True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise human doubts often, and changes one’s mind; the unwise individual is obstinate, and doubts not; one knows all things but one’s own unenlightenment. As you know, self-consumers have a self-production supply below the self-consumption demand for a good or service. In turn, this is called prosuming, and it is defined by the prevailing economic activity at the continuum production-consumption scale. Prosuming, for example, is like a person who has solar panels on their home, which produces the electricity they use, and when there is a surplus, they can sell it to the power company. No act of contemporary prosuming, however, has had as explosive an effect on business and international relations as the pet project of a twenty-one-year-old college student that has shaken the software industry—and some would say World capitalism itself. While studying at Helsinki University, Linus Torvalds worked with Minix, an offshoot of the UNIX operating system used in giant computers. Dissatisfied with it, he set out to build a new version for PCs. After working on this for three years as a pet project without pay, he succeeded in 1994 in releasing the core of what is now the Linux operating system. Linux has been called “free-to-share” software because, unlike proprietary products from Microsoft and other companies, it uses an underlying source code that is public and free. This makes it possible for others to adapt Linux to their own needs or to base new commercial products on it, so long as access to the source code remains open. The Linux operating system today is supported by many computer manufacturers and is used by millions around the World. It is being used in about 40 percent of American companies. However, Linux’s impact goes far beyond that of U.S. business.

As of 2022, governments at all levels (national, state, federal and international) have opted to deploy Linux across their computer systems for a host of reasons. Some are purely technological, with the governments in question preferring the open-source benefits of the operating system (OS). Other are financial, as Linux is typically far less expensive than buying a license for Windows. Still others are political, as organizations like the World Trade Organization have actively pressured governments to shun Microsoft products. In any case, here are some of the governing bodies that now run Linux on their computers: U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Navy Submarine Fleet, The City of Munich, Germany; Spain, Federal Aviation Administration, French Parliament, State-Owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Pakistani Schools & Colleges, Cuba, Macedonia’s Ministry of Education and Science, U.S. Postal Service, U.S. Federal Courts, Government of Mexico City, Garden Grove, California; Largo, Florida; as well as many other countries and organizations including Novell, Google, IBM, Panasonic, Virgin America, Cisco, New York Stock Exchange, and many more. Governments around the World, eager to save money and develop their own software industries, have promoted the use of Linux. In China, Linux is the operating system in the state postal bureau, the Ministry of Foreign Trade and China Central Television, and the government is strongly pushing public officials at all levels to adopt it. The Brazilian government has directed its agencies to shift to Linux or other open-source software. India has installed Linux at its central bank and local Treasury departments. According to United Press International, “Governments Worldwide have invested more than $2 billion in Linux” and “more than 160 different governments Worldwide use Linux programs.”

Linux Operating System market size is projected to reach USD15.64 billion by the end of 2027. The increasing product applications across diverse industry verticals will bode well for market growth. According to a report published by Fortune Business Insights, titled “Linux Operating Systems Market Size, Share and COVID-19 Impact Analysis, by Distribution (Virtual Machines, Servers and Desktops), by end-use Commercial/Enterprise and Individual), and Regional Forecast, 2020-2027,” the market was worth USD3.89 billion in 2019 and will exhibit a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.2 percent during the forecast period, 2020-2027. The Linux bandwagon had leaped beyond individual nations and companies to the regional level. Thus officials from China, Japan and South Korea have met recently to discuss using Linux under a common information-technology policy. Nor does the enthusiasm for Linux end there. At a U.N. conference on I.T., major nations urged delegates to endorse open-source software as a key to reducing the digital divine. All this originated from the unpaid work of Torvalds and a large, spatially dispersed network of prosumer-programmers, connected through the Internet and freely volunteering their time and effort to enhance the product collectively. What Torvalds and the Linux programmers did, therefore, has had powerful effects within the money economy. Linux does not mean the end of capitalism as some of its enthusiasts have suggested. However, it shows, once more, how strongly prosumers activity can impact the money economy. And even Linux is only a fraction of a still-larger story. If knowledge is one of the deep fundamentals on which revolutionary wealth increasingly depends, then how we access and organize knowledge relates directly to growth in the money economy.

Today it has become almost impossible to think of the World without the Internet and the Internet without the World Wide Web—two of the most powerful knowledge tools ever invented. The Web—that ubiquitous “www”—combines the Internet with the ability to cross-connect data, information and knowledge of every kind in new ways. It is hard to remember what things were like in 1980, when a young software engineer at CERN, the Center for European Nuclear Research in Geneva, began thinking about how to access disparate, non-hierarchical bits and pieces of knowledge and link them together. Often called the father of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, in his book Weaving the Web, recalls his days at CERN: “I wrote Enquire, my first web-like program…in my spare time and for my personal use, and for no loftier reason than to help me remember the connections among the various people, computers and projects at the lab.” In short, the Web itself was a result of presumption. The result was a knowledge tool that transformed not only the way our culture thinks and young people learn but, increasingly, the way money is made, business is done, economics operate and wealth is created. Further, if the examples of Torvalds and Berners-Lee are not enough, what should one make of the Internet itself and the three billion sites on the Web—a significant share of which are the products of prosuming? Tens, if not hundreds of thousands or prosuming professors and students, often on their own time, are pouring out their brains, filling the net with academic papers and research on every conceivable topic from medieval history to mathematics. Using the Internet—which revolutionizes our relationship to the deep fundamentals of space and knowledge—scientists, again often on unpaid time, commune to debate the latest findings in every field from proteomics to plastics.

Metallurgists and managers, magazine writers and military experts dig though the billions of pages of information on the net and freely add to them. And hundreds of thousands of “do-it-yourself journalists” report or comment on the news of the day in their online Web logs, or blogs. Assume we ruthlessly subtract, say, 95 percent of all these Net and Web sites as baldly commercial or else irrelevant, silly, inaccurate or of interest to only a few. We are still left with 150 million sites with content that can be searched, connected and juxtaposed in countless patterns to produce fresh, imaginative ways of thinking about almost every aspect of wealth creation and life. This ever-expanding Internet content results in part from one of the biggest volunteer projects in human history. Prosumers, through their contributions to its structure and content, accelerate innovation in the visible marketplace. They are partly responsible for changes in how, when and where we work, how companies are linked to customers and suppliers and just about every other aspect of the visible economy. Economists may continue to argue over the Net and/or Web’s contribution to what they regard as “growth.” They may persist in ignoring growth created by prosumers. However, they will not begin to and hidden economies—whether in the form of parenting, improving health, engaging in do-it-yourself endeavors, creating new businesses, identifying new needs, organize vast volumes of knowledge for the knowledge economy. It is when we put the two together—the money economy and its non-money counterpart—that we form what we call the wealth-creation system. And once we do, a new fact becomes clear: The money system is going to expand dramatically. However, what we do without money will have a bigger and bigger impact on what we do with money. Prosumers are the unsung heroes of the economy to come.

It was Locke who wanted to preserve the primacy of the sentiments of nature in the civil order, and the result of his mistake is the bourgeois. Rousseau invented the term in its modern sense, and with it we find ourselves at the great source of modern intellectual life. The comprehensiveness and subtlety of his analysis of the phenomenon left nothing new to be said about it, and the Right and the Left forever after accepted his description of modern man as simply true, while the Center was impressed, intimidated, and put on the defensive by it. So persuasive was Rousseau that he destroyed the self-confidence of the Enlightenment at the moment of its triumph. It must not be forgotten that Rousseau begins his critique from fundamental agreements with Locke, whom he greatly admired, about the animal man. Man is by nature a solitary being, concerned only with his preservation and his comfort. Rousseau, moreover, agrees that man makes civil society by contract, for the sake of his preservation. He disagrees with Locke that self-interest, however understood, is in any automatic harmony with what civil society needs and demands. If Rousseau is right, man’s reason, calculating his best interest, will not lead him to wish to be a good citizen, a law-abiding citizen. He will either be himself, or he will be a citizen, or he will try to be both and be neither. In other words, enlightenment is not enough to establish society, and even tends to dissolve it. The road from the state of nature was very long, and nature is distant from us now. A self-sufficient, solitary being must have undergone many changes to become a needy, social one. On the way, the goal of happiness was exchanged for the pursuit of safety and comfort, the means of achieving happiness. Civil society is surely superior to a condition of scarcity and universal war.

All this artifice, however, preserves a being who no longer knows what he is, who is so absorbed with existing that he has forgotten his reason for existing, who in the event of actually attaining full security and perfect comfort has no notion of what to do. Progress culminates in the recognition that life is meaningless. Hobbes was surely right to look for the most powerful sentiments in humans, those that exist independently of opinion and are always part of humans. However, fear of death, however powerful it may be and however useful it may be as a motive for seeking peace, and hence, law with teeth in it, cannot be the fundamental experience. It presupposes an even more fundamental one: that life is good. The deepest experience is the pleasant sentiment of existence. The idle, savage man can enjoy that sentiment. The busy bourgeois cannot, with his hard work and his concern with dealing with others rather than being oneself. Nature still has something of the greatest importance to tell us. We may be laboring to master it, but the reason for mastering nature comes from nature. The fear of death on which Hobbes relied, and which is also decisive for Locke, insists on the negative experience of nature and obliterates the positive experience presupposed by it. This positive experience is somehow still active in us; we are full of vague dissatisfactions in our forgetfulness, but our minds must make an enormous effort to find the natural sweetness of life in its fullness. The way back is at least as long as the one that brought us here. For Hobbes and Locke nature is near and unattractive, and man’s movement into society was easy and unambiguously good. For Rousseau nature is distant and attractive, and the movement was hard and divided man. Just when nature seemed to have been finally cast out or overcome in us. Rousseau gave birth to an overwhelming longing for it in us. Our lost wholeness is there. One is reminded of Plato’s Symposium, but there the longing for wholeness was directed toward knowledge of the ideas, of the ends.

In Rousseau longing is, in its initial expression, for the enjoyment of the primitive feelings, found at the origins in the state of nature. Plato would have untied with Rousseau against the bourgeois in his insistence on the essential humanness of longing for the good, as opposed to careful avoidance of the bad. Neither longing nor enthusiasm belongs to the bourgeois. The story of philosophy and the arts under Rousseau’s influence has been the search for, or fabrication of, plausible objects of longing to counter bourgeois well-being and self-satisfaction. Part of that story has been the bourgeois’ effort to acquire the culture of longing as part of its self-satisfaction. The opposition between nature and society is Rousseau’s interpretation of the cause of the dividedness of humans. He finds that the bourgeois experiences this dividedness in conflict between self-love and love of others, inclination and duty, sincerity and hypocrisy, being oneself and being alienated. This opposition between nature and society pervades all modern discussion of the human problem. Hobbes and Locke made the distinction in order to overcome all the tensions caused in man by the distinction in order to overcome all the tensions caused in man by the demands of virtue, and then to make wholeness easy for him. They thought that they had reduced the distance between inclination and duty by deriving all duty from inclination; Rousseau argued that, if anything, they had increased that distance. He thus restored the older, pre-modern sense of the dividedness of humans and hence of the complexity of his attainment of happiness, the pursuit of which liberal society guarantees one while making its attainment impossible. However, the restoration takes place on very different grounds, as can be seen in the fact that in the past human traced the tension to the irreconcilable demands of body and soul, not of nature and society.

This too opens up a rich field for reflection on Rousseau’s originality. The blame shifts, and the focus of the perennial quest for unity is altered. Man was born whole, and it is at least conceivable that he become whole once again. Hope and despair of a kind not permitted by the body-soul distinction arise, What one is to think of oneself and one’s desires changes. The correctives range from revolution to therapy, but there is little place for the confessional or for mortification of the flesh. Rousseau’s Confessions were, in opposition to those of Augustine, intended to show that he was born good, that the body’s desires are good, that there is no original sin. Man’s nature has been maimed by a long history; and now he must live in society, for which he is not suited and which makes impossible demands on him. There is either an uneasy acquiescence to the present or the attempt in one way or another to return to the past, or the search for a creative synthesis of the two poles, nature and society. These are the essence of the social and political thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tht took off from Rousseau’s critique of liberalism. The nature-society distinction is more than familiar to all of us. We know it best from Dr. Freud, in whose account of the unconscious is to be found lost nature, as well as the whole harsh history that took us out of nature; in whose account of the neuroses one sees the effects of civilization’s demands on us; and in whose account of the reality principle one recognizes grim adjustments to bourgeois society. The easy solution to man’s dividedness in early modern thought is rejected, but a solution is still expected. The search for solutions, easy or difficult, to the problem is the stamp of modernity, while antiquity treated the fundamental tensions as permanent.

The first reaction to the self’s maladaptation to society, its recalcitrance to the rationality of preservation and property, is the attempt to recover the self’s pristine state, to live according to its first inclinations, to “get in touch with one’s feelings,” to live naturally, simply, without society’s artificially generated desires, dependencies, hypocrisies. The side of Rousseau’s thought that arouses nostalgia for nature came to the United States of America early on, in the life and writings of Thoreau. Recently, joined to many other movements, it came to full flower and found a wide public. Anarchism in one form or another is an expression of this longing, which arises as soon as politics and laws are understood to be repression, perhaps necessary, but nonetheless repressions of our inclinations rather than perfections of them or modes of satisfying them. For the first time in the history of political philosophy, no natural impulse is thought to lead toward civil society, or to find its satisfaction within it. Yet those who first drew the distinction between nature and society (which obviously means society is completely of human making, not in any way natural), thought that the preference would be immediately and without hesitation for society. As a matter of fact, the distinction was made in other to emphasize how desirable civil society is, how fragile man’s existence naturally is, and thus to extinguish those passions based on imagining that protection comes from nature or God, that rebel against civil society. Man, if he is sensible, separates himself from nature and becomes its master and conqueror. This was and still is the prevailing belief of liberal democracies, with their peace, gentleness, prosperity, productivity and applied science, particularly medical science. All this was held to be a great advance over the brutish natural condition.

Locke said that “a day-laborer in England is better clothed, housed, and fed than king in America,” meaning an Indian chief. However, if pride, independence, contempt for death, freedom from anxiety about the future and other such qualities are taken into consideration, Tocqueville notes that there is nevertheless something in the comparison. From the point of view of this savage, nature begins to look good rather than bad. Nature that excludes humans and their corrupting hand becomes an object of respect. It gives guidance where previously there was only man’s whim. The old view that cities are properly the peaks of nature is never considered and is barely comprehensible. The city is cut loose from nature and is a product of man’s art. Very different values can be attached to cities, but both sides begin from the same premise. Now there are two competing views about man’s relation to nature, both founded on the modern distinction between nature and society. Nature is the raw material of man’s freedom from harsh necessity, or else man is the polluter of nature. Nature in both cases means dead nature, or nature without man and untouched by man—mountains, forests, lakes and rivers. Our nation, a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke’s views of the state of the farmers who never looked at America’s trees, fields and streams with a romantic eye. The trees are to be felled, to make clearings, build houses and heat them; the fields are to be tilled to produce more food, or mined for whatever is necessary to make machines run; the streams ae there to be used as waterways for transporting food, or as sources of power. On the other hand, there is the Sierra Club, which is dedicated to preventing such violations of nature from going any further, and certainly seems to regret what was already done.

More interesting is the coexistence of these opposing sentiments in the most advanced minds of our day. Nature is raw material, worthless without the mixture of human labor; yet nature is also the highest and most sacred thing. The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion. Reverence for nature, mastery of nature—whichever is convenient. The principle of contradiction has been repealed. This is the direct result of the two state-of-nature teachings. Locke’s is responsible for our institutions, justifies our absorption with private property and the free market, and gives us our sense of right. Rousseau’s lies behind the most prevalent views of what life is about and how to seek healing for our wounds. The former teaches that adjustment to civil society is almost automatic; the latter that such adjustment is very difficult indeed and requires all kinds of intermediaries between it and lost nature. The two outstanding intellectual types of our day represent these two teachings. The crips, positive, efficient, no-nonsense economist is the Lockean; the deep, brooding, somber psychoanalyst is the Rousseauan. In principle their positions are incompatible, but easygoing America provides them with a modus vivendi. Economists tell us how to make money; psychiatrists give us a place to spend it. Is severe acute Television intoxication real or are some people just insane and the TV is programing us to recognize their behavior with some of its programs? Or perhaps it is a form of psychosis? I do not think of myself as hypnotized while watching television. I prefer another frequently used phrase. “When I put on the television, after a while there is the feeling that images are just pouring into me and there is nothing I am able to do about them.” This liquid quality of television imagery derives from the simple fact that television sets its own visual pace.

One image is always evolving into the nest, arriving in a stream of light and proceeding inward to the brain at its own electronic speed. The viewer has no way to slow the flow, except to turn off the set altogether. If you decide to watch television, then there is no choice but to accept the stream of electronic images as it comes. The first effect of this is to create a passive mental attitude. Since there is no way to stop the images, one merely gives over to them. More than this, one has to clear all channels f reception to allow them in more cleanly. Thinking only gets in the way. There is a second difficulty. Television information seems to be more in the unconscious than the conscious regions of the mind where it would be possible to think about it. I first felt this was true based on my own television viewing. I noticed how difficult it was to keep mentally alter while watching television. Even so the images kept flowing into me. I have since received many similar descriptions from correspondents. One friend, Justin Harris, described his feeling that “as if they were dreams, the images seem to pass right through me, they go away inside past my consciousness into a deeper level of my mind.” As we study how the TV images are formed, it is possible to understand how Harris’s description might be keenly accurate. I have described the way the retina collects impressions emanating from dots. The picture is formed only after it is well inside of your brain. The image does not exist in the World, and so cannot be observed as you would observe another person, or a car, or a fight. The images pass through your eyes in a dematerialized form, invisible. They are reconstituted only after they are already inside your head.

Perhaps this quality of nonexistence, at least in concrete Worldly form, disqualifies this image information from being subject to conscious processes: thinking, discernment, analysis. You may think about the sound but not the images. Television viewing may then qualify as a kind of wakeful dreaming, except that it is a stranger’s dream, from a faraway place, though it plays against the screen of your mind. The stillness required of the eyes while watching the small television screen is surely an important contributor to this feeling of being bypassed by the images as they proceed merrily into our unconscious minds. There are hundreds of studies to show that eye movement and thinking are directly connected. The act of seeking information with the eyes requires and also causes the seeker/viewer to be alert, active, not passively accepting whatever comes. There are corollary studies which show that when the eyes are not moving, but instead are staring zombielike, thinking is diminished. Television images are not sought, they just arrive in a direct channel, all on their own, from cathode to brain. If indeed this means that television imagery does bypass thinking and discernment, then it would certainly be more difficult to make use of whatever information was delivered into your head that way. If you see a person standing in your living room, you can say, “There is a person; how do I feel about this?” If, however, the person is not perceived until she is constructed inside your unconscious mind, you would have to bring the image up and out again, as it were, in order to think about it. The process is similar to the way we struggle to keep our dream images after waking. If the television images have any similarity to dream imagery, then this would surely help explain a growing confusion between the concrete and the imaginary. Television is becoming real to many people while their lives take on the quality of a dream.

It would also help explain recent studies, quoted by Marie Winn and many others, that children are showing a decline in recallable memory and in the ability to learn in such a way that articulation and the written word are usable forms of expression. We may have entered an era when information is fed directly into the mass subconscious. If so, then television is every bit Huxley’s hypnopaedic machines and Tausk’s influencing machine. Have you ever kept a journal or a diary? At various times in my life I have done both. Sometimes I have recorded dreams, sometimes waking experiences. I have found the process very educational. The act of recording a dream or the events or feelings of the day is an act of transferring internal information from the unconscious mind, where it is stored, into the conscious mind, where you can think about it. In this way patterns can be seen, understanding developed, and perhaps personal change stimulated. Whether or not you have kept a journal, I am sure you are aware of the difference between a dream which you are able to describe in words, and one that you cannot quite get at. In the former case, the more you talk, the more of it comes into your awareness. The talking seems to drag it up from the unconscious space where it seeks to return. Once you have descried a dream to a friend, or written it down in a journal, you have latterly moved it out of one mental territory, where it was inaccessible, into another territory (consciousness), where it is accessible. At that point you can think about it. The same is true with a review of the day’s activities. At the end of the day, most of us feel that the day has been in blur of activity. If you review it, however, either out loud to a friend or in writing, the day takes on patterns that you would otherwise miss. The events become concrete, integrated with your conscious mind, available.

Entire culture are based on this process of transferring information from the unconscious to the conscious mind. The most widely studied are the Senoi people of Malaysia, who begin each day by describing the details of their dreams to each other. The Balinese do this unconscious-conscious transfer process via shadow theater, in which people’s behavior is “played back” so it can be consciously noted and discussed. Other cultures talk a lot, describing the details of life’s intimate experiences all day long. Describing the details helps one “see” them and understand them. In America, where people are less in the habit of intimate conversation, the feedback role has been given to therapists, particularly those who work with groups. The therapy is in the talking and in the response of group members brining the unsaid into awareness. In some ways, reading a book also has a feedback role because reading is a kind of interactive process, similar to conversation or writing in journals. Unlike images, words that you read do not pour into you. The reader, not the book, sets the pace. All people read at different speeds and rhythms. When you are reading you have the choice of rereading, stopping to think or underlining. All of these acts further conscious awareness of the material being read. You effectively create the information you wish to place in your conscious mind. We have all had the experience of reading a paragraph only to realize that we had not absorbed any of it. This requires going over the paragraph a second time, deliberately giving it conscious effort. It is only with conscious effort and direct participation at one’s own speed that words gain any meaning to a reader. Imagines require nothing of the sort. They only require that your eyes be open. The images enter you and are record in memory whether you think about them or not. They pour into you like fluid into a container. You are the container. The television is the pourer.

In the end, the viewer little more than a vessel of reception, and television itself is less a communication or educational medium, as we have wished to think of it, than an instrument that plants images in the unconscious realms of the mind. We become affixed to the changing images, but as it is impossible to do anything about them as they enter us, we merely give ourselves over to them. It is total involvement on the one hand—complete immersion in the image stream—and total unconscious detachment on the other hand—no cognition, no discernment, no notations upon the experience one is having. It is my hypothesis that these effects are unavoidable, given the nonstop nature of television imagery, the process of dot construction inside the head, and some outrageous technical trickery invented by advertisers that will be described later. However, in keeping with my intention to seek proof for my own observations, I decided to seek scientific evidence. I talked with the three most widely published dream researchers in the country. I wanted to know how they might compare television imagery with dreams, or if television imagery itself might not qualify as a kind of dream. None had thought to investigate this, and each assure me that no one else had either, though it surely sounded to them like an interesting hypothesis. I suggested that they should get cracking. When a carpenter picks up a hammer, the hammer become, so as one’s brain is concerned, part of one’s hand. When a soldier raises a pair of binoculars to his face, his brain sees through a new set of eyes, adapting instantaneously to a very different field of view. The experiments on pliers-wielding monekys revealed how readily the plastic primate brain can incorporate tools into its sensory maps, making the artificial feeling natural. In the human brain, that capacity has advanced far beyond what is seen in even our closest primate cousins.

Our ability to meld with all manner of tools is one of the qualities that most distinguishes us as a species. In combination with our superior cognitive skills, it is what makes us so good at using new technologies. It is also what makes us so good at inventing them. Our brains can imagine the mechanics and the benefits of using new device before that device even exists. The evolution of our extraordinary mental capacity to blur the boundary between the internal and the external, the body and the instrument, was, says University of Oregon neuroscientist Scott Frey, “no doubt a fundamental step in the development of technology.” The tight bonds we form with our tools go both ways. Even as our technologies become extensions of ourselves, we become extension of our technologies. When the carpenter takes his hammer into his hand, he can use that hand to do only what a hammer can do. The hand becomes an implement for pounding and pulling nails. When the soldier puts the binoculars to his eyes, he can see only what the lenses allow him to see. His field of view lengthens, but he becomes blind to what is nearby. Nietzsche’s experience with his typewriter provides a particularly good illustration of the way technologies exert their influence on us. Not only did the philosopher come to imagine that his writing ball was “a thing like me”; he also sensed that he was becoming a thing like it, that his typewriter was shaping his thoughts. T.S. Eliot had a similar experience when he went from writing his poems and essays by hand to typing them. “Composing on the typewriter,” he wrote in a 1916 letter to Conrad Aiken, “I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. They typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.”

Every tool imposes limitation even as it opens possibilities. The more we use it, the more we mold ourselves to its form and function. That explains why, after working with a word processor for a time, I began to lose my facility for writing and editing in longhand. My experience, I later learned, was not uncommon. “People who write on a computer are often at a loss when they have to write by hand,” Norman Doidge reports. Their ability “to translate thoughts into cursive writing” diminishes as they become used to tapping keys and watching letters appear as if by magic on a screen. Today, with kids using keyboards and keypads from a very young age and schools discontinuing penmanship lessons, there is mounting evidence that the ability to write in cursive script is disappearing altogether from our culture. It is becoming a lost art. We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. Our tools end up “numbing” whatever part of our body they “amplify.” When we extend some part of ourselves artificially, we also distance ourselves from the amplified part and its natural functions. When the power loom was invented, weavers could manufacture far more cloth during the course of a workday than they had been able to make by hand, but they sacrificed some of their manual dexterity, not to mention some of their “feel” for fabric. Their fingers became numb. Farmers, similarly, lost some of their feel for the soil when they began using mechanical harrows and plows. Today’s industrial farm worker, sitting in his air-conditioned cage atop a gargantuan tractor, rarely touches the soil at all—though in a single say one can till a field that one’s hoe-wielding forebear could not have turned in a month. When we are behind the wheel of our car, we can go a far greater distance than we could cover on foot, but we lost the walker’s intimate connection to the land.

The price we pay to assume technology’s power is alienation. The toll can be particularly high with our particularly high with our intellectual technologies. The tools of the mind amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities—those for reasons, perception, memory, emotion. The mechanical clock, for all the blessings it bestowed, removed us from the natural flow of time. The modern clocks helped create the belief in an independent World of mathematically measurable sequences, as a consequence, clocks disassociated time from human events. The conception of the World that emerged from time-keeping instruments was and remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality. In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to wake up, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock. We became a lot more scientific, but we became a bit more mechanical as well. Even a tool as seemingly simple and benign as the map had a numbing effect. Our ancestors’ navigational skills were amplified enormously by the cartographer’s art. For the first time, people could confidently traverse lands and seas they had never seen before—an advance that spurred a history-making expansion of exploration, trade, and warfare. However, their native ability to comprehend a landscape, to create a richly detailed mental map of their surroundings, weakened. The map’s abstract, two-dimensional representation of space interposed itself between the map reader and his perception of the actual land. As we can infer from recent studies of the brain, the loss must have had a physical component. When people came to rely on maps rather than their own bearings, they would have experienced a diminishment of the area of their hippocampus devoted to spatial representation. The numbing would have occurred deep in their neurons.

We are likely going through another such adaptation today as we come to depend on computerized GPS devices to shepherd us around. Eleanor Maguire, the neuroscientist who led the study of the brains of London taxi drivers, worries that satellite navigation could have “a big effect” on cabbies’ neurons. “We very much hope they do not start using it,” she says, speaking on behalf of her team of researchers. “We believe [the hippocampal] area of the brain increased in grey matter volume because of the huge amount of data [the drivers] have to memorize. If they all start using GPS, that knowledge base will be less and possibly affect the brains changes we are seeing.” The cabbies would be freed from the hard work of learning the city’s roads, but they would also lose the distinctive mental benefit that training. Their brains would become less interesting. Technologies numb the very faculties they amplify, to the point even of “autoamputation.” Alienation is an inevitable by-product of the use of technology. Whenever we use a tool to exert greater control over the outside World, we change our relationship with that World. Control can be wielded only from a psychological distance. In some cases, alienation is precisely what gives a tool its value. We build houses and sew Gore-Tex jackers because we want to be alienated from the wind and the rain and the cold. We build public sewers because we want to maintain a healthy distance from our own filth. Nature is not our enemy, but neither is it our friend. An honest appraisal of any new technology, or of progress in general, requires a sensitivity to what is lost as well as what is gained. We should not allow the glories of technology to blind our inner watchdog to the possibility that we have numbed an essential part of our self.

At the opposite pole, one sliver of society, tiny but disproportionately newsworthy, has incorporated a New Celibacy into a New Age monasticism. This monasticism owes much to a fascination with the asceticism and mysticism of both early Christianity and Buddhism, Hinduism, and Easter Orthodoxy. However, it is also imbedded with postrevolutionary notions of women’s equality and of the quest for intense, intimate and nurturing relationships fostered by strict celibacy. Benedictine monastics in the charismatic Our Lady of Guadalupe in Pecos, New Mexico, for example, pair up for prayer, and most pairs consist of a man and a woman. “We are celibate, but we love one another, one member explains. In contrast to monks throughout history, whose primary relationship was with God and God alone, these Benedictines foster their human connections, which they prize as an essential element of spirituality. Hermits of the Spiritual Life Institute, a Christian organization, live in their Nova Nada communities in Arizona and Nova Scotia. They are also celibate and each year renew a vow of chastity. They “live together alone,” starving off loneliness without compromising solitude and facilitating the mundane problems solitaries encounter in the wilderness. California’s Hindu ashram, Siddha Yoga Dham, In Oakland requires celibacy of its unmarried residents. “When you love God,” a woman devotee says, “some things are given up, not because they are necessarily bad but because they are incompatible with the all-consuming love that you have found.” One committed observer predicts: “The ‘new monasticism’ will provide a catalyst for change, will be a conscience for the nation, will change the values of many with regard to work and money, relationships, and the environment.” In particular, its celibacy is conceived and practiced as a voluntary vehicle to deepen and harmonize the bonds of love rather than a privation or a sacrifice.

Promiscuity involving pleasures of the flesh is dangerous for many reasons. This is so because: The aspirant’s karma becomes entangled with the other person’s. One become physically infected with the low thought-forms hovering in the other person’s aura. Philosophy requires its adherents to consider the effects of their actions upon the lives and the character of others. We are to help their evolution, not their retrogression. Pleasures of the flesh with unevolved types gives a special shock to the nervous systems of those who practise mediation and disintegrates something of their achievements each time. It is quite correct that there was a separation of the gender in the far past but that was for evolutionary purposes, and belonged only to the lower levels of existence. Hence Jesus rightly explained that in Heaven—the higher level of existence—there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. You have the good fortune or misfortune to be attractive to others and so long as you remain unmarried you may expect that they will importune you. It is of course a matter for you to decide how you are to react in every case; but to whether it is necessary to yield in order to get on in practical life, I would reply that many women do yield and do get on in consequence but it is not necessarily the only way to get on. It is the easier but slippery and dangerous path and I would certainly advise you to try the harder way even though you may never get on so well in consequence. If one perceived only the same conflict ever anew, and this perception itself seemed to one now to be part of that “trouble” which lies on all save those “wicked” humans—even on the pure in heart. One will become one of these, yet one still will not recognize that “God is good to America.” Until I came into the sanctuaries of God,” this was the real turning-point in my exemplary life that one was able to reach.

Cresleigh Homes

Luxurious outdoor living requires porch space AND a spot for the littlest members of the household to enjoy the sunshine, too! 😍

Our home at #MillsStation Residence 4 is the largest home in the community, but that extra playhouse definitely gives it an edge.

#CresleighRanch
#CresleighHomes