(dis)Orientation

Technology's Impact on the Changing Human Landscape

I have not written in awhile, but I was invited to be interviewed for a podcast soon by nopornmillenial (I’ll let you know the venue as soon as I know it) and thought I would lay out some thoughts on the true impact by technological advances upon human consciousness, culture, society, psychology, and being in advance of this interview. My topic here is not the topic of the interview proposed, but I hope this essay will help you get to know me and serve as a kind of foundation for what I will end up saying to “Colorado Mac” in that interview. I offer him my appreciation for his reaching out to me for this opportunity after hearing me speak with #criticallythinkinganddrinking” in X “Spaces,” for which I was an invited co-host for Spaces on Just War Theory and Tribalism. My handle there is @GregoryBorse, so look those Spaces up and give them a listen. I hope you will be edified.

My apologies for not using this space for awhile. I value it and I am thankful that my subscribers continue to show interest in my thoughts. To be honest (and I have been disorganized in this effort), I am trying to resurrect the idea of the public intellectual in the consciousness of the American public and have failed to give it the attention it deserves. I would be remiss if I did not mention the public intellects I admire even as I point out they are a dying breed. G.K. Chesterton is a formative influence. So is C.S. Lewis, the Christian Apologist especially, despite the fact that I am solidly Catholic. J.R.R. Tolkien, William Faulkner (despite my complete ignorance of his religious attachments) and Flannery O’Connor have exerted much pressure on my intellect and heart. I also admired Charles Krauthammer and George Will (before he abandoned his honor). Jordan Peterson has emerged as an important contrarian and Victor Davis Hanson has cemented himself, in my view, as a national treasure. My own more sinewy influences include Donald and Louise Cowan, founders of the University of Dallas, who “adopted” me and my peers as graduate students—and were much influenced by “The Fugitives” of Vanderbilt, included among them Allan Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Caroline Gordon, and Donald Davidson as well as the tangential “Agrarians,” including Andrew Lytle (whom my Bride and I met and shared a bourbon with on our honeymoon), and Melvin Bradford, who had a dim view of my Senior Project on Faulkner for my BA at the University of Dallas. I mention with affection and gratitude direct influences John Alvis, Fr. Robert Maguire, Scott Dupree, Eileen Gregory, Dona and Herschel Gower, philosopher Frederick Wilhelmsen, Rome Program Director James Fougerousse, and Raymond DiLorenzo. I am forever grateful to Frederick Turner, friend and mentor, of the University of Texas at Richardson, and my dissertation director at LSU, Bainard Cowan, student of Cleanth Brooks at Yale University, who, I think, gets pride of place in my constellation of influences.

I offer this miniature pantheon in the hopes that you, my dear reader, will look up these names and get a sense of the people who made me the intellect I am today. I am gaining something of a minor following on social media and would like to grow my own influence not because I want to make money or aggrandize myself but because what I think what I was given is worth paying forward. I also offer it so that history will note that I thanked those who gave me the tools to become a happy warrior for what I firmly believe is the Truth will get their due credit for such a gift and I will thereby encourage you to, in the future, extend such a courtesy to your benefactors.

My subject tonight is the impact of technological advances upon Human Habitation of the Earth. This is a very large subject and I lean upon my own benefactors for insights offered as gifts and so the forgoing list is a kind of list of gratitude. The earliest leap for humans was in the command of Fire. It must have been seen as immediately necessary for survival and the earliest information we have for its impact on human civilization indicate two obvious things: the recognition that while this very destructive force that rain by lightning from the sky and scattered the animals upon whom men and women depended for survival and burned the forests, its capture and manipulation was essential to gaining a tactical advantage against the very forces of (divine) Nature upon which the early tribes depended and reckoned against for survival. The ability to capture fire and to transport it as burning embers from place to place to guarantee warmth in winter and the cooking of meat was essential to a human increase in comfort and stability. This, with the eventual domestication of the seed and the animal (I think in that order) established farming as a more stable way of life and banished foraging and wandering as a thing of the past. These advances allowed humans to stop moving constantly and gave them weapons against the depredations of Fate and forces over which they had no control. It also bore the very idea of private property and the notion that trade itself could be a defense against constant war.

It is naively seen, today, as an advance. And such a notion is not unmistaken unless it links such an advance as a cure to the flaws of human being: greed, fear, selfishness, laziness, deceit, and those features of our fallen being that mean humans will ever human. TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES do not cure our ills; they only complicate them. Puritan as it seems to say, technological advances do not cure our ills, they just give us new ways to fail.

For a long time on earth, for instance, the tribal order was the dominant way of life for the vast majority of human beings. We post-moderns sentimentally, perhaps over-influenced by Rousseau, imagine that such a “primitive” life was without the strife of competition and war. But all of the ancient Epics tell us we are wrong. Ancient peoples were as complicated, smart, and flawed as we are. Agamemnon and Achilles display all of the flaws we possess in our own actions and character and Clytemnestra’s anger and vengeance is as present in the Orestaia as it is in HBO’S Succession or the brilliant Justified or True Detective.

Note, however, that humanity’s experience over the long course of its life on this planet is marked by transformations birthed by advances in technology. These advances I make no argument are not the only drivers of change, but they are huge. Fire. The Domestication of the Seed and Animal. Iron. Bronz. The Arch. This short list constitutes monumental advances for the human animal and each changes the world for man. But look up the gaps in time between them. They too are monumental.

Which raises a question. When the Renaissance and the Age of Reason. I cannot cite a source at the moment (I think it is Donald Cowan in “Unbinding Prometheus,” by the way), but something like 95% of all technological advances in human history have happened since the Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution. Note too that the vast majority of these advances were simply better extensions of the human musculo-skeletal system: Industrial Age inventions are extensions of the human body. A bull dozer is just a giant who can move a massive amount of dirt. A crane is a giant that can life and place a great weight. An automobile looks like what it does. All are advances and aggrandizements of what the human body is designed to do.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Forum.

The Nuclear Age, the Computer Age, disconnected us from our own bodies. The tech advances are not imitations and extensions of our muscle and bone. They are extensions of our nervous system and our brains. And this advance has meant that we experience ourselves outside of our own bodies.

This reality explains a lot—from porn to body dysmorphia to social media and individual pathologies we’ve never seen before.

And this is what I want to talk to Colorado Mac about and what I want to talk to you about.

Thanks for reading Fellow Travelers. There is hope. ;