this in contrast: in principle the value of earthly happiness is deprecated relatively to celestial bliss or union with the All. As all these religions, however, do recognize a ...
33 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 69.7 ms ] threadIs this how you see your god?
In your example, if that happened to you (monsoon knocked down trees, your houses and a couple of your children) - then you would for sure have an emotional reaction, and those emotional reactions would absolutely not see monsoons as "pressure differentials with no choice". (Well unless you block all your emotions, which many people do of course.).
You would need to figure out an emotional reaction to that situation. That might be anger/grief unto the monsoon (as an extension of god), or if you processed it and grew spiritually from it, you might see it as god (through monsoons) trying to teach you something, and then everything there in between. However, you would still not in any of those cases see monsoon as pressure differentials. At the very least your emotional intelligence wouldn't. (Then there is a question of whether you listen to it or try to block everything and live like a robot, which some people opt to do, but that only works for a while.)
But until life makes you actually interact with those situations, then it's easy to ignore the emotional reality and see the world (or any part of it like a monsoon) as dead mechanical force with no consciousness.
IME the Christian god serves more as a means to an end for controlling and/or dilluted rulers. Being an abusive, often absent, manipulative, and bigoted father that god is unlikely to help anyone emotionally.
God is nothing. God is not the Supreme Being because God isn't a being. To exist is to be conditioned, so God does not exist. These aren't wild, heterodox statements except to our current modern strains of fundamentalist religious thought which try to pin down God as a phenomenon we can observe and study. They are statements that have been made by theologians of all sorts of traditions including the Abrahamic ones throughout history.
My take on this question is that regardless of "why" this is an objective historical phenomenon—look at the USA today, clearly the hearts of Trump supporters (and the Resistance) have been hardened. Any account of God has to take the observed world as a datum, and the data say that before destruction, the leaders of a nation are stricken with hardness of heart.
Similarly, God suffers monsoons to blow and so forth and so on. That's the data. Today we are again we see that God destroys Towers of Babel. So it goes.
Compare to the older stories of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, made mankind less dependent upon the gods, and was thus consigned to eternal torture.
Tyrants hate collectivism more than anything.
Accidental or not the implications long term are of a cycle of overthrow and self fulfilling prophecy.
Regardless of "belief" in Christinity, it is clear to me at least that any such simplistic interpretation as "god was just a dick", is at the very least, missing the point of the stories. There is a much more deep and logical meaning in many of those stories, which becomes very obvious when you get presented to it, and that's before you even start tapping into the spiritual/existential/metaphysical content of the stories. It makes much more sense even as simple life wisdom.
To present an overly simplified answer, I will say that typically (and this is a typical occurrence in the stories, where god does something painful or creates an obstruction), when something like that happens, the phrase "god did it", does not refer so much to the fact that christinaity tries to make up this god character and give him some lines to make him look a certain way, in order to tell some message.
Instead, "god did it this way" refers to god being everything, the universe, including the human societies: god is not something above human world as a guy in the sky (in fact bible never presents that image, it's more something from monty python), god is the personfification of the world and everything that happens in it.
And what happens in it is that sometimes people feel pain, do stupid things, sometimes tragical (appearing so) events happen. That's just the fact of life. Christianity does not triumphantly claim that "god did it" as any form of justification, it simply describes that since those thing do obviously happen, that means the universe, the world, the society - the god (all those things combined) make those things happen. And then the rest of the story is presented in such a way as to understand how humans can act in relationship to those underelying realities. How they can respond to and understand what is happening in the world.
"I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have any strange gods before Me."
From this statement it is very clear to me who God is and that is not the Universe, society nor the father of time.
I disagree that this is how the Bible presents God, but I wholeheartedly agree that interpreting some stories in the Bible while treating God as you have describes has value in the lessons that they teach.
That makes me sound like a crazy prepper, but if the water shuts off and the supermarkets don't get resupplied I'll probably be dead within a week.
"What has efficency done for us?" is a real straight line, a question that is a set up for a gag the length of an essay that makes "Who is John Galt" look terse.
Forget the aquaducts of the romans. Aside from allowing specialization to give increased benefits like advanced medicine, education, a rising standard of living for a growing population with a small minority engaged in agriculture, and reducded environmental impact what has efficency done for us?
It’s the difference between focusing on biology of a tree and not ecology of a forest
Not systems efficiency in general, specific efficiencies we’re chasing by describing how much time we put into them relative to other time and resource efficiencies we can look for
There’s no efficiency to be found in launching a new phone every couple years? In any context?
Maybe your take is what’s “terse”?
Where did you get this impression from? No such thing is mentioned in the article, not that I saw at least.
After getting all excited about it early on in Wealth if Nations, he later changed his tune in the book.
Later he went on about it being a monstrous thing that would make people as stupid as they can be
It’s a Brave New World out there
I am not a Luddite. Nor do I believe a minority of the human population who can afford these things are owed them at great expense to the planet all humans have to live on
It’s authoritarian to force a future mess on others. That they’d have to chose to clean up & stabilize instead of explore
But the west of course is a bunch of nihilists at heart. Too busy ogling the machine itself to be distracted from the idea their impact could possibly be harmful to ourselves or the species
https://youtu.be/y_7V7tEj2Lo
In the spirit of this I would encourage you to read the original 1909 E.M. Forster piece first before reading this piece of commentary or the replies in this thread: https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machi...
EM Forster was brought to the future, filed a single support ticket, and was sent back to report to his own age
― Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955)
“Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is "no exit"; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology again to find the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years. . . . In our cities there is no more day or night or heat or cold. But there is overpopulation, thralldom to press and television, total absence of purpose. All men are constrained by means external to them to ends equally external. The further the technical mechanism develops that allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1954)
“What is more, the whole apparatus of life has become so complex and the processes of production, distribution, and consumption have become so specialized and subdivided, that the individual person loses confidence in his own unaided capacities: he is increasingly subject to commands he does not understand, at the mercy of forces over which he exercises no effective control, moving to a destination he has not chosen. Unlike the taboo-ridden savage, who is often childishly over-confident in the powers of his shaman or magician to control formidable natural forces, however inimical, the machine-conditioned individual feels lost and helpless as day by day he metaphorically punches his time-card, takes his place on the assembly line, and at the end draws a pay check that proves worthless for obtaining any of the genuine goods of life.
This lack of close personal involvement in the daily routine brings a general loss of contact with reality: instead of continuous interplay between the inner and the outer world, with constant feedback or readjustment and with stimulus to fresh creativity, only the outer world-and mainly the collectively organized outer world of the power system-exercises authority: even private dreams must be channeled through television, film, and disc, in order to become acceptable.
With this feeling of alienation goes the typical psychological problem of our time, characterized in classic terms by Erik Erikson as the 'Identity Crisis.' In a world of transitory family nurture, transitory human contacts, transitory jobs and places of residence, transitory sexual and family relations, the basic conditions for maintaining continuity and establishing personal equilibrium disappear. The individual suddenly awakens, as Tolstoi did in a famous crisis in his own life at Arzamas, to find himself in a strange, dark room, far from home, threatened by obscure hostile forces, unable to discover where he is or who he is, appalled by the prospect of a meaningless death at the end of a meaningless life.”
― Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power (1964)
"On all sides man was continually made to feel the natural limitations of earthly well-being. The efficient ministering of the technical, hygienic and sanitary appliances with which man has surrounded himself is spoiling him. He is losing the good-humored resignation in the daily imperfections of human well-being which formed the disciple of earlier generations.
But at the same time he runs the risk of losing the natural ability to take human happiness as it offers itself, as well. Life is made too easy. Mankind’s moral fiber is giving way under the softening influence of luxury. In earlier civilizations, whether Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or any other, there was always this in contrast: in principle the value of earthly happiness is deprecated relatively to celestial bliss or union with the All. As all these religions, however, do recognize a ...