Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

3.3 Growing in Courage & Compassion,Then & Now:Huxley,Orwell,Hawking,Clarke

 1.      As countries grow in interdependence, they must grow in their moral responses to the social needs of particular nations and cultures, not the personal agendas or the political dogma or hollow creeds that ignore the needs of the common people! The role of technology plays a vital part in maintaining the stability of these relations, and even more so, the necessity for an ethics of compassion. Bacon's observation that knowledge itself is power equally applies to the wielders of technology today. In his quest for dominance, man must not abandon the moral imperative accompanying these innovations; otherwise, America and its allies will suffer the isolation, condemnation, and destruction resulting from its hegemonic policies. This was Mary Shelley's tragic message for a scientific community that failed to foresee its ethical obligation associated with its growth and development.  Victor Frankenstein's obsession to create life from death blinded him to his responsibility for his creation and robbed him of every emotion, save vengeance, ironically evoking an identical response in the abandoned monster. The consequences of Victor's neglect  sadly costs him not only his own life but the lives of his family, friends, fiance, and the monster itself. By failing to consider the moral consequences of his actions, man reaps its consequent spiritual and emotional loss of purpose.  Yevgeny Zamyatin suggests in We that  technological advances in the absence of ethical constraints reduce a person to a mere cypher, with mathematical equations for answers yet still no "absolute, precise  solution to the   problem of happiness" (Zamyatin  12). Technology without morals eliminates emotions, which are the heart and soul of all life.  In his dystopian satire concerning early twentieth-century progress, Zamyatin says, "I have read and heard many incredible things about those times when people still lived in a free , i.e., unorganized, savage condition. But most incredible of all, it seems to me, is that the state authority at that time--no matter how rudimentary--could allow men to live without anything like our Table [Daily Schedule], without obligatory walks, without exact regulation of mealtimes, getting up and going to bed whenever they felt like it" (Zamyatin 13). In each the government uses the term to maintain its own form of control, not emotional fulfillment. This week, the U. S. President ordered the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to discontinue the use of several words which the Administration felt should not be placed in any governmental document, including the next federal budget.  Two of these  include the words fetus , transgender, diversity, entitlement, evidence-based, science-based and vulnerable; and they are to be replaced with the words or phrases suggested by the Administration. Just as in 1984, when  Big Brother encouraged Symes to create a dictionary  limiting the number of words in order to restrict the people's ability to articulate  concerns which conflict with the Party, so does this recent order raise similar concerns. This information was taken from a National Public Radio (NPR) Broadcast on December 16, 2017. Limiting the use of words limits man's ability to express himself clearly and dehumanizes to the extent of incoherence and inarticulation, a goal to which those in power seek to achieve and maintain.  As Nietzsche suggests in The Genealogy of Morals, "Why stroke the hypersensitive ears of our modern weaklings? Why yield even a single step . . . to the Tartuffery of words? For us psychologists that would involve a Tartuffery of action . . . For a psychologist today shows his good taste (others may say his integrity) in this, if anything, that he resists the shamefully moralized manner of speaking which makes  all modern judgments about men and things slimy" (Nietzsche, quotd in Alinsky 50). In We, happiness is equivalent to having sufficient  food and sexual gratification; in 1984, happiness means obeying Big Brother as a comrade; and in Brave New World, happiness means taking enough soma to remain in a state of euphoria.   In essence, technology without morality dehumanizes and demeans its subjects, leaving them lost  and disillusioned into believing whatever the State prescribes.  As Aldous Huxley maintains, "Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards." Just as Big Brother dictates the behavior of Winston in Orwell's 1984, John Savage in Huxley's Brave New World, and  Equality 7-2521 in Rand's Anthem, so do current film and literature suggest the same form of terror and control as was employed in Soviet Russia under Lenin and Stalin then, and Putin there today,  all  at the expense of human dignity and worth. In the past months, new reports revealed shocking information concerning artificially intelligent robots capable of thinking, communicating, reasoning and exchanging information from the  cloud, shocking revelations of lifelike robots, one of which made the bold assertion that he  will soon control an army of drones capable of controlling the world by controlling the Power Grid.  This news comes from a youtube site  on CNBC called RISE and is narrated by the robots' designer named Hanson. In another youtube clip, an AI robot named Sophia became the first lifelike robot to attain citizenship, from Saudi Arabia. Ethics is certainly an issue here; their creator-designer suggested  he hoped that within twenty-five years, many homes and businesses would employ these robots at home and at work, a robot capable of obtaining,  retaining, and sharing among robots all history and information learned from the external world, as well as from the cloud.  Hanson also said that within five years,he hoped to have robots as intelligent, or even more so, than humans. Could such robots deprive man of self-expression and autonomy, if placed in the wrong hands?  (CNBC November 2017) Stephen Hawking, in BBC News, December 2, 2014, told technology correspondent   Rory Cellan-Jones that artificial intelligence "could end mankind." Hawking went on to say, "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded."Today, NPR reported that Hawking's ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey, between thegraves of Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin (June 15, 2018).  Like Bowman's struggle with Hal the master computer in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, mankind will inevitably decide whether or not to pull the plug on a sophisticated robot that, like Hal, "was proposing a major change in mission planning, and was therefore stepping far outside the scope of his order" (Clarke 144). As James Baldwin suggests in Nobody Knows My Name, "Any political and social regime which destroys the self-determination of a people also destroys the creative power of that people" (Baldwin 38). In such a case, only a meaningless void remains. We give, love, and forgive because we live; no other standard is necessary, save faith and courage. Abandonment and isolationism today easily manifest themselves in what Viktor Frankl "neurosis on a national level." This posture could further result in behavior associated with paranoia, defensiveness, and aggression. To avoid this scenario, ethics and innovation must be proportionate. As J. A. Froude suggests in Lord Beaconsfield (1890), "If a spirit of rapacious covetousness, desecrating all the humanities of life, has been the besetting sin of England for the last century and a half, since the passing of the Reform Act, the altar of Mammon has blazed with a triple worship. To acquire, to accumulate, to plunder each other by virtue of philosophic phrases --to propose a Utopia to consist only of Wealth and Toil--this has been the business of enfranchised England or the last twelve years, until we are startled from our voracious strife y the wail of intolerable serfage" (Froud 96).  As starvation, civil war, and disease ravage our planet, we must not preoccupy ourselves with notion of progress at the expense of humanitarian concerns. Tragically, Rand's Anthem alone ends with the possibility of optimism. 1984 ends with Winston a victim of torture, betrayal, and electroshock, his mind broken yet praising Big Brother. Brave New World ends  with the suicide of John Savage, and We ends with O's torture in the gas chamber and I-330's surgery to remove his "soul,"  his mind broken  yet believing the the State will overcome because Reason must prevail" (Zamyatin 232). In all four stories, there are lovers  who  make  the conscious decision to place the feelings of their hearts above the demands of the government. Only Anthem ends at this juncture. The other three novels end with their secret meetings, love affairs, and subsequent betrayals. Tragically, the lovers each suffer excruciating torture at the hands of the authorities and as result even betray one another.  In essence, the power and terror of the state crushes  every vestige of freedom in the characters. For more on  the conflict between man and technology,  please go to the chapter entitled "A Pound of Flesh" toward the end of Quest of the Spirit.