Illusion and Reality

There are a number of incidents in history that changed humanity’s ways of belief and conduct.  In elementary school I was taught that the first incidents of the uses of fire changed the human menu and dictated meal preparation that held for centuries, some of which continues in our era.  The wheel was given similar reputation for significant change in the way things were done, and the expansion of the orbit of mankind’s activity, even introducing business as process.  Old ways faded, new ones grew.  We were introduced to great change in the emergence of the Greco-Roman culture, so becoming more cerebral and progressive as the mind began to ponder the laws of nature and super-nature (space theories), especially as the planets and stars became a part of consideration.  At first, the world was explored using stars for navigation.  The Fall of Rome was noted as a change agent, which is something of a distortion in that the west tended to absorb the Hun invasion, but the blame for the dilution of the former civilization fell on the defeat of the Roman military.  In Europe the church held things together, introducing new insights and culture until the Renaissance emerged to capture some of what had been lost or recast from the Greeks and Romans, especially the Greeks for culture and the Romans for law.  The blanket coverage influenced virtually all the factors of human societies, aided by other dramatic events – like the printing press, explosive powder, and onward to general education, internal combustion engines, and industrial complexes shifting majority life from rural communities to cities.  Great change is now under way relative to technology with enormous problems to be addressed, such as employment of the work force.  Labor is the only wealth we can offer to a nation. We are now going through change dictated by mechanization, science that uses invisible forces like rays, robots, communication channels, sophistication, and other massive influences falling all at once, closely coupled, to create a new world.  That world seems likely to change the family, to reduce the forms of the past that required physical labor in great quantity, and offering lesser meaning for human habitation so to reduce perceptions of children and family.  Family is already being defined in a different paradigm than that held since the beginning of known history.  As the old idea of society serving the Divine Right of Kings has been switched in many nations to the divine human rights of the people, there appears to be a new paradigm emerging that the power brokers are expected to find a way to meet the needs of the people so to gain a tranquility that will permit them to do as they please, within conflicting boundaries.  Life will emerge in this paradigm encapsulated in the ancient saying that: Romans were satisfied with bread and circuses.  It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.  Human expectations have never been higher than they are in this new millennium – the twenty-first.  It is unlikely those expectations can be met without some conflict and suffering.  A fresh future is not assured.

Analysts have written on the theme, some meaningfully, some wishfully, and some nonsensically.  Some analysts using oral media have missed effectiveness, what with melodramatic approaches that become the grist for exchange rather than grist ideas they might promulgate.  One may appear only when he is ranting.  Another fails for his disrespect; another for skipping questions to attack persons (ad hominem). A physician and writer, concerned about directions civilization is taking, has addressed large current social issues about life and society that may be growing so as to indicate a new kind of dark age.  One title: Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass, reviews the lives and directions of the lower financial and educational levels of communities.  He spent years, primarily in England but also in other countries including Africa, studying changes pointing to continuing decline for populations.  In summary, he found entitlement to be the emerging factor, practiced in a way that removed responsibility from the citizenry.  His blame fell hardest on those upper classes sustaining irresponsibility – believing it to be solution.  Human beings, if he is correct, can be reduced to animals even by their own actions, fed at a trough, released to the meadow, and expected to live without complaint.  We wonder where it will take the nations, economies, families and ideals for life.  Blame for disaster is passed to others.  With Shakespeare, Daniels calls this foppery.  We are responsible for change.  God’s objectives never change.