![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The form of a question may ease our way or pose obstacles. Or, when even slightly altered, it may generate antithetical answers, as in the case of the two priests who, being unsure if it was permissible to smoke and pray at the same time, wrote to the Pope for a definitive answer. One priest phrased the question "Is it permissible to smoke while praying?" and was told it is not, since prayer should be the focus of one's whole attention; the other priest asked if it is permissible to pray while smoking and was told that it is, since it is always appropriate to pray.And this, gentlefolks, is why more than half of the US population is pro-life and more than half is pro-choice.
Karl Marx quote on the first page of today's reading. "[I]s the Iliad possible at all when the printing press and even printing machines exist? Is it not inevitable that with the emergence of the press, the singing and the telling and the muse cease; that is, the conditions for epic poetry disappear?"
Dude, I'm really fond of certain other things you said, but uh that sounds like a challenge.
A little further on, I'm having a mad at the book. So first the author defines 'technocracy':
Which, uh, hi I am a queer atheist. The concept of 'sin' is actively anathema to me and I don't see how getting rid of it—not, I observe, that we collectively have, see Hobby Lobby decision—is a bad thing. So is the concept of 'traditional family life' in any definition of 'traditional' that excludes queer folks, and uh that's every Western or Christian definition of 'traditional family' older than maybe ten years. (You can really tell that the author of this book is a Western Christian.) I know a bunch of religious people who would probably like to have words with this author on the grounds of respecting tradition and finding sustenance in ritual and myth. And I'm an activist. Social responsibility and individual action is the whole point of activism.
Oh, and the strong implication from everything in this book so far is that dependence on technology is bad. Um. I thought social activity was a necessary thing for mental health? Guess where I get all of mine.
Dude, I'm really fond of certain other things you said, but uh that sounds like a challenge.
A little further on, I'm having a mad at the book. So first the author defines 'technocracy':
tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, to some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.And then a lengthy digression on Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo and Newton and Bacon, and then this:
Technocracy did not entirely destroy the traditions of the social and symbolic worlds. Technocracy subordinated these worlds—yes, even humiliated them—but it did not render them totally ineffectual. In nineteenth-century America, there still existed holy men and the concept of sin. There still existed regional pride, and it was possible to conform to traditional notions of family life. It was possible to respect tradition itself and to find sustenance in ritual and myth. It was possible to believe in social responsibility and the practicality of individual action. It was even possible to believe in common sense and the wisdom of the elderly. It was not easy, but it was possible.Strong implication in those words, flat-out stated in the next paragraph, that it is no longer possible to any of those things.
Which, uh, hi I am a queer atheist. The concept of 'sin' is actively anathema to me and I don't see how getting rid of it—not, I observe, that we collectively have, see Hobby Lobby decision—is a bad thing. So is the concept of 'traditional family life' in any definition of 'traditional' that excludes queer folks, and uh that's every Western or Christian definition of 'traditional family' older than maybe ten years. (You can really tell that the author of this book is a Western Christian.) I know a bunch of religious people who would probably like to have words with this author on the grounds of respecting tradition and finding sustenance in ritual and myth. And I'm an activist. Social responsibility and individual action is the whole point of activism.
Oh, and the strong implication from everything in this book so far is that dependence on technology is bad. Um. I thought social activity was a necessary thing for mental health? Guess where I get all of mine.
With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-worlds [that is, the traditional worldview] disappears. Technopoly eliminate alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy.I can't even words my problems with this statement.
As I write (in fact, it is the reason why I write), the United States is the only culture to have become a Technopoly.
