I’m reading The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson and find it interesting that Isaacson sees matters in terms of individual effort vs collaboration, parallel to my efforts to deal with human being in its individual and communal forms.
The research laboratories such as Lawrence Livermore operated by the US government and those operated by Disney or Microsoft were and are similar to those centers of research in materials and and optics and colors which were the workshops of Michelangelo and other premodern artists. Communities of poets in New York or Paris, wide-ranging think tanks such as the Institute for Advanced Study or the Aspen Institute, the many physics and mathematics and electrical engineering departments throughout the West, became centers of innovation because of the concentration of talent gathered to interact for conferences or perhaps for career-long stays. Some such as the Aspen Institute tried consciously to re-integrate humanistic knowledge and creative efforts into this modern world of such great technological innovation. Many individual scientists retained stronger and deeper attachments to humane activities than did most in the West. I’ll note only this: Einstein was not so unusual among scientists in being a very serious violinist and pianist.
In any case, technological innovation continues to advance in robotics and animation as does innovation in fields of theoretical science, at least in the sense of filling in gaps and settling some well-defined questions in particle physics (the mysterious Higgs Boson has been found though it be a bit less than divine) and in theories of gravity (the long-sought gravity waves have been found).
Those scientists who have developed ways to explore the human past through genes have done their work and so have those who have produced miraculous materials that make possible our cell-phones; we are deaf to rumors that the rare metals used in those materials are mined in Africa by slaves. We are also blind to the link between such technologies and emerging damage to individuals and communities, though we talk fearfully at times of the younger generations being increasingly less literate, less knowledgeable about history or their family’s traditional faith, more apathetic in many situations and more inclined to sink into a world of video games and Internet pornography and constant communication with distant friends even as they ignore the three friends at their side.
Innovation continues in technology and some other parts of human life and yet there seems little point to it but for the well-paid amateurs (lovers) who still possess the passion of Victorian gentlemen scientists. And for those who profit from it all. For the rest of us, the announcement of another possible ancestor, or ancestral cousin, of mankind or an article tracking the movements of post-glacial man into Europe, means little. It would seem that, without a substantial communal mind and without the overall understanding which is much of that mind, we can’t even think through the implications of our genetic knowledge of historical and prehistorical movements of entire peoples or of large groups of armed men who took the wealth and women of other men in the regions of conquest.
So it is that science and technology in the West move forward even as the West decays. (That forward movement shows signs of slowing down or even stopping, but such trends are hard to read with any confidence.)
We have enough technology to give a high standard of living to every living human being, if we could figure out how to distribute goods in a moral and well-ordered way to the many who—let’s be blunt—have found themselves useless in the modern world, for the many able to get only jobs which could be done by halfhearted 12 year-olds or mentally handicapped adults. If they can even get those jobs.
Our problem isn’t lack of advanced technology and we remain competent or better at innovating in technology as Isaacson and other historians and journalists tell us. We’re good at it and we continue to do it even as our political and religious and educational and cultural institutions have decayed into bad jokes. We make ever more advanced cell-phones for the use of 24 year-old holders of (undeserved?) college degrees in English or chemistry or electrical engineering, even as those young men and women move toward behaviors already adopted by the next older generation: high rates of alcoholism and heroin usage and suicide. Land of the junkies and home of the brain-dead.
Our problem is lack of innovation on the human side: the deeper understandings we need, the rich and meaningful social and political and cultural and religious practices which would result from those understandings. Despite the general decay of American educational institutions and rumors of an increasing tendency of talented foreign students to stay in their own countries or to return to them, IBM has little trouble assembling teams of scientists who can build computers which can replace chess grandmasters and TV game-players and, soon enough, those computers will be replacing teams of scientists who can build the next generation of computers…
What the hell is the point of it all? Suppose we solve one major set of problems and learn to give a good life to all, working or not. What will we live for? Maybe for another go at that virtual machine in our living rooms that can give us a greater sexual arousal than anyone has imagined? Maybe we can spend our days in some Disney theme-park? Maybe members of future generations will look up from a blackjack table at the walls without windows or clocks and wonder if they’re in Las Vegas or Atlantic City or maybe Casino City on Mars?
We need innovators who can produce a civilization. Not in one fell swoop to be sure. It will take a century or more to build a new West, even as we perhaps get to watch other civilizations currently in formation passing us by.
What should those innovators be doing? Whatever they feel they should be doing. There is no formula for innovation.
There are conditions which make innovation more likely, such as the proximity of various sorts of talented men and women, but there is no formula for innovation. As a rule, it occurs in response to opportunities or needs, at least it occurs in living and energetic communities. The very lack of innovation in recent centuries in the fields usually described as `humanist’, political and social and religious and philosophical and literary and others, testifies to a great decrease of confidence and of energy, of faith and of curiosity about concrete reality as well as curiosity of those abstract regions explored by mathematicians and some poets and philosophers.
I struggle to re-understand this world as part of a greater Creation, the work of the God of Jesus Christ, but most in the modern West aren’t much interested in a revival of Christian thought or of Christian civilization, not even most Christians so far as I can tell. While decadents revel in the false freedoms of a rotting civilization, many Christians seek no better than shelter in the houses or cathedrals not yet fallen down, wishing to personally remain Christians but not to draw the attention of the worldly powers.
No, don’t listen to the cries of Christians that they are innocent victims. The secularists melt down to strange sorts of barbarians but those who claim to be Christians simply wish for and pray for a magical restoration of civil order and respect for Christianity and other traditional religions, for a return to a blander sort of secularism which respects Christmas and religious memorials for those who died in war. Those Christians have no interest in a re-understanding that sees Creation anew in light of both Christian revelation and some quite disturbing recently gained knowledge of God in His role as Creator. I’m referring to knowledge of how the human race separated from our chimpanzee cousins about 5 million years ago, knowledge of the movements of populations across Eurasia which movements often involved bands of men moving in to kill the native men and take their women, of gut bacteria which can manipulate our moods, of parasites which can alter our intelligence levels (slightly) and our social behaviors and maybe our sexual preferences.
The innovators we need will produce new understandings of Creation which merge understandings of recently discovered and quite disturbing aspects of Creation with old understandings of other disturbing aspects of Creation and with some traditional understandings which seem yet true and with the revealed truths of Christianity (mostly found in the ancient Creeds).
The West seems to have reached its end, though I struggle as if to help save it, knowing that the good I accomplish is more likely to feed into the new or old civilizations outside of the West. Strangely enough, it does somewhat bother me that this possibility no longer bothers me. We have shown that it took only a little prosperity to distract us from our duties to God and to future generations and I’m plain tired of even trying to talk to other Christians about the true nature of our problems. I can only dream of the energizing effect of being around others who wish to develop a new Christian (or Jewish or even virtuous pagan) understanding of reality.